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CELESTIAL SEX, EARTHLY DESTRUCTION, AND DRAMATIC SUBLIMATION IN HOMER'S ODYSSEY:

THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by
ALFRED DE GRAZIA

Metron Publications
Princeton, New Jersey


Notes on the printed version of this book:

This book was processed by the Princeton University Computing Centre,
using the processing language called Script.

Photocomposition, cover make-up, lay-out and printing
were accomplished by the Princeton University Printing Services.

The photograph on the front and back covers displays a marble male figure, glancing to
the skies and playing the harp; it is of pre-Homeric Aegean origins and now possessed by
the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York.

ISBN: 0-940-268-09-4

Copyright 1984 by Alfred de Grazia

All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
Limited first edition.

Address:

Metron Publications,
P.O. Box 1213,
Princeton, N.J. 08542, U.S.A.

To
Immanuel Velikovsky
(1895-1979)

"Iron sharpens iron,
and one man sharpens another."

Proverbs, IV, 27.17





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THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

CELESTIAL SEX,
EARTHLY DESTRUCTION,
AND DRAMATIC SUBLIMATION
IN HOMER'S ODYSSEY:

by
ALFRED DE GRAZIA





TITLE PAGE & FOREWORD

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Part. 1:
SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER

Chapter 1. AN ATHENA PRODUCTION

Chapter 2. THE SONG OF LOVE
THE SONG LITERALLY RENDERED IN ENGLISH VERSE 
HAPPY ENDING
THE PHAEACIAN UTOPIA

Chapter 3. THE LOVE AFFAIR AS THE MASK OF TRAGEDY
AN ANCIENT PRIEST EXPLAINS
THE HIDDEN STORY
AUTHOR'S CODA

Chapter 4. CATASTROPHE AND SUBLIMATION
THE GENERAL THEORY OF CATASTROPHE
THE DISPLACEMENT OF AFFECTS

Chapter 5. HOLY DREAMTIME
THE SCANDALOUS LITTLE PIECE
BURLESQUE OR RELIGION?
THE PIOUS DRAMATIST

Part. 2:
GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS

Chapter 6. THE RAPE OF HELEN
THE INDESTRUCTIBLE LADY HELEN
THE AGE OF MARS

Chapter 7. CRAZY HEROES OF DARK TIMES
THE SAGE WHO BRIDGED THE DARK AGES
SOCIETY IN SHOCK
THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE

Chapter 8. THE TWO FACES OF LOVE
A MOST ANCIENT GODDESS
TURBULENT BIRTH IN MYTHS AND REALITY
ENCYCLOPEDISTS AND THE MOON GODDESS
THE COSMIC SPINNER
CONFUSION COMPOUNDED
A MATCH OF SOURCES
HOW TO NAME A PLANET?
THE ROMAN VENUS

Chapter 9. THE RUINED FACE OF A CLASSIC BEAUTY
THE INNOCENT ASTRONAUTS
RADIOACTIVE CLOCKS
THE RILLES OF MOON

Chapter 10. HE WHO SHINES BY DAY
THE EPITHETS OF VENUS
CONGENITALITY AND HOMOLOGY
ATHENA'S LAST BATTLES

APPENDIX TO Chapter 10
LOGIC OF IDENTIFYING RELATIONS SUCH AS "HEPHAESTUS IS ATHENA"

Chapter 11. THE BLASTED CAREER OF THE MIGHTY
THE QUALITIES OF ARES
THE FATAL WOUND

Chapter 12. THE LAUGHING GODS
MERCURY
APOLLO
POSEIDON
HELIOS
A DIVINE SENSE OF HUMOR

Chapter 13. HOW THE GODS FLY
THE MOVEMENTS OF THE SCENARIO
ELECTRO-MECHANICS OF THE GODS

Part. 3:
THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR

Chapter 14. THE USES OF LANGUAGE
METER AND METAPHOR
HOMER: EDITOR AND PUBLISHER
TRADUTTORE TRADITTORE
THE THROES OF ORIGINAL PLOT
HUMAN STRESS AND LANGUAGE
THE RULES OF MYTHICAL LANGUAGE

Chapter 15. THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF MEMORY
TRAUMATIC ORIGIN OF MEMORY
THE RULES OF MEMORY
FORGETTING
AMNESIAC PHILOSOPHERS

Chapter 16. THE TRANSFIGURATION OF TRAUMA
DREAMWORK
SEXUALITY AND DISASTER
IN ILLO TEMPORE
THE KERNELS OF HISTORY

Chapter 17. SETTLED SKY AND UNSETTLED MIND
WHAT HOMER REMEMBERED
THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE
A CLAIM OF SUCCESS
FROM SAVAGERY TO SUBLIMITY

Appendix: CHARACTERS OF THE BOOK






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THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia


INTRODUCTION

The theory to be expressed here is hardly believable. We discern behind a famous Homeric
scenario about the misconduct of the gods the shadow of a second scenario of
astronomical catastrophe. By pursuing the connection relentlessly, many reasons are
uncovered to suspect that the human drama is unconsciously imitating what the human eye
witnessed as a prior catastrophe in the skies. Chant and catastrophe, dance and disaster
seem to be historically linked.

Can a dance and poem be a piece of astronomical history, tightly, not vaguely, related?
If they are, then an idea that many psychologists have considered: that humans have a
tendency to suppress the memory of terrible events, but also are somehow compelled by
unconscious psychic forces to reenact the events - this idea is supported by our theory.

It appears that the reenactment may take place through religious rites, through wars,
through literature, through individual and group behavior of many kinds. Here it is
through the sublimated medium of poetry and dance. I think that such a process is
occurring in the story of the Love Affair of Venus and Mars. If my readers will agree,
then we shall begin to shape a consensus on a matter of great importance to several
fields of science and the humanities.

The literature referred to is a brief lyric of a hundred lines, sung in Book VIII of the
Odyssey. It tells how the bright-crowned goddess Aphrodite loved Ares, god of battle,
and how they met repeatedly to make love "in the home of fire," until they were
entrapped in a marvelous net made by her outraged consort, the god Hephaestus, and
released only when Ares pledged to reform his conduct.

The lyric tells of a much longer opera ballet sung and directed by the sightless bard,
Demodocus, who, some say, is Homer's self-image. The recital plays to a fascinated
audience at the palace of Alcinous and to his guest, Odysseus, or Ulysses, hero of the
War against Troy. The frank sexuality is Homer's, no matter how often it has been
translated vaguely. The story is the archetype of the adulterous love triangle, as neat
a plot and piece as anyone has ever composed, and a model for a thousand imitations. But
it may also be the masking of a catastrophe visited upon the Greeks from the skies.

I studied the lines and read some translations of them. I rendered them in something
like the original epic hexameter, and shall present them below (Chapter 2) in that form.
Still, examining the words was but the beginning of an investigation that carried me on
odyssean wanderings into various fields of knowledge.

I asked myself what spirit breathed into Homer and saw that it was the goddess Pallas
Athena. Athena moved the Homeric Age. She led the Greeks in the Iliad and guided
Odysseus through his many adventures of the Odyssey. I found her everywhere. She
dominated the skies as a phenomenon, and human strife on Earth.

I concerned myself with the context of the song and discovered that it was a Holy
Dreamtime song, not a sacrilegious burlesque. It was presented as an opera-ballet, meant
to take place among the gods in heaven. The same art form exists today among the
aborigines of Australia.

I asked myself how such holy songs could arise, and found an answer in the modern theory
of catastrophism. Precedents and parallels from many countries and cultures justify
searching for catastrophism behind the lines of the love song of Demodocus. Greek
culture was badly damaged by natural disasters of the eight and seventh centuries before
this era, and Homer's poetry (which I place later than is usual) shows both the effects
of the disasters and the ways in which the Greeks recovered from them.

The song of the love affair of Aphrodite and Ares is to be stripped of its facade. It is
to be considered as a song about planetary gods doing violence to the world. I assign
this Aphrodite of Homer to the Moon, with reservations that I believe are fully
explained herein, rather than to the planet Venus. Ares stands for planet Mars without
doubt. Hephaestus or Vulcan, though male, surprisingly stands for the planet Venus in
this episode. Sea-god Poseidon represents the worried Earth, and persuades Hephaestus to
release Aphrodite and Ares from the invisible net by which he has trapped them. Poseidon
stands bond for Ares. All this suggests the unspeakable horror of natural disasters
brought by these planetary gods upon Earth and humanity.

That Aphrodite was always a great goddess of the Moon is maintained, again with
reservations, for she may also have had her name assigned to other sky-bodies,
especially planet Venus which the Greeks and Romans, following the Orientals, came to
call Aphrodite. We tell of how the Moon-Aphrodite received in Homeric times the wanton,
irresponsible, and imperturbable character by which later ages came to know her.
Aphrodite is tied to Helen of Troy, and Helen to the Hellenes or Greeks. The Trojan wars
evolve psychically into campaigns to recapture the Moon from planet Mars (Ares) by the
followers of planet Venus (Athena).

The stories of the Trojan wars thus use the historical and mundane battles to play out
on Earth the drama of the skies. The skies of the Homeric age must be recent: 776 to 687
B. C. - or so I calculate, taking up Velikovsky's chronology. Although natural disasters
had befallen the numerous settlements of Troy (possibly Hisarlik) throughout its
history, a final major destruction by natural forces may well have occurred during
Homer's boyhood. It was an awesome tragedy to him and others, which could not be
recalled without pain, fear, and distortion.

It is to be expected that the life of survivors of worldwide natural catastrophes would
be fearful and turbulent. Hence I argue that the social psychology of the Homeric Greeks
is framed in a concept of mania and madness, rather than in the conventional view of a
primitive people gradually achieving a higher culture.

Further, as on Earth so in heaven, there must be signs of the cosmic disasters of the
age. I examine the Moon, as the astronauts have seen and sampled it for evidences of
recent disaster, and shall recite indications that it did experience torrid bouts in the
near past involving immense electro-gravitational stresses.

I do the same with the planet Mars, from the evidence of the latest explorations. Mars
has been the victim, it appears, of recent abysmal ruptures and explosions; I explain
how these might have been caused by near encounters with Earth, Moon and Venus. Planet
Venus is played by Hephaestus in the love Affair. He is a stand-in for Athena, director
of the show, who is more frequently identified with the planet Venus than he. Venus is
exceedingly hot, and marred beneath her dense atmosphere by shallow surface craters of
great diameter.

The other gods of the Love Affair introduce to the first modern bedroom comedy its
humor, which can be explained in Freudian theory as yet another cover-up of the
disaster. In reality they too are heavenly bodies. The role of the Sun, Helios, is shown
to be secondary to that of the planetary gods and responsive to their behavior, as it is
pictured in the earliest development of theology everywhere.

If the characters of the Love Affair are to be placed in heaven, their motions too must
be given meaning. The best explanation lately offered has the Sun and planets forming an
electric systems, subordinate to and part of the galactic electrical system. They act as
charged bodies separated from an oppositely charged space plasma by space-charge
sheaths, the rupture of which destroys a balance and creates havoc through discharges
among the bodies. These efforts seem to be discernible in the special motions of the
characters of the Love Affair.

We present physical and historical evidence in general agreement with the love song sung
by Demodocus. How the human mind manages to react to such events in a way to preserve
its own balance, and to give forth its most beautiful literary expressions, needs to be
learned. An examination of the language of the Love Affair, and of Homer generally,
brings forth a theory of myth: to succeed in telling the truth about an unspeakable
event, a myth must fail to convey the truth. This fateful contradictory task is achieved
successfully through the Love Affair.

Homer was probably an editor and publisher of such great myths. He labored to write down
in a fresh and convenient alphabet what he thought should be sung. He was a bringer of
peace between gods and men, and the symbolizer of a unified Greek culture.

Memory, I offer, is of traumatic origin. Human memory begins in horror and the need to
forget. To remember is to forget; to forget is to remember. From the beginnings of true
human nature until now, no one has been exempted from the rules of amnesia, not even the
philosophers whose sublimation of the terrors of becoming a creature of memory have
seemed to carry them very far from particular events.

Myth and dreams coincide, operating according to similar laws. The conscious and
unconscious parts of the mind exchange with each other what is required for a sense of
control to exist so life can go on. Still the balance is scarcely a happy one. Human
nature is imprinted by a deeply buried, unresting, and generalized great fear. The fear
is reflected today and in the earliest human institutions of religion, politics, sex,
schools, commerce, and war.

I concluded in the end that the hundred lines of the Love Affair dramatize
subconsciously the history of a catastrophic encounter of the planets at or near 687 B.
C. Further, the mythical and literary transformations of the event mark a high point in
the development of the European mind and its culture.

I ask the reader - no matter that he may disbelieve me - to pursue his disbelief through
the pages to follow, and acquire, at the least, a reasoned disbelief. To the reader who
is familiar with my ideas, I offer assurances that the revelations contained in this
introduction do not exhaust the surprises that he will encounter, one after another, as
he moves through these pages upon his personal Odyssey.




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FOREWORD
In this book, I extract a dreamy bedroom comedy from Homer's Odyssey, analyze it as a
dramatic form of myth, detect that it might have a real astronomical origin, seek this
origin in world-wide disasters, and assert that an unconscious parallel occurs between
astronomical events and artistic production.

The narrative is well suited to readers of venturesome tastes, who may have a passing
acquaintanceship with the history of the theater and ancient Greece, with
psychoanalysis, with mythology and the ideas of catastrophism and astronomy.

The work was written and offered for publication over a decade ago. Well-founded
criticism from several British experts on mythology, particularly Peter James, Malcolm
Lowery, Brian Moore and Martin Sieff, led me to withhold the manuscript, despite the
encouragement coming from other quarters to publish it. I have indeed held it, to near
the end of the Quantavolution Series, and release it now, benefited, I believe, by the
amendments that my friends induced.

Thanks on this occasion go also to professor William Mullen of St. John's College, whose
advice extended from greek poetic meter to the full ancient oecumene; to Eugene
Vanderpool of Athens, Greece, who was consistently sympathetic; to Dr. Elizabeth
Chesley-Baity, who discussed with me the archaeo-astronomical anthropology of dances,
fire-rites, ballgames, and sword ceremonies; to the late Dr. Zvi Rix of Israel, whose
enchanting letters on problems of mythology kept the book and its author warm over the
years of its hibernation; to George English for his editorial advice and Jungian
interpretations; to my colleague, Professor Cyrus Gordon, for his appreciations of the
values in my approach; to the late Professor Livio C. Stecchini, whose absence from the
scene of ancient history and science is sorely felt; and to Dr. Jay Lefer who responded
keenly to the questions here raised in the field of psychiatry. Finally, I would
acknowledge the inspiration afforded by my friend, the late Immanuel Velikovsky, who
designated the Greek gods as sky-bodies threatening the Earth.





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THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART ONE:
SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER

CHAPTER ONE

AN ATHENA PRODUCTION

The Love Affair, as I shall call it, is a story of how the arrogant god of war, Ares,
made love to the Golden Goddess Aphrodite in the bed she was supposed to share with her
husband, Hephaestus, the lame blacksmith god. Hearing of their adultery from Helios, the
sun-god, Hephaestus fashioned an invisible net that trapped the pair in bed. Returning
from a pretended trip, he called upon the gods to witness their guilt and would release
them only on the promise of the sea-god, Poseidon, to stand bail for the disreputable
Ares.

Perhaps this was the first bedroom farce of literature. Its producer, in a manner of
speaking, was the Goddess Pallas Athena, patron of the arts and crafts, daughter and
favorite of Zeus, father of the gods. She was born some centuries before 1500 B. C. [1] 
and was originally envisioned in the planet Venus.

Athena was not only the producer of the 'Love Affair' but also of the Iliad and the
Odyssey, as I shall seek to show: so she was not a novice in the field of dramaturgy.
Her versatility was proverbial. She probably inspired the magnificent setting of
Phaeacia and directed the scene closely. She sang it in the guise of the god-inspired
Demodocus. Like Shakespeare she acted in her own plays: as herself, she planned the
occasion for the story, and in the person of Odysseus, was the honored member of its
audience. "I am Pallas Athene, Daughter of Zeus, who always stands by your side and
guards you through all your adventures," she reminds Odysseus at one point.

Odysseus's name means "troublemaker" or better "the inveterate troublemaker." Writes
George Dimock, "In the Odyssey odyssasthai means essentially 'to cause pain (odyn‰) and
to be willing to do so. '" [2]  In her unruffled and sanguine way, often behind the
scenes, Athena is the world's greatest troublemaker, as we shall soon learn.

Though she is a mistress of disguises, Athena permitted a picture of her natural human
form to develop over the centuries. E. V. Rieu, who has provided one of the many
translations of the Odyssey that are available, writes that "we may think of her as a
tall and beautiful woman, with brilliant eyes, clad in the white robe, with the aegis, a
goatskin cloack, across her breast, a crested helmet on her head, and a long spear in
her hand." [3] Sometimes an owl and a snake accompany her. However, we would warn that
Athena's appearance is as varied as her characterizations, and her names are so many
that some are still to be unearthed.

"Most vivid and alive of Homer's gods," writes Rieu, "she dominates the Odyssey. And
this is true even though there are moments when we are at a loss to say whether the poet
means us to imagine her actual presence or to understand only that his characters are
exercising the motherwit which she personifies."

The whole story of the Odyssey itself can be retold briefly here. The saga begins with
an assembly of the Gods. Athena catches her father Zeus reminiscing on the just killing
of an evil man, and, taking advantage of the absence of Poseidon, reminds him that the
worthy Odysseus has still not reached home, although it is the tenth year after the
destruction of Troy; for seven years he has been detained by the nymph Calypso on an
island. And for three years before then, he had wandered: he had sacked a town, landed
among the lotus-eaters who relished an amnesia-promoting vegetable, and had been
captured by a giant man-eating Cyclops whom he blinded in order to escape.

This proved to be unfortunate. The Cyclops was a son of Poseidon, whose enmity now
marked Odysseus for unending disasters.

The wanderers landed on the floating island of Aeolia where they were treated royaly.
Upon departing, Odysseus was given a bag of rushing winds that was not to be opened, and
granted a fair breeze for home. But his crew, acting in the typically greedy and
impetuous manner that was to destroy them all ultimately, opened the pouch in envy of
its supposedly precious contents. The fierce winds escaped; the way was lost. A landing
among savage Laestrygonians brought a slaughter of many of the company. Fleeing, they
found the island of the witch, Circe. After some difficulties (she changed a number of
the men into pigs for a time), they conciliated her and spent a luxurious year at her
palace.

Upon his departure, Circe gave Odysseus means of discovering his own fate and reviewing
the history of many a departed soul through a visit to Hades and a talk with the seer
Teiresias. Pausing at Circe's island afterwards, Odysseus received further instructions
that would carry him past the seductive Sirens, and through the narrow straits between
Scylla, a grasping monster, and Charybdis, a swallower of ships.

However, he is overruled by his men when he begs them to sail past the Island of the
Sun. They land, and are kept ashore by storms until out of supplies. While Odysseus
sleeps, the crew seize and eat the fat cattle of Helios. The Sun protests to Zeus
(Jupiter) who destroys their ship and lets Odysseus drift alone for nine days until
washed up on the shore of Ogygia, the island of Calypso. Seven years pass.

Then it is that, following upon Athena's plea, the order of Zeus moves him on and he was
sailing well until Poseidon, returning from a visit among the Ethiopians, spied him and
dashed his little boat to pieces. The nymph Ino helped him to stay afloat and Poseidon
turned away, satisfied. Athena smoothed the winds and seas so that he might survive, and
arranged for him to fall into the hands of the Phaeacians.

Now it is to the Phaeacian episode that I shall attend closely, but a few words more
will bring the story to an end. Odysseus is transported from Phaeacia, with many gifts,
and laid upon Ithaca, asleep. Athena appears to him and advises him: his wife, Penelope,
still withholds her choice of a betrothed, though it is demanded of her by her many
suitors, who meanwhile feast at the expense of the palace. His son, Telemachus, also
faithful, is young and indecisive. Odysseus is to go first in disguise among his people,
then to prepare his weapons, then, with the help of his son and two loyal slaves, to
challenge and slaughter the suitors. So he does, and wins back his possessions and his
wife. A final battle with the surviving opposition ensues but Athena calls Odysseus off,
for he is supported but warned by Zeus. "So spoke Athene, and he obeyed, and was glad at
heart. Then for all time to come a solemn covenant betwixt the twain was made by Pallas
Athene, daughter of Zeus, who bears the aegis, in the likeness of Mentor both in form
and in voice"  [4] . Thus ends the Odyssey.




{S : Notes (Chapter 1: An Athena Production)}
Notes (Chapter 1: An Athena Production) 

1. William Mullen, "A Reading of the Pyramid Texts," III Pensee No 1 (1973), 10; pp. 13-
4.

2. George E. Dimock, Jr., "The Name of Odysseus," in George Steiner and Robert Fagles,
eds., Homer: A Collection of Critical Essays, New York: Prentice Hall, 1962, p. 106.

3. The Odyssey, Penguin edition, introduction.

4. A. T. Murray, translator, Homer: The Odyssey, 2 vols. (New-York: Putnam's Sons,
1919), II, 443. Mentor was the lifetime guardian and advisor of Odysseus. He had been
left behind when Odysseus sailed for Troy. (All line references to the Greek text will
be to the Murray translation.)






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THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART ONE:
SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER

CHAPTER TWO

THE SONG OF LOVE

Here then is this song of love. It is presented fifth-hand: My literal verse is based
upon a number of translations of what is ultimately a tenth century A. D. manuscript in
Greek (the earliest extant - as written down in the seventh-century B. C. and reedited
in the next century) of Homer's Odyssey, which reports what was sung by a blind harpist,
Demodocus, in a time and place that have been debatable questions for over two thousand
years.

Alcinous the King announced the event: Now, all and one of you dancers, Phaeacia's
finest! form in your corps de ballet so our stranger and guest can tell all his friends
upon going back home, we're surpassing all manner of mankind; We are the paramount
sailors on sea, and in running a foot race, singing of songs, and in dancing. So someone
around us here go, go without loitering, bring to us here for Demodocus's use, that
precious harp that so clearly resounds; it's the lyre carefully standing, it's
somewhere, I know, within one of our great halls." Sacred commands of Alcinous! Quickly
arose a herald, seeking to find and to fetch him the resonant harp from its palace
place. Rising as well were a chosen nine men who were Lords Ceremonial, publically
called, whenever the people foregathered and needed an ordering. These cleared out space
for the dancing to come; they measured a broad ring. Meanwhile the herald returned; he
carried the clear-intoned lyre. Taking the lyre in hand, Demodocus moved in the midst of
the young boys standing there, all of them skilled in the dance though they blossomed
with fair youth. Down stamped their feet on the floor made for beauteous magical dances.
Spellbound Odysseus marveled as dancing feet twinkled in mid-air!



{S : THE SONG LITERALLY RENDERED IN ENGLISH VERSE}
THE SONG LITERALLY RENDERED IN ENGLISH VERSE 

Whereupon the song of the Love Affair begins. Striking his masterly chords in the
prelude to singing his sweet song, Demodocus charmingly told of Ares' love affair and
Aphrodite, Golden of Crown. In secret they lay in the home of Hephaestus. Ares came
carrying all manner of gifts to dishonor the Lord's bed.

Straightaway then went with the news, of course, Helios, who'd spotted them loving.
Shocked and dismayed was Hephaestus to hear of the painful story. Deep down below to the
depth of his forge he proceeded; there, placing a thunderbolt stone on the block of the
anvil, he struck, and struck off unbreakable fetters that no one could hope to dissolve,
for fixing the lovers in bondage, right where they loved, was his fierce aim. Then
having fashioned his snare, imbued with a wrath against Ares, up to his chamber he went,
by his bedstead of love, and all over, everywhere, round the four posts of the bed he
moved, spreading the ligaments, dropping a number of them from above, from the beams to
the floor, too, fine as the web of a spider, so fine that the Blessed Immortals, looking
for them could not see them, such excellent craft was he capable of.

Soon as the bonds had been stretched over all of the lovers' trysting couch, Hephaestus
pretended to move on the way to his well-founded Lemnos, dearly loved island. Wherewith
the unwavering gaze of the Golden-bridled Ares fixed without fail on Hephaestus, Most
Famed among Artisans, going off. And Ares straight made his way to the house of the
Famous Hephaestus, eager for love of Cytherean Aphrodite of the Bright Crown. She had in
fact come before him just now from her father, mighty Son of Kronos, and rested herself
to await his arrival. Ares entered directly the house, reached for her hands, and spoke
calling her name: "Dearest one, come to bed now with me; let us together lie. Hephaestus
is no longer here or about and I do think he's gone. Lemnos must have him; he's gone to
his Sintians who speak like barbarians." He spoke like that, and she was quite thrilled
to lie in his lean arms.

Going to bed, they laid themselves together. But upon them showered the bonds engineered
by versatile Hephaestus, tight drawn. Try as they might, they couldn't remove their
limbs or even move them. Then they did realize no way could be found to escape the close
bonds.

Nearing them now, having turned himself back before reaching his Lemnos, came close the
Famous, the Strong-armed, the God with Disabled Legs. Helios had watched as before and
again had delivered the story. So, to his mansion once more he returned, his heart so
heavy. Standing astride of the door he was seized by a wild anger. Terrible cries went
up; all of the Gods heard his shouting: "Zeus, my father and all of you Blessed Gods who
are Eternal, come down! See for yourselves here a laughable matter, unyielding fact.
Aphrodite, the daughter of Zeus, has ever shunned my lameness, but loved Annihilator
Ares who is handsome and straight-footed, born to stumble that I am! Yet no one to blame
save my parents. Better had they not begotten me. Here you can see how this pair climbed
into my bed and twine around each other so lovingly. I am torn apart by the sight. But
believe me, their desire will vanish. However in love, their lust is gone, and an end to
their fornication. Nevertheless, the trap and the net will not let them go free. Gifts
that I gave for the right to the bride, with her eyes of a spaniel, first must be paid
back to me by her father; fair though his daughter, she is a wanton and reckless." So
spoke Hephaestus, seeing the Gods had now met at the house by its brazen bright
threshold.

Poseidon came, the Mover of Earth, and Hermes the Helper, too. Lord and Director of Far-
removed Works, Apollo: he came. (Goddesses were absent, they remained home, away from
the shameful scene.) Standing around the door, then, were the Gods, the Givers of Good
Things. Laughter arose from the Blessed Gods, inextinguishably gleeful they were at the
sight of Hephaestus' shrewd craft and cunning, saying amongst themselves, glancing at
each other, "Bad deeds prosper poorly. The slow one can catch the most swift. See how
Hephaestus, though slow he may be, has caught up with Ares, fastest of Gods who command
high Olympus. Lame although he be, yet he has caught him by skill, so Ares must pay the
just fine owed by one in adultery." To each other they spoke in this manner.

Apollo, Lord and the son of Great Zeus, said aside to God Hermes, "Hermes, the son of
Great Zeus, and our Messenger, Giver of Good Things: would you be willing, on oath, to
wed with the Golden Aphrodite, even though trapped by strong bonds?" The Messenger God,
Slayer of Argus, retorted: "Would that this happened to myself! Yes, O Master Apollo,
Unfailing Marksman. If unbreakable bindings of three times the number would fasten me
down, yes, and all of the goddesses were to be looking upon the two of us. Would that it
happened that I should be sleeping with Golden Aphrodite!" Speeches like this caused new
laughter to rise from the Heavenly Deities.

Poseidon laughed not at all; he besought on the contrary Hephaestus, Supreme-of-all-
Craftsmen, to let go of Ares, speaking in winged words: "Loose him, I promise, when
ordered by you, to compel him to pay you all that is right, and I swear this before all
these Gods, the Immortals." Famous and Strong-armed Hephaestus replied: "Do not ask
this. Think! Poseidon, Earth-Surrounder. Bail for a reprobate! How can I place you in
bondage among the immortal gods, granted that Ares will avoid both the debt and the bail
and depart." Still the Shaker-of-Earth was insistent; Poseidon declared, "Surely if Ares
shall flee from his debt I shall pay you Hephaestus." Then the Famous, the Strong-armed
Hephaestus conceded in answer: "I am not right to deny you, nor would such an action be
proper." Suddenly, so saying, the Mighty Hephaestus unfastened the bindings.
Straightaway, freed from their powerful bonds, the lovers sprang upwards. Ares proceeded
to Thrace, but Aphrodite, Lover of Laughter, went on to Cyprus, to Paphos, her domain
with her fragrant-smoke alter. There she was bathed by the Graces, who salved her with
oils of immortals, ointment refulgent on Gods who are Deathless. And they clothed her
body. Such was the beauty of raiment, the vision astonished the eyes.




{S : HAPPY ENDING}
HAPPY ENDING 

The opera is over, its audience charmed and relaxed: This was the song that the famous
bard sang and Odysseus rejoiced; glad in his heart was the guest while he listened;
glad, too, the Phaeacians, men of the long oars, famed for their sea-going vessels.
Forthwith Alcinous bade Halius and Laodamas to dance by themselves. No one could match
them. They grasped in their hands a beautiful purple ball that Polybus the Wise One had
fashioned for them and their dancing. One would lean backwards and toss it up high
towards the shadowy clouds. His brother would leap off the ground in the air, and
skillfully catch it, even not touching the ground with his feet until holding it firmly.
Showing their skill at casting the ball straight up high was a prelude; Now they began a
new dance on the bounteous earth, flinging the same ball to and fro, to and fro, as
other youths stood in the wings, beating time. Great was the din that arose! Odysseus
then turned to Alcinous, saying: "Lord and Renowned among mankind, you boasted of your
dancers; best you had said that they be, and true are your words in our full sight.
Looking upon them, amazement takes hold of me here."

Alcinous is gladdened by this praise. He impetuously ordains that all manner of rich
gifts be heaped up for the guest to carry along home when he leaves Scheria.



{S : THE PHAEACIAN UTOPIA}
THE PHAEACIAN UTOPIA 

The "Love Affair" stands as a complete story in itself. More exactly, it is a summary of
a long dramatic presentation which will never be heard or seen. And this long story is
of course part of only one episode of the Phaeacian Adventure.

Phaeacia itself is a marvelous creation of Homer-Athena. If the "Love Affair" as a
literary genre can be called the first bedroom farce, Phaeacia may be called the first
Utopia, to be succeeded by hundreds of utopias in the millennia to come. It has aspects
of More's Utopia, of Campanella's City of the Sun, of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, of
Hilton's Shangrila, of Skinner's Walden II, and of many another.

Phaeacia means in Greek the "Shining Land". It is a new community, now in its second
generation. Its people were once settled in Hypereia, probably far to the East, when
they were oppressed by savage giant neighbors, "a quarrelsome people who took advantage
of their greater strength to plague them", says Homer.

Their first king, Nausithous, father of the present king, the divine Alcinous, "made
them migrate and settled them in Scheria [probably a mythical name, like Phaeacia and
Hypereia], far from the busy haunts of men."

"There he laid out the walls of a new city, built them houses, put up temples to the
gods, and allotted the land for cultivation." They have an abundance of food and water,
and of niceties of civilization. "We run fast and we are firstrate seamen. But the
things in which we take a perennial delight are the feast, the lyre, the dance, clean
linen in plenty, a hot bath, and our beds." The wash is done in "the noble river with
its never-failing pools, in which there was enough clear water always bubbling up and
swirling by to clean the dirtiest clothes." [1]

The beautiful princess, Nausicaa, is impelled by Athena to go with attendants to the
river banks to wash clothes and play games, activities suggestive of the rites of Spring
to at least one authority, Emile Mireaux  [2] . There she inevitably encounters
Odysseus, begrimed from his many days adrift but refreshed from sleep. Her ball falls
near the thicket where he lay, she meets him and he wins her trust. She in turn
reassures her playmates.

"Stop, my maids. Where are you flying to at the sight of a man? Don's tell me you take
him for an enemy, for there is no man on earth, nor ever will be, who would dare set
hostile feet on Phaeacian soil. The gods are too fond of us for that. Remote in this
sea-beaten home of ours, we are the outposts of mankind and come in contact with no
other people." [3]

A town square, marketing-place and meeting place, well-paved, adjoins the Temple of
Poseidon, chief of the gods favoring the city, for he fathered king Nausithous. Poseidon
is not always pleased with his Phaeacians, because they are sometimes too hospitable to
travelers who have offended him, and it was fore-told by King Nausithous that Poseidon
would be jealous enough one day to petrify a vessel of theirs and swing about the
mountains behind them into a ring that would foreclose the sea.

Meanwhile they lived well and gave their energies to the building and sailing of fleet
ships. They held commerce, too, in contempt. Neither grim warriors nor merchants, yet
they enjoyed all the good things of life.

The King's name of Alcinous (Alkynoos) is significant. The central star of the Pleiades,
the gate to Paradise and to the world of spirits, is Alkyone. Alkyonic Lake is the
waters of death leading of Paradise. There has since time immemorial been a worldwide
knowledge, among tribes and great civilizations, about the Pleiades, early November
celebrations occur centering upon them  [4] .

The palace of Alcinous, too, is shining and grand, "for a kind of radiance, like that of
the sun or moon, lit up the high-roofed halls of the great king." The palace enjoys a
large household of retainers and its gardens extend into a bush-enclosed orchard.

Homer is as respectful of women as anyone in this age of brutal male chauvinism. Queen
Arete, mother of Nausicaa, "sits at the hearth in the light of the fire, spinning the
purple yarn, a wonder to behold, leaning against a pillar and her hand maids sit behind
her," [5]  but she is a powerful factor in setting policy for the realm. "If you secure
her favor, Nausicaa tells Odysseus, you may hope to regain home and friends. "On
mother's wishes much depends." [6]

The places of public assembly can hold "many thousands": all of the nobles, their
families and the population. The king is beloved, but ruler by consensus. Social and
political functions are performed by men chosen, perhaps elected, from the aristocracy.
For example, when the performance of "Love Affair" was announced, a committee of nine
official stewards took matters in hand. "They were public servants who supervised all
the details on such occasions."

The Phaeacians are a well-organized community. They have a public opinion. There are
conventional moral standards: gossip, respect, a time for marriage, a place for everyone
and for strangers: these seem all the more utopian as they seem real.

A peaceful people, we are induced to believe, a people beloved by and respecting the
gods, a people who lived serenely under an ultimate belief that their special god,
Poseidon, would take away their sea, their precious sea-fairing way of life.

In the end, we are told, these beautiful people, hospitable, who had sublimated all
terrors to the arts and crafts, were punished as Poseidon had promised: for their
kindness to Odysseus, their returning ship was frozen to stone and a range of mountains
was about to encircle them.




{S : Notes (Chapter 2: The Song of Love)}
Notes (Chapter 2: The Song of Love) 

1. Ibid., VI.

2. Vol I, chap. X.

3. Loc. cit.

4. R. G. Halliburton, 25 Nature (Dec. 1, 1881) 100-1; E. B. Tylor 25 Nature (Dec. 15,
1881) 150-1; R. G. H., 25 Nature (Feb. 2, 1882) 317-8.

5. A. T. Murray, op. cit., I, 229.

6. Robert Fitzgerald, Homer: The Odyssey (New York: Doubleday, 1961).





{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS}
{P PART 1: }
{Q SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER}
{C Chapter 3: }
{T THE LOVE AFFAIR AS THE MASK OF TRAGEDY}
{S - }


THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART ONE:
SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER

CHAPTER THREE

THE LOVE AFFAIR AS THE MASK OF TRAGEDY

The song is sung. The play is over. Now the question is, "What does it represent?" It
represents, I think, and I must take the rest of this book to explain myself, a shocked
spell amidst conditions of horrifying natural disaster. The Greeks experienced it,
suppressed its memories, remembered it subconsciously, and converted it ultimately into
the symbolic form of a comedy.

The Greeks assumed the Love Affair took place in the sky nor could it have any other
location. The gods move swiftly from place to place, the Sun is one of the actors, some
of the brilliant imagery such as of "the brazen bright threshold" suggests the heavens,
the gods involved are all sky-gods, and the decor and associated games are celestial.
Hyginus is not alone in speaking of the play as going on in the sky; speaking of Venus
exciting Mars, he writes that "since she inflamed him violently with love, she called
the star Pyroeis, indicating this fact." [1]

Hyginus' Poetica Astronomica also says that: When Vulcan married Venus he watched so
Mars could only follow but never catch her.

This indicates the nature of the "love-affair" as a planetary engagement and hints at
prior close encounters of Vulcan with Aphrodite and then a relationship such that Vulcan
would always be closer to Aphrodite than Mars could be.

Effective planetary encounters must be accompanied by grave disasters.

Probably the primordial elements of The Love Affair were composed of the incoherent,
intense feelings of people in a frenzy of despair and fright  [2] . Words of today
cannot express their feelings. The biblical prophets convey some impressions of the
state of mind in the throes of disaster. The mind of today, developed in the imagery of
nuclear bomb devastation, can perhaps understand something of their feelings. Accounts
of historically experienced natural disasters such as Vesuvius, Krakatoa, the Pestigo
(Wisconsin) forest fire, and the great Lisbon earthquake lend analogous material.

What had really happened had probably caused repeated surges of disjoined symbols and
thoughts. The poetry must have sprung originally from a chaos of sounds, sights and
human babel and ejaculations, uttered by many tongues, over hours and days of time. A
"normal" adult would probably have been reduced to bodies of expression such as follows:

     The worst is happening... just as feared!... all sacrifices failed... here it is...
     annihilator... oracles... monster-body... war... death sun... red dogs, blood...
     Aphrodite... sex... moon... darkness... thunder... trumpets... golden... Ares... Zeus...
     sword... stretched fireballs... moon rape... heat... god, god... who... suffocation...
     stinks... stand still... run... hide... don't move... a giant in the sky calling... he
     was away... his flares are out... moon is his... we give it... pray take it... all this
     can't happen... we did not mean it... abah, awah, abah... we are dying... glowers...
     shakes... where is he going... where has she gone... din... deafness... the sky and land
     are afire... Poseidon stop it... shake them off... take everything... let us be... uh.

And so on. But the horror once past paved the way for music and literature. The state of
mind of the audience of Demodocus can be reconstructed into a more coherent story in
which the matching of a new plot with the original real story is nicely achieved. The
original memories and anxieties are blended and smoothed over by the new story so that
they erupt under control. History cannot be forgotten, but it can be made tolerate. The
Song of Love is telling something that only the collective unconscious can understand,
and which the unconscious rarely permits to be verbalized. I shall try, nevertheless, to
force to emerge some of the unexpressed and unconscious feelings of the people of
Phaeacia as the Love Affair is sung and played. To do so I may resort to a rhetorical
device.



{S : AN ANCIENT PRIEST EXPLAINS}
AN ANCIENT PRIEST EXPLAINS 

If an old priest of Delphi were to be instructing acolytes about events of the song, we
imagine that lecture-notes upon his discourse would read as follows:

     We know these gods for what they are, uncontrollable and primeval; we cannot say what
     we think of them; we must not even say who they are or where we first met them; we must
     not say what they did to us or in any way accuse them; we must not even remember too
     much lest we feel agony and panic. The rhythms and the chords keep our feeling under
     control, reinforcing the screen of words alone. The story, as Demodocus signs it, is
     familiar. Yet it contrives to excite and appease us. We shall feel better afterwards.
     That is because otherwise we might be compelled to confront the true story, which is
     rather like what follows, although we cannot be sure that it is more than a terribly
     realistic dream.




{S : THE HIDDEN STORY}
THE HIDDEN STORY 

     Ares and Aphrodite are the planet Mars and the Moon. The Planet Mars is ruddy and far
     away now, but was then close to the Moon who was bathed in her golden aura. Hephaestus
     is the planet Venus. He is not married to Aphrodite. He approached her on various
     occasions in times past, and ourselves too, our Earth, and was terribly destructive. And
     the Moon was disturbed and drawn to him and then was drawn back, and so we gave her in
     marriage, or rather Zeus gave her in marriage, for how else could they be legitimately
     coupled save by the ruler of the skies and of humanity, who has for three thousands
     years dominated us.
     
     Mars and Moon are not in love, nor do they make true love. They are destroying each
     other and us. Mars' huge body which once seemed like a flaming sword interjects itself
     between Moon and Earth. And the whole primal violence of extreme sexual activity occurs
     on a world scale. The bed of Earth shakes, the skies glare brilliantly, electricity is
     all-pervasive, the Moon disappears and reappears. A massive rape is occurring.
     Hephaestus is far away. It is night but for the brilliance of the scene, secret night
     when sex flourishes and Aphrodite, the Dark One, makes love. Perhaps if he would return,
     he would divert the assailant Mars and spare us from total destruction. We would
     ourselves imitate this orgy, if we were engaging in an alternate mood of anxiety-
     therapy, or we would propitiate by sacrificing ourselves or what belongs to us or
     whatever and whomever we can lay our hands on.
     
     We know what "gifts of Ares" are. They are meteors. They are the steeds of Mars. They
     have struck us and are showered upon Moon. When our King Nausithous led us out of
     Hypereia, it was because of the stone-giants which Mars and his horde had hurled upon
     our land.
     
     The secret will be exposed. Helios the Sun is rising. He never takes part. He cannot
     rescue us. But he will attract the attention of the Planet Hephaestus and perhaps an
     intervention will occur.
     
     It does. Planet Hephaestus looms large, in blazing anger, his immense arms and stunted
     legs making him look like a comet. Then he disappears. He does not approach the lovers
     closely. He goes to the other side of Earth. We wonder whether he will reappear. The
     destruction upon Earth is terrible. Mars is twice the size of the Moon. We are struck
     repeatedly by his "gifts"- gases, stones, quakes. The waters are disturbed. The tides
     are high, the volcanos are erupting. Will the other gods do nothing? Now the Moon and
     Mars are behind us, leaving us rocking and quaking. But Hephaestus is once more in
     sight. He is as large as Mars, brilliant, and trailing electric sparks even against the
     gray sky. But if his legs drag, not so his arms. His huge arms flap as they hammer out
     the sparks. The whole sky around him is brazen. He drops flashing clouds over our heads
     and from the corner posts or pillars of the sky.
     
     But again he departs and again come Mars and Moon. She had returned separately to the
     region of Jupiter and comes back once again to meet Mars who has come flying along
     parallel to us. Moon attracts Mars once more. Great electric sparks envelop them. They
     are perturbed. They pause and move, pause and move. Now Moon appears in an unusual phase
     or position, now she disappears behind Mars and he moves ahead showing another part of
     her. Mars is closely following the Moon, which is to say that he is moving swiftly
     parallel to the Earth.
     
     But Hephaestus now approaches, even larger than he was a few hours ago (who can measure
     such agonizing time?) A thunderous noise fills the heavens, like the enraged shouts of
     the cuckolded husband. It is something to cause ugly laughter; it is a tangible, an
     enormous, a highly visible fact, this entanglement of the two.
     
     We shall now witness the catastrophe, as we Greeks call the end of an age and also that
     part of a drama which brings the culmination of a plot.
     
     "The Gods of the Sky must come!," says the thunderous noise. The scene must attract
     them, for it is their milieu. It is the end of the age, the end of the world. They will
     be our salvation or our doom. Hephaestus is lying. He knows he is not the son of Zeus
     but was cast down by Jupiter and took his strange misshapen form (compared with the
     other Olympians) from the accident. The bed of Hephaestus is by the Moon, not as it is
     today, even though he is often far away and invisible in the northern sky.
     
     But Mars has climbed upon this bed and is trapped in the invisible electrical-
     gravitational net. The sex bout has ended with the bodies suddenly largely stilled. Our
     Earth also pauses.
     
     Hephaestus hovers in the sky, glowering, raging, exchanging bolts with Mars. Mars tries
     to emerge from the bed of the Moon. Hephaestus demands his brideprice back from Jupiter.
     They are the same "gifts" as Mars, which Hephaestus had showered upon Moon in olden
     time, when the marriage was first consummated and we have not recovered from that
     marriage of the gods yet.
     
     Jupiter stays away. He is retiring more and more. He has claimed to set up the order of
     the skies, such as it is. He is scarcely responsible, it seems to us, for he should
     return to strike Mars with thunderbolts and drive him away. Instead of the conflict
     being adjudicated, it will have to be compromised.
     
     Other gods gather. Actually they do not. But memories of them do because of the terror
     of our experience. New terrors pile upon the old and explode them. Here we see Hermes
     and Apollo, the lucky and the wise. What can we except from them? Hermes is the helper.
     We say he is so, because we hope he will help and because once long ago he had been near
     us when we were going through a similar crisis; he fled to safety and we followed; so we
     say he led us.
     
     But now he is tormenting us. Prompted by Apollo, he tells the grim truth as a sexual
     joke; he is an old lover of Moon too, and great is the ruin they brought upon each other
     and ourselves but great also is the attraction these gods of the sky have for one
     another. They laugh at the tragedies of others because they suffered the same themselves
     and no one consoled them.
     The goddesses stayed away, "out of shame", we sing. The goddesses are not ashamed; it is
     male conceit. Their names are taken by the male gods whenever they please. Artemis "is"
     Apollo. Hera "was" Poseidon and "is" now Jupiter. And Athena? Well, Athena "is"
     Hephaestus, the only planetary female, so she is here in fact and deed.
     
     Hephaestus-Venus will stay married to the Moon. We know how it will end. The only
     question is whether Mars should pay anything. Apollo remains aloof and laughing. But for
     Earth and Sea it is no laughing matter. Poseidon stands for Earth when Mother Earth is
     absent, as well as for the all-encircling seas and waters. He is The Earth-Shaker! He
     repeatedly beseeches the Planet Venus on our behalf to uncouple Mars and Moon. Earth is
     already paying its price and willing to pay more if only the disasters will cease.
     
     The tension is terrible to bear. Fortunately Venus-Hephaestus is about to move away. The
     disaster cannot continue. He therefore accepts the offer of the Earth-Shaker who may be
     growing tired of his own exertions. More will be paid by Earth to the Planet that shines
     in daytime. This bodes ill. More songs, more dances, prayers, sacrifices, suffering will
     be required in the future, from Venus as well as from Mars.
     
     So the two bodies are loosed and spring up and away. Thank the Gods! The break happened
     fast. As Venus withdrew, Mars speeded away in a new orbit to the Northwest, propelled by
     the planets Earth and Venus, and the Moon, violently abused, flew Southwest where all
     smoke and fires were quickly quenched and she emerged soon, appearing as round and
     golden as she did before but she now carries new pocks and scars. The character of the
     Moon is unchanged.

     The Gods are uncontrollable; we must not offend them; we must not pretend to be like
     them; but we cannot help but sing and dance about them. It is one of the few things we
     can do to prevent our utter destruction in the future and suppress our intolerable
     memories of the past.


And the old priest would conclude with a warning to the acolytes: "Someday you will
understand this, but what I have told you must always remain a secret from everybody."

The song, the music, and the dancing are ended. The transition to the ordinary frame of
mind occurs. The sons of the good King Alcinous perform a dance to lighten the minds and
hearts of the audience. They cast a beautiful purple ball far into the air, leaping to
catch it. It seems to reach the shadowy clouds. They seem to touch the sky, to be as
light as air. This heavenly sphere has no counterparts on earth. Perhaps it is a
stretched and round-stitched bladder or skin filled with feathers, fashioned by a master
hand, or a round-shaped gourd ball. It makes contact with the celestial spheres-Sun,
Moon, Planets. They keep them up and leap after them; all is done quickly; it is a
trompe l'oeil, a dazzling coda.



{S : AUTHOR'S CODA}
AUTHOR'S CODA 

If the preceding replay of Demodocus' song as a representation of the unconscious
contains both a new "real" parallel plot and a certain "madness," one need not be
repelled or even surprised. Literature was not invented by humankind out of boredom with
spending long nights in caves. It emerged as a method of controlling psychological
distress.

Both the "real" story and the "madness" will come in for more lengthy discussion. One
asks here simply for a beginning of understanding. As the plot breaks down under
analysis, it should evidence some well-known psychoses of which the mind is capable
under stress. In its suffering and terror the mind engages in many forms of delusional
thought. An important effect is the belief that the skies and the earth are alive with
beings who resemble oneself and are similarly motivated. This anthropomorphism helps the
transfiguration of the uncontrollable and huge forces into the images of sex, social
power, and property that the mind is accustomed to dealing with.

Ambivalence to the gods erupts quickly, once the gods are born out of nature. Hate is
just as quickly suppressed and turned upon oneself, for fear that one will be terribly
punished if it becomes known to the gods. A persecution complex occurs instantly; one
cannot evade the mighty punishers. Symptoms of schizophrenia are abundant: attempts at
shutting out the real world; attempts at reconstructing quickly a new world of one's own
in which events are controlled only by the mind.

Forgetting and distortion proceed quickly. As soon as possible, means will be invented
to screen off both the real story and its effects on the psyche. Literature, songs, and
games will be invented. Wars will be waged, for one must handle the urge to punish
oneself by moving out wildly and attacking others. Temples and palaces for the provision
of security and order must be erected; these will celebrate, in a different screening
language, of course, the events of those days; they will see to it that the right food
is eaten and digested and the proper mating and reproduction will occur.




{S : Notes (Chapter 3: The Love Affair as the Mask of Tragedy)}
Notes (Chapter 3: The Love Affair as the Mask of Tragedy) 

1. Poetica Astronomica, II 42. The root "pyr" denotes "fire."

2. Alfred de Grazia, "The Palaetiology of Fear and Memory," (Lethbridge, Canada:
University of Lethbridge, 1976), Part I.






{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS}
{P PART 1: }
{Q SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER}
{C Chapter 4: }
{T CATASTROPHE AND SUBLIMATION}
{S - }




THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART ONE:
SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER

CHAPTER FOUR

CATASTROPHE AND SUBLIMATION

One may dare to suppose that the Love Affair stands for a tragedy of humanity if there
is borne in mind a larger theory, already considerably developed, even if not yet widely
employed. The larger theory, the modern scientific theory of ancient catastrophes -
quantavolution - functions as a kind of general engineering scheme to guide the
reconstruction of the song of Demodocus. It is both chronological - telling what
happened when - and analytic - telling how it happened. As a consequence of work done in
quantavolution, many ancient and recent discoveries have come together, attracted as if
by a magnet.



{S : THE GENERAL THEORY OF CATASTROPHE}
THE GENERAL THEORY OF CATASTROPHE 

I state here the several components of the general theory of ancient catastrophes and
quantavolution, shaping it to present needs to a degree, and illustrating it to the
minimal extent required for its comprehension. Ample documentation and qualifications
are to be found in the "Quantavolution Series" [1] and other works - of a controversial
nature, to be sure.

1. Grave catastrophes have befallen the planet Earth. The evidence of geology.
oceanography, meteorology, paleomagnetism, and archeology are continuously bringing
forward new evidence, and rediscovering old evidence, that in times past the Earth
suffered repeated devastation by quakes, floods, fires and winds whose dimensions are
fantastically beyond any historical experience of the last 2700 years. The surface of
the Earth has been twisted and turned, sunk and raised, scoured and ploughed on a
continental scale. The orbit of the Earth, the rotation of the Earth, and the axial
inclination of the Earth to the plane of the ecliptic have changed suddenly, with
frightful consequences. 2. The catastrophes have been initiated in great part by changes
in the solar system. Planets have changed their orbits and other motions, nearly
collided, acquired or discarded satellites, become heated and cooled, accumulated and
discharged electricity, and, on some of these occasions, involved the Earth in their
titanic activities. One planet, Venus, may even have been newly created out of Jupiter.
The number of meteors that have struck Earth is large but responsible for only a portion
of the catastrophic damage, since atmospheric, electrical, tidal and seismic
disturbances can occur with or without body impact.

3. Some catastrophes have had large effects upon mankind. They have been allocated to
past periods during which hominids and humans lived, whether these are traced back
thousands or millions of years. The last ice age has been moved up to a point where homo
sapiens is readily recognizable, and has been given by many geologists a huge, abrupt
beginning and/ or conclusion. All agree that, on occasion, as far back as the fossil
record may carry and up to the dawn of history, many species were quickly and
concurrently wiped out or reduced to a few survivors.

4. Some catastrophes have occurred at times within the capacity of humanity to transmit
their memories to successive generations. All peoples have myths of chaos and creation,
and of the destruction of civilizations and their recreation, in a set of cycles. As one
moves from earlier to later catastrophes the linkages between oral (and transcribed)
myths and factual reportage, recognizably modern in form, increase. Additional
corroboration comes from the developing science of myth-analysis, contributed to by
classicists, anthropologists, philologists, psychologists, and archaeologists. In
addition, archeology has disclosed periods of total and simultaneous devastation of
existing civilizations in areas stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to China, and from
Mexico to Peru.

5. Wherever symbolic and linguistic evidence is available, and usually also where only
oral traditions are preserved, the catastrophes suffered on Earth and by humanity were
attributed to changes in the celestial system, and particularly to Ouranos (the Sky),
the planets Saturn, Jupiter, Apollo (now transmuted beyond ready identification),
Mercury, Venus, and Mars. The latest catastrophes are associated with the erratic and
destructive behavior of Mars in the years 776 to 687 B. C., ending that is, 2662 years
ago. These precise years, which Velikovsky initially proposed, cover the scenarios of
this book, and in my view are generally acceptable.

6. Putting aside the sudden destruction of many civilizations in the course of thousands
of years and granting that the sheer survival of these species was all-important,
retroactively considered, and furthermore leaving to my book Homo Schizo I the question
whether a highly significant mutation took place among proto-humans in a cerebral or
endocrinal form that contemporary paleophysiology can barely recognize, the greatest
effect upon humanity of the catastrophes was their contribution to the making of the
human mind and human nature.

The exceedingly heavy experience of disaster from all forms of elemental turbulence,
with its associated disruption and dissolution of human communities, caused widespread
amnesia. As much as they could and as quickly as possible, surviving humans suppressed
the memories of those times.

But the fear and the anxiety produced now by one and then by another catastrophes could
not be forgotten and surged repeatedly to the surface of consciousness. The massive
collective anxiety was displaced onto many different subjects, altered the ways in which
these subjects were viewed and treated, until finally our modern human nature emerged,
replete with a variety of sublimations, that is, the continuous and partly controlled
discharge of the never-to-be forgotten experiences and fears of disaster  [2] .



{S : THE DISPLACEMENT OF AFFECTS}
THE DISPLACEMENT OF AFFECTS 

The sublimations of catastrophic anxiety diffused into three major areas: expressive
communication; passive controls; and active controls.

In the area of expressive communication, the primitive language was expanded and grew
more abstract and conceptual to describe the behavior being observed in the skies. The
astral events were associated with prior experiences of the closest analogous types,
especially sex and conflict, and humanized. The terrific visible skyforces were
understood then to be human-like but superhuman to the nth power. (" The Lord made the
mountains skip like rams," recited the Hebrew psalmist.) All manner of recounting the
events was called for; no matter which mode, it was bound to be loaded with anxious
affect.

The different modes were sorted out, the most heavily charged from the less, the most
denotative from the more connotative. Different formulas were worked out for handling
the modes of expression; those that were the most direct or challenging to the
superpowers had to be the most carefully licensed and regulated. Little by little,
songs, ballads and fables were developed that could be granted more freedom of
expression. So began the history of literature, both liturgical and profane.

Passive controls include the incorporation of catastrophic anxiety into prescribed
conduct, whether personal or social. The governance of behavior by taboos, fixation of
archetypes and stereotypes, and the performance of rituals alone and in crowds received
so much impetus from the catastrophes and their aftermaths that they practically may be
said to have sprung from them. If a word had to be chosen to represent the motivation
for all of these passive controls, it might be an obsession, which may be defined as the
inability to move one's conscious attention from the centerpiece of one's anxiety
without enchaining the attention.

The greatest taboo of all is to forget the circumstances of disaster. One freezes like
death, like the possum, like the soldier against a brilliant flare, like the humans who
were turned into statues by the Greek gods, like the Judaic sect whose members
immobilize at the first moment of the Sabbath, in the position of the moment, until the
Sabbath passes. A great proliferation of ideas and customs can come from this attitude
but they will all be deductively connected to the primeval chaos and creation. "Good"
education comes to be making the young both as fearful and as habituated as oneself.
People think, "If I do something new, it, the thing, nature, god, will do something new"
and therefore it isn't worthwhile; it is taboo in fact, to try to do so [3] . The third
great area affected by catastrophe governs human efforts at active control of other
people and the environment. Here is included the sharp growth of the power motive (and
corresponding ability) in individuals that start up the centralized kingdoms (and which
prospers from the passive control behavior just noted). The urge to wage destructive
warfare is enhanced, but also the proliferation of invention: all in imitation of the
celestial forces who hammered, shouted, put on dazzling displays of light, showered down
many types of materials and objects, and changed many species of animals and plants.
"For the Spartans," wrote Lucian, "Lycurgus drew from the sky his ordering of their
whole polity." [4]

The Love Affair is an example of the first area of sublimation, the expressive
communication, and of one kind of myth, the holy dreamtime song. But, as has become
already apparent, the words alone are an inadequate description of the event. It dwells
upon what was the last or nearly the last of the great catastrophes. Every major element
of the general theory of ancient catastrophe put forward above is represented in the
song, its latent meaning, and its physical and social contexts. At the same time, every
element of the general theory of catastrophe had happened before in earlier disasters,
as in the case of the repeated incursions of Venus upon the Earth's orbit, which
occurred between 1500 B. C. and the time of our story and which have been described in
detail by Velikovsky, by the "Quantavolution Series," and in related works. And it all
happened again and again before 1500 B. C., which is a vast and difficult history only
now being told.




{S : Notes (Chapter 4: Catastrophe and Sublimation)}
Notes (Chapter 4: Catastrophe and Sublimation) 

1. The reader is referred to the volumes of my Quantavolution Series (Metron
Publications : Princeton, N. J., 1981-4), especially Chaos and Creation and its
bibliography.

2. These matters are discussed at length in Homo Schizo I and II.

3. Cf., e. g., Eliade, Myth and Reality, pp. 6-7 et passim.

4. From "Astrology," p. 367, Vol. V of Works (Loeb ed., Harvard University Press, 1936).




{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS}
{P PART 1: }
{Q SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER}
{C Chapter 5: }
{T HOLY DREAMTIME}
{S - }




THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART ONE:
SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER

CHAPTER FIVE

HOLY DREAMTIME

Before the Love Affair had been played and sung Odysseus was reduced to tears by
Demodocus' singing of the Trojan War. And, later on, hours after the Love Affair has
been played Odysseus offers a gift to Demodocus and addressed him:

     Demodocus I proclaim you the most distinguished of all mortals. Either the Muse,
     daughter of Zeus, instructed you, or Apollo you directly. For you chant the fate of the
     Achaeans absolutely according to its proper ordering: What they did and had done to them
     and what distress they suffered - as if, in some way, you had been present yourself or
     had heard it from someone who was there  [1] .

One may wonder whether, although Odysseus does not recognize it, the Love Affair, too,
is sung "absolutely according to its proper ordering," and as if Demodocus "had been
present" himself "or had heard it from someone who was there."

Strange it is that Odysseus, when the song is ended, has been transported and is
joyfully at ease. One would imagine that the story of an adulterous love triangle might
have reminded him of his own plight - long away from his palace and beset by rumors of
his wife's unfaithfulness. One might believe that the song was in bad taste, or that
afterwards he might gnash his teeth and rend his garments. Not at all. Homer and he
obviously did not feel any such connection between the performance and his plight.

When the singer, Demodocus , "struck the chords in prelude," his audience was already
entranced. He himself is blind; Homer, whose image he may reflect, is also called "the
Blind." He is Homer's "good minstrel, whom the Muse loves above all other men, and gave
him both good and evil; of his sight she deprived him, but gave him the gift of sweet
song." [2] There is a hint here that ancient bards were sometimes blinded, as smiths
were ritually lamed, and young singers castrated, to heighten their symbolic role and
competence. No god might then envy the bard, especially not Apollo, and his blindness is
an assurance that he will not see what is divinely forbidden to see. Athena, too, was
known to play tricks with human sight [3] . Furthermore, his audience will not be
discomfitted at being viewed in their musing mood by a sensibly alert musician. And, of
course, a blind man may develop epic powers of memory. An alternative, less radical,
would be to sing with eyes closed, or blindfolded.

The audience is settled around as an organized community, king and queen, nobles,
council of state, the citizens and retainers, and the Hero, Odysseus. The dancers
continue their movements, acting out the scenes of the sacred play. Those who have
competed in sports rest, their aggressiveness dissipated, their minds relaxed to receive
now a flow of aesthetic communication.

The singer carries the melody; it is sung in long, measured lines. His lyre was
originally a gift of Mercury and Apollo, and is a beautiful instrument; its strings are
attuned to the heavenly bodies, as Pythagoras will demonstrate mathematically a century
hence. Although the earliest lyres held three strings, the age of seven-stringed lyres
may have already arrived. The rhythms are supplied by the ballet who stress movements of
the opera.

The production is a drama, not a ballad or folk song. Its plot is conventionally
complete, perhaps the earliest of the dramatic plots of what is to become the literary
history of Classical Greece, therefore a great invention, with a pair of protagonists,
an antagonist, the development of a line of conduct, its interruption, a climax, a
resolution, a disposition of participants and values. All happens in a time span close
to what Aristotle discovered, centuries later, to be the ideal unity of dramatic time.

One notes particularly, in the jargon of literary analysis employed from the time of the
early Greek tragedians, the "catastrophe." The word means "the climax," "the point of
denouement;" in general, the word means "the turning-down point," and also "the end of a
period of time." Yet it was historical experience that lent itself to the definition of
plot, not plot of history. It was first an unconscious invention, then a conscious one,
that ordained the classical climax of drama. The archetypical plot is that when the end
of an age arrives, the gods foregather, and societies turn abruptly downward, after
which the cycle begins once more. The Love Affair is a relic of the end of the Mycenean
Age of Greece.




{S : THE SCANDALOUS LITTLE PIECE}
THE SCANDALOUS LITTLE PIECE 

What has been made of the Love Affair? It is at least a song, for it was chanted to the
chords of a lyre, to the accompaniment of rhythmic dancing. Perhaps, first off, I should
stress that its 'songness' has been variously imparted. In the version by the famous
Alexander Pope, one would sense a different spirit. The bard, Demodokos,

     The loves of Mars and Cytherea  [4]  sings; How the stern god, enamour'd with her
     charms, Clasp'd the gay panting goddess in his arms, By bribes seduced

And as Hephaestus traps the lovers, Pope's Homer sings:

     Stern Vulcan homeward treads the starry way: Arrived, he sees, he grieves, with rage
     he burns: Full horribly he roars, his voice all heaven returns. "O Jove, (he cried) O
     all ye powers above, See the lewd dalliance of the queen of love! Me, the awkward me,
     she scorns; and yields her charms To that fair lecher, the strong god of arms."

Translation of the Odyssey are numerous. One that interested me to the point of inquiry
was by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679,) prepared when he was in his eighties. His long life as
natural philosopher and political scientist carried him through the extensive
revolutions and religious debates of the times and up to Newton and Whiston. This was
the Hobbes whose view of mankind included the famous phrase that in a state of nature
man's life was "nasty, brutish, and short." Poetically, I must agree with Pope, who said
that Hobbes' version of Homer was "too mean for criticism." [5]  But did he treat the
Love Affair in some unusual way? Not at all - though it contains a touch of unwarranted
political expertness:

     And the judges rise In number nine, who had elected been By public-vote, of games to
     hold assize, And order took for large room in the middle, And made it to be planed well
     and even. [6]

But, as a I shall explain, even if beautifully rendered, the lines of Homer must read as
the pale representation of their original pronouncement and context.

Experts upon Homer have generally denied serious consideration to his song about a love
affair. It seems to be what Alexander Pope makes it out to be, burlesque entertainment
for a visiting sailor. One seems to hear the typical commentator: "A bit scandalous, but
then you know how lightly the Greeks took their gods and goddesses!"

One translator, Professor Murray, indicates conscientiously that "the whole passage was
on moral grounds rejected by some ancient critics." [7]  Walter Otto tells us that "even
in antiquity many readers, Plato among them, found this story offensive, and in modern
times it is generally regarded as a frivolous burlesque." [8]  Professor Finely, an
expert upon the society and economy of Homeric Greece, speaks of "the little pieces,
like the myth of the adultery between Ares and Aphrodite" [9]  that infiltrate the
Odyssey. George Sarton, the encyclopedic historian of science regards the whole of the
Odyssey, indeed, as a story of peace, a gentle romance  [10] . Such observations can
only reflect the nostalgia for one's school-days: the blood and guts spilled in the
Odyssey, and the terrors entailed, would put to shame the authors of a typical evening
of violence and horror on American commercial television. T. B. L. Webster mentions the
possibility that "the light-hearted treatment of the gods in some Egyptian stories may
have influenced Demodokos' lay of Ares and Aphrodite in the eight book of Odyssey." [11]
E. V. Rieu, introducing his translation of the Odyssey, says that "in the famous Lay of
Demodocus" Homer provides "a treatment that we can only regard as humorous."

This merely betrays, he claims, "a very tolerant understanding of their motives and
frailties," not an absence of respect for the power and beauty of the gods  [12] .

But, then, the distinguished Robert Graves, premature women's liberationist that he is,
says: "though masquerading as an epic, the Odyssey is the first Greek novel; and
therefore wholly irresponsible where myths are concerned." Graves tends to agree with
Samuel Butler, author of the utopia, Erewhon, who, in another book, Authoress of the
Odyssey, ascribed the work to a young and talented Sicilian noblewoman of the district
of Eryx [13] .

Experts can be piled "Ossa upon Pelion" without reaching heaven. Otto's elaborate
concern over reason and respect reminds one of a prude explaining why his sister is
loitering on a Piraeus street corner. "The story is naturally not a moralizing sermon,
but that does not make it frivolous. Its tone of lofty humor removes it from both
moralizing and frivolity." Ares is a bloody savage, disliked by everyone. "All interest
centers upon the discreditable role played by Ares... And Aphrodite? If we consider the
story carefully we suddenly realize that she receives no attention whatsoever." His
final gaff regarding Poseidon is monumental: "Poseidon is so touched by Ares' situation
that, unable to laugh, he prevails upon Hephaestus to release his hapless victim and is
so kindly as to provide a guarantee for him." [14]  This comment would perhaps have made
the surly Poseidon laugh for once.




{S : BURLESQUE OR RELIGION?}
BURLESQUE OR RELIGION? 

One cannot be satisfied with these explanations: a little piece, a casual ballad, a joke
at the expense of the gods, or a pardonable escapade. Suppose the passage is reread,
beginning with the paragraph before the song commences.

"Sacred commands of Alcinous." Do godlike kings incite simple public pornography?

"Quickly arose a lithe herald, seeking to find and to fetch him the resonant harp from
its palace place." Are treasured instruments of music employed casually? "Rising as well
were a chosen nine, men who were Lords Ceremonial, publicly called, whenever the people
foregathered and needed an ordering." These are nobles. They are nine, the magic number
of days in the week may then have existed or once existed in a 36-day or 27-day month
[15] . They are chosen representatives of the community, a council of ministers of
public order. Are these august personages activated for the sake of a ditty?

"They cleared out space for the dancing to come; they measured a broad ring." Is a large
dancing ring being readied without apprehension and excitement?

Demodocus "moved in the midst of the young boys." He is the star performer, blind,
revered, also godlike (of these qualities we read in other passages). "All of them
skilled in the dance though they blossomed with fair youth." This is not to be
improvised. The performers know their places. They have all achieved high competence.

"Down stamped their feet on the floor." The rhythms begin, even before the lyre sounds.
"Spellbound Odysseus marveled as dancing feet twinkled in mid-air!" The little song is
introduced, it is clear, as a full court opera. The preliminaries portend a significant
event. Odysseus, and the rest of the audience, have become transformed by the rhythm,
flashing movements, and apprehension into an unusual state of mind, a new mood.

The mood is not vulgar or profane. It is not lecherous. Something more profound is to
occur. The audience has experienced it all before; their contagion affects Odysseus. The
incident, from its very beginnings, portends an affair of state, not a moment of
minstreling, a story of significance rather than cocktail hour music. It is to be even
rather sacred, I think.

Perhaps reassurance is needed. Is this behavior, this kind of performance, unanalyzed in
science? Not at all. It is universal and has been generalized. Mircea Eliade, a
distinguished religious ethnologist, would lend his support:

     All dances were originally sacred;... they had an extrahuman model... The model may
     have been revealed by a divinity (for example the pyrrhic, the martial dance created by
     Athena) or by a hero (cf. Theseus' dance in the Labyrinth). The dance may be executed to
     acquire food, to honor the dead, or to assure good order in the cosmos. It may take
     place upon the occasion of initiations, of magico-religious ceremonies, of marriages,
     and so on... What is of interest to us is its presumed extrahuman origin (for every
     dance was created in illo tempore, in the mythical period, by an ancestor, a totemic
     animal, a god, or a hero.) Choreographic rhythms have their model outside of the profane
     life of man; whether they reproduce the movements of the totemic or emblematic animal,
     or the motions of the stars; whether they themselves constitute rituals (labyrinthine
     steps, leaps gestures, performed with ceremonial instruments) - a dance always imitates
     an archetypal gesture or commemorates a mythical moment. In a word, it is a repetition,
     and consequently a reactualization, of illud tempus, 'those days. '" [16]

The Love Affair appears then as a sacred song, not bawdy lyric; or at least its context
is unmistakably holy, putting aside its plot and words. One cannot be sure of either its
full context or words, of course, because Demodocus tells of another, apparently long
operatic ballet that we are not privileged to watch and hear.




{S : THE PIOUS DRAMATIST}
THE PIOUS DRAMATIST 

The Phaeacian audience is in illo tempore. It is in Holy Dream-time, a state of being in
the past and in the present, where a great event is happening and still away from it in
the here and now, in the presence of those who were involved in the action. One cannot
watch the Phaeacians as R. M. Berndt did the aboriginal Australian Wonguri in a similar
format and mood [17] , or as other anthropologists have observed primitive tribal
performances; one must imagine them with the aid of all the evidence that can be brought
to bear upon the scene. If one is successful, it will be owing to another scholar, in
this case Giovanni Patroni, whose total immersion in ancient Mediterranean sources has
permitted him elaborately to reconstruct the format of the song of Demodocus. He says:

     The most important observations that the singing of Demodocus merits (and has too long
     awaited) concern the generic type of the song, its aim and function in Homeric and pre-
     Homeric society, the probable frequency and importance of recitations analogous to that
     we see held in the agora of Scheria by Demodocus with the aid of a corps de ballet or a
     chorus that will interpret the narrative of the singer (but we do not mean exclusively)
     through the medium of movements and dance figures.
     
     This is not epic poetry. Nor is it a song, nor a fragment of a song, nor an episode of
     an Achaean saga... Neither, for that matter, notwithstanding that its subject concerns
     exclusively the gods, a sacred hymn. If it is the last, it reflects the higher personal,
     profound and polemical religiousity of Homer; in this sense it should be entitled: 'The
     triumph of Mediterranean religion over the foolish and sacrilegious heresy of Olympia.
     '" [18]

By this, Patroni means that Homer adores the ancient Great Goddess, detests the single-
minded destructive god Ares, and upholds the peaceful sovereignty of the female
principle that antedated the barbarous incursions of the Achaeans into Minoan and
Mycenaean civilization.

In effect, says Patroni, the Song is not sacred poetry because one could not come out
openly and formally to the greater glory of Aphrodite, even though the Song carried her
through a tedious trial at the hands of a repulsive husband and a mindless warrior
lover.

So Patroni classifies the cantata of Demodocus as "opera theatre," midway between our
ballet and melodrama with dance, a musical satire perhaps.

But, in fact, Patroni goes beyond his own real interpretations, so prejudiced for the
archaic Mediterranean religion is he (and alike to Robert Graves in this regard). We
must insist that he stay with his own judgement - it is sacred poetry even if influenced
by the personal religion of Homer. It is sacred enough, as he points out immediately, to
prompt extraordinary preparations, measure the magic circle, place the venerated poet in
the center that is to be occupied many years later by an alter of Dionysus, use the
sacred instrument of religious and funereal singing of the Minoans, and employ the
incredible acrobatic dancing of the bull-leapers of Tyrins and Knossos. The song, he
knows, is the abbreviation of a long performance, and takes place in the halls of the
prince. Indeed, such is the enthusiasm of Patroni for what he believes must have
occurred in the opera-theater of the Love Affair that he uncovers ultimately the vast
majority of criteria that for anthropologists and psychologists denote the Holy
Dreamtime. And he forgets that he has for a moment faltered and said that the hierarchs
could not allow a religious character to be granted the triumph of Aphrodite.

He gives, actually, a full set of stage directions for the production of the Disastrous
Love Affair of Mars and Moon. Dancers leap high into the sky. The Sun mandates a
messenger to Hephaestus (for the sun, reasons Patroni, cannot move from its course).
Direct quotations are sung by actors, the rest by Demodocus. The climax brings together
all of the actors to determine the resolution of the plot, and the finale must be
beautiful and ecstatic; Ares is summarily dismissed, but Golden Aphrodite, unabashed,
flies to her island where she is perfumed, beautified, and made virginal altogether.

     The goddess - impersonated by an actor - hid herself momentarily in the base of the
     tower that had been put at the disposition of the spectacle, while the music and ballet
     entertained the audience; and, from another exit that gave upon the sea (at Scheria the
     agora was next to the arsenal: it was the same in all the maritime cities; elsewhere the
     sea was simulated by pulling a boat with a pulley) she embarked on a boat kept in
     readiness and reappeared from the other side, landing and reentering the arena with all
     of her cortege, quickly then joined by the entire corps de ballet which, having given
     further proof of its unmatchable competence, composed itself for the final scene. And
     what could be the meaning of the scene if not: The Triumph of Aphrodite?

The answer to his rhetorical question would disappoint him. It could be, it was, the
Triumph of Athena the Producer and Director of the opera. Zeus said to Hera in the Iliad
when Hera proposed to fight Ares: "Go to it then, and set against him the spoiler
Athene, who beyond all others is the one to visit harsh pains upon him." [19]

The chorus of this Mycenaean drama moved directly into the classical Greek chorus, says
Patroni (p. 250). Here is one more indication of the interface between Mycenean and
Greek, rather than a five hundred year chasm of barbarism. The circle we see in Scheria,
too, persisted in the theatre at Epidaurus.

Patroni's informed visions of the dramaturgy of Homer are captivating. The production of
the Love Affair in Scheria was complete and elaborate, as much so as the Dreamtime
production of the Moon and the Dugong that I mentioned above, though relative to the
culture of the indigenous Australians. Patroni's assertions, that Homer was heir to the
Minoan and Mycenaean theatre, and that he was a fully experienced choreographer and
dramatist, are acceptable too.

The anthropological and mythological evidence should induce Patroni to acknowledge his
own immense cultural panorama and to grant that the "marveling" and "spellbound"
Odysseus, along with the Phaeacian audience, was in the state of Holy Dreamtime, midway
between the pomp and circumstance of the religious "mass" and the nearly secular games
that preceded the spectacle.

Here Emile Mireaux has hit the target briefly and sharply:

     Choral lyric poetry naturally remained closer to its religious origins. It was really
     the poetry of the sacred songs, with their accompaniment of music and dancing... (It
     included the hyporcheme which involved mime dancing. The mischievous story recited by
     Demodocus... may be simply a hyporcheme... All these collective displays were designed
     to 'inspire' the community and lead to the exorcizing of the 'demons' of envy, discord
     and civil strife  [20] .

The Olympic Games themselves, agglomerates of athletics and poetry, had been instituted
in the year -776, and no one doubts their religious and cultural aims. Then and at the
time of the Love Affair, the Greeks, of many ethnic subcultures with local versions of
the gods, and with all manner of archaic and foreign vestiges, were pulling themselves
together. The divine Homer was striving to lead them.




{S : Notes (Chapter 5: Holy Dreamtime)}
Notes (Chapter 5: Holy Dreamtime) 

1. Odyssey, VIII,* s. 487-91.

2. VIII, I. 62-4; V. I, 263 in Murray, op. cit.

3. Graves, I, 23: I, p. 87.

4. Cytherea is one of the epithets given Aphrodite. Cytherea was the holy island which
the newly born goddess touched while floating towards her destination of Cyprus.

5. The English Works, Vol. X (London: ed. 1677; John Bohn, 1844, W. Molesworth, editor),
p. iv.

6. Ibid, p. 376.

7. Op. cit., p. 276.

8. The Homeric Gods, trans. by Moses Hadas (London: Thames and Hudson, 1954).

9. M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1954, 1967,
1972), p. 40.

10. A History of Science: Ancient Science through the Golden Age of Greece, 1958 (New
York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964), p. 135.

11. From Mycenae to Homer (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958, 1964), p. 88.

12. Page 5.

13. The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (New York: Braziller, 1957). Cf. v. II, pp. 376,365.

14. Op. cit., p. 245.

15. Immannuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, hereafter cited simply as W in C, (New
York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1950), pp. 343-4.

16. The Myth of the Eternal Return, originally in French, 1949( Princeton, N. J.:
Princeton University Press, 1954, 1965), pp. 28-9. As a well worked out case, see R. M.
Berndt, "A 'Wonguri-Manzikai Song Cycle of the Moon-Bone," XIX Oceania (September, 1948,
16-50)

17. Ibid., and see my note on this song in The Burning of Troy.

18. Commenti Mediterranei all'Odissea di Omero (Milano: Marzorati, 1950), p. 249

19. Richard Lattimore, The Iliad of Homer( Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962), p.
148.

20. Daily Life in the Time of Homer, trans. by Iris Sells from the 1954 French edition
(New York: MacMillan and Company, 1959), p. 102.









{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS}
{P PART 2: }
{Q GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS }
{C Chapter 6: }
{T THE RAPE OF HELEN}
{S - }




THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART TWO:
GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS

CHAPTER SIX

THE RAPE OF HELEN

It began during the furious quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles at the rich feast of
the gods, sings Demodocus, "for it was at this very moment that calamity began to unroll
upon both Trojans and Danaans by the plans of the Great Zeus." [1]

The Iliad is sung as the wrath of Achilles on one level - the Poet says so - but is of a
type with the battles of the sky gods recited in Scandinavian, Finnish, Hindu, Mexican,
Babylonian, and other epics. The Greek gods of the Trojan Wars engage in plain
soldiering, hurling rocks and spears, shooting arrows, and driving chariots. They make
onslaughts from heaven; they launch disasters upon Earth: plagues, fires, hurricanes,
earthquakes, floods, hail of stones and arrows, famines, fogs, and darknesses in the
day.

The gods negotiate amongst themselves and with humans. They engage in fighting,
trickery, argument, and bribery amongst themselves. They build morale and conduct
psychological warfare; they provide military intelligence but also distort information
for the good of their favorites. They counsel the warriors on tactics. They enforce
rules of warfare that they sometimes themselves violate. They manufacture weapons. They
promote and reverse events, battles, and decisions of leaders.

Whole sections of the Iliad are devoted to the warring of the gods. On the Achaean side
there range Athena, Hera, Poseidon, Hephaestus. On the Trojan side, the line-up includes
Ares, Aphrodite, and Apollo. The victory is with the Achaeans and their gods, although
the Homeric element ends with Achilles' killing of Hector, the burial of Hector, and a
mere pause in the struggle; however, all known versions of the rest of the story,
occupying the tenth year, agree that the Achaeans "won the war" and razed Troy. Whether
or not Troy was actually destroyed by the Achaeans cannot be told from the ruins of the
city. Troy VI and VIIa are the best candidates for the historical city; Schliemann's
Troy (now referred to as Troy IIg) is not regarded anymore as a possibility; I have
written of this case in the Book, The Burning of Troy. Troy IIg was destroyed by an
atmospheric conflagration; Troy VI by an earthquake; Troy VIIa by an atmospheric
conflagration. These, to Homer and his audiences, would be the gods in battle, the
effects of "a divine-kindled fire of stones" (Iliad) and other superhuman operations.
The "Fall of a City" is a legendary symbol in various cultures for a disaster, that is,
the disruption and end of a celestial order. It is likely that the Fall of Troy was such
a catastrophe, in which human agency played less of a role than the divine.



{S : THE INDESTRUCTIBLE LADY HELEN}
THE INDESTRUCTIBLE LADY HELEN 

Some of the Trojan story is reported in the Odyssey, by Demodocus no less, and by
Odysseus from Hades. There and elsewhere the post-war adventures of the Achaean heroes
are recounted and it would appear that for the most part they received very little for
their pains except more suffering, mishaps, treachery, and misadventure.

But let us examine, with Finley's words, the case of

     Helen, who is a very peculiar figure. Helen, daughter of Zeus and Leda, was
     Aphrodite's favorite, and thanks to the gifts of the goddess she succeeded in embroiling
     Greeks and Trojans in a gigantic struggle that cost both sides dearly. Helen was no
     innocent victim in all this, no unwilling captive of Paris-Alexander, but an adulteress
     in the most complete sense. For Paris there was no atonement ... But Helen received no
     punishment, and scarcely any reproach. She ended her days back in Sparta, administering
     magical drugs obtained in Egypt, interpreting omens, and participating in the life of
     the palace much like Arete [queen of the Phaeacians and a strange, powerful figure] and
     not like a proper Greek woman  [2] .

The "enigmatic" and "complicated" image of Helen, that Finely alludes to, has a simple
solution. Helen of Troy stands for the Moon. She represents the goddess Aphrodite.
Paris-Alexander, Prince of Troy, represents the god Mars-Ares. The Moon that had been
"embraced" over centuries by Hephaestus (Athena-planet Venus) in his encounters with the
Earth is taken away from him; Athena-Hephaestus and their allies must repossess it.
Helen is the Moon Goddess and the world is the male version of Helen, father of the
family of all Greeks. Etymologists have also indicated a connection between "Selene" and
"Helios," the latter deriving from the same Indo-European root as sun and solis  [3] .
Thus she symbolizes in the battle of the gods the coming of the Hellenes into their
revived nationhood in conjunction with the triumph of the Athena faction of the family
of Zeus.

Let us read in Graves briefly:

     The Ionians and Aeolians, the first two waves of patriarchal Hellenes to invade
     Greece, were persuaded by the Hellads already there to worship the Triple-goddess and
     change their social customs accordingly, becoming Greeks (graikoi 'worshippers of the
     Grey Goddess, or Crone'). Later, the Achaeans and Dorians succeeded in establishing
     patriarchal rule and patrilinear inheritance, and therefore described Achaeus and Dorus
     as first - generation sons of a common ancestor, Hellen - a masculine form of the Moon-
     goddess Helle or Helen ... Aeolus and Ion were then relegated to the second generation,
     and called sons of the thievish Xuthus, this being a way of denouncing the Aeolian and
     Ionian devotion to the orgiastic Moon-goddess Aphrodite - whose sacred bird was the
     xuthos, or sparrow, and whose priestesses cared nothing for the patriarchal view that
     women were the property of their father and husbands  [4] .

Hans Jones, author of The Gnostic Religion, may also be quoted. For he has traced a very
old belief in the connection between Moon and Helen:

     "Some Greek mythological speculation seems to have associated the Homeric Helen with
     the moon, whether prompted by the similarity of Helene and Selene, or by her fate
     (abduction and recovery) interpreted as a nature myth, or by Homer's once comparing her
     appearance to that of Artemis. One story had it that the egg which Leda found dropped
     from the moon; and the late Homer commentator Eustathius (twelfth century A. D.)
     mentions that there are some who say that Helen fell down to earth from the moon, and
     that she was taken back up when the will of Zeus was accomplished. When and by whom this
     was said, Eustathius does not state; neither does he say (or imply) that in this form of
     the myth Helen served as a symbol of the anima..." [5]

The plot of the Iliad, then, would become the plot of the Love Affair, where the central
action concerns the recapture of Aphrodite from Ares by Hephaestus (Athena). The theory
would explain many problems (and no doubt will create some). The question raised
endlessly by students, "How could people of little discipline fight so murderously and
for so long over a mere woman in an age when women were nearly ordinary chattels?" is
answered. Beautiful Helen, eternally unravisheable and unconquerable, was Moon-
Aphrodite. Aphrodite was also a Great Goddess, and retained qualities of a Great Mother
Goddess; so the psychic prize was not only the Moon and the beautiful women, but also
the Mother of Greece.

The connection between the two wars - one of men, the other of gods - is often explained
as a form of hyperbole and egocentrism: it "heightens the glamour of the human
warriors." This kind of explanation would no longer be necessary. The two wars are
inextricably and originally linked now; they must be told together because they happened
together. As for the city of Troy and the Trojans, it is as much a mythical place as the
Shinning Land of Phaeacia. The Trojans are the Moon-capturing followers of Ares.

As has been argued increasingly for two decades, the Trojans may have been Greeks who
were set up by Homer to provide a counterforce to the Achaeans. Perhaps no saga in all
mythology treats the enemy so objectively, even with positive sympathy. An epic singer
usually delights his audience by heaping sins and defeats upon the enemy. Even Achilles
may have to assume a new character, that of Athena-Hephaestus, triumphant, but falling
finally through a wound of the foot from the arrow of Paris-Ares-Apollo-Aphrodite.

If this were generally so, and it is not to be demonstrated here, then at least the Love
Affair portion of the Odyssey may be fixed as concurrent with the Battle of the Gods in
the Iliad. It has been affirmed that the Love Affair is a late piece of the Odyssey. We
would not contest this placement at all. We are thinking of the middle 7th century for
the composition of the Iliad, and of the culture and the skies being both of the
preceding two generations.

Yet one more theory needs to be put forward respecting the Odyssey, before agreeing that
the work may well be composed of older materials and have its own hidden plot. Compare
the strong affection that Athena holds for Odysseus in the Iliad. He has her traits. See
him again in the Odyssey. Again he has her traits.. From beginning to end, the work of
the Odyssey is the divine work of Athena. She was not only the producer of the Love
Affair, and of the Iliad, but also of the Odyssey as a whole, and as she was the
principal actor in the first two, so she is once more the principal actor. For the
Odyssey is, in its latent plot, the story of the wandering planet Venus between 1500 B.
C. and her final settling in her present orbit, personified in her human mirror-image,
Odysseus. She it is who saves him at the beginning from the enraged Sea-Earth god,
Poseidon, and places him safely in command of his royal sphere in the end. If the Love
Affair is a Holy Dreamtime cycle, and the Iliad is sacred History, then the Odyssey is
to be categorized as Sacred Saga.

For all of this we praise Homer and his kind. He chose for the leitmotif of his works
the natural history of seven centuries. He rationalized the sky-gods for the Greeks and
transfigured unbearable truth into tolerable myth. His myths coordinated the basic
activities of sexuality, subsistence, respect, power, technology, and wealth into a
consistent cultural pattern and created the archaic Greek character. He restored to the
Greeks an ethnic identity consistent with the changed nature of the Gods and heaven.




{S : THE AGE OF MARS}
THE AGE OF MARS 

"When the gods fought" was a stock phrase among the ancient Greeks. Or they referred to
"the strife of the Gods," meaning something that was not simply confined to passages of
the Iliad but was a historical event. According to Velikovsky, the period 776 B. C. to
687 B. C. experienced at least four catastrophes at fifteen-year intervals that were
felt throughout the world. There were probably six terror-filled episodes.

This disastrous agenda began with an earlier event, which he dealt with in the first
part of his work called Worlds in Collision and in his Ages in Chaos. The former amassed
evidence that the planet that we know as Venus appeared before our ancestors as a comet
and nearly destroyed life on Earth around 1500 B. C. Thereafter the eccentric orbit of
the planet threatened the Earth at intervals of fifty-two years. The comet was
worshipped as a god, Pallas Athena, in the Greek world. Sometimes before 776 B. C. and
perhaps close to that year, Venus, in a diminishing elliptical orbit, encountered Mars.
Thereafter, and until both planets were impelled to take roughly their present safe
orbits, now one and now both approached Earth and Moon with consequent devastation to
the participating bodies.

Awe-inspiring celestial phenomena accompanied the founding of the Greek Olympic Games in
- 776. Hercules is supposed to have organized the games, ushering in what later came to
be a quadrennial all - Greek spectacle of religion, athletics, and poetry. The Greek
Mythikon calendar ends in - 776. The Historikon calendar begins. But Stecchini says that
it may have actually begun, or soon was redone, in - 748/ 7  [6] . And this would
conform to those who say that Hercules did not enter upon the games until they had been
operative on eight prior occasions.

In the west, the town of Rome was founded in - 748 or - 747. Some say - 753. It was a
period of commotion. Fabius Pictor's ancient adoption of the date - 747 seems most
likely to have been accepted for an event which probably did not take a single day but
had best, for patriotic reasons, to accompany some climactic events.

The founding of Rome was in the name of Romulus who was sponsored by Mars. Romulus was
the direct descendant of Aeneas, hence of Aphrodite, mother-protector of Aeneas. Aeneas
founded towns in her names on his long journey to Italy. Barely had the Trojans become
latinized when Rome was founded. Once more, the revised chronology connects well with an
ancient tradition. In the time of Romulus the week and month were reckoned long, and the
early calendar began with the month of Mars and proceeded in four nine-day weeks for ten
months, a total of 360 days. Romulus himself disappeared on the occasion of a natural
tumult during which, says Ovid, the earth shuddered, clouds obscured the heavens, and
the sky was riven by flames; "The people fled and the king soared upon his father's
steeds to the stars." [7]  (His "father" was Mars.) No people on earth came to be
dominated more by Mars and imbued wit the spirit of ruthless, single-minded warfare
personified by Ares-Mars.

In a study of the validity of carbon-dating in ancient times, H. E. Suess has come upon
"a most conspicuous and so far unparalleled irregularity in the *C14 as a function of
time. There was a "rapid C14 increase at the beginning of the 8th century B. C. and the
sharp maximum between 780 and 770 B. C... It is also the time of a general climate
change that took place on the North American continent... The climatic change was not a
temporary one; it marked the beginning of a completely new climate epoch." [8]  So
severe a change introduces the probability of extraterrestrial encounters, for reasons
that I have advanced and supported in The Lately Tortured Earth.

In Egypt it was the time of the Libyan and Ethiopian dynasties. These were foreigners,
whose domination over the greatest of empires has not been satisfactory explained,
except as a consequence of natural disasters. In Italy, Vesuvius exploded with a fury
not to be approached until the milder eruption that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. In
Judah, heavenly commotion excited the populace and brought destruction in the times of
Uzziah (783-742), Ahaz (735-717), and Hezekiah (717-687); the kingdom of Israel was
dissolved and its people dispersed at this time. The Assyrians were under six different
kings, the last of whom, Sennacherib, saw his army blasted to death before the city of
Jerusalem in a single night of the year -687. It was the period of a Babylonian-Chaldean
empire; of Laomedon and Priam of Troy; of the destruction of the now Greek-speaking
Cretans at Knossos; of the destruction of Mycenae; and, at the end of the period, there
came Homer and Hesiod. They are the oldest known Greek writers, and the first whose
writing have appeared in the classical Greek script and alphabet. The adoption of a new
calendar by the Assyrians in -747, the beginning of the "Age of Nabonassar," suggests
that heavy disturbances occurred in the first and second encounters; probably the
Earth's orbit, rotation, and axis all underwent changes.

Thales, one of the great "seven sages," calculated the Greek calendar, perhaps shortly
after Homer and possibly around -600. But, as Velikovsky points out, Thales re-
calculated the seasons and year after the period of turmoil and changed celestial
periodicities. For, "all around the globe the years following -687 saw activity directed
towards reforming the calendar." [9]  Velikovsky asserts, too, that the day shortened in
-717 and lengthened in -687. These would indicate orbital changes, axial tilts, changes
in rotational speed, or a combination thereof.

Accordingly, in the Greek-speaking and Middle East areas, crushing damage to late
Mycenaean and early Hellenic civilization occurred in the period -776 to -687. One or
more of the type of encounters pictured in the Love Affair took place, with Moon and
Mars largely barren of atmosphere, and susceptible to nearly complete destruction on the
faces that they turn to Earth.

Velikovsky dates the last disaster as centering upon 23 March -687. It is noteworthy
that the Romans celebrated the festivals of both Minerva (Athena) and Mars about the
same time. The Exodus has also been assigned this day by Velikovsky, over seven
centuries earlier. Probably this is more than a coincidence, and the double celebration
is evidence of both bodies participating in an encounter about 23 March -687. That the
same date would also correspond roughly with the spring fertility rites in which the
Moon would have long played the major role would stress, too, the occasion.

This Seventh Century date would put the story that Homer writes down and Demodocus sings
in the period of heavy Greek colonization of the Western Mediterranean. The physical
destruction of the pre-existing civilization, the movements of people, the loss of their
written language, the capture of initiative on the part of the uncouth survivors, the
loss of memory (that is, loss of will to report the disaster), the revival of poetic
forms, the mastering of the forms and then the Homeric collection and integration of
them in writing would have to take place in no more than a hundred years. Only a radical
reformulation of the nature of Homeric studies would permit this. But one must pursue
this approach, for, in the words of Lucian, "It is the conjunction of Venus and Mars
that creates the poetry of Homer."




{S : Notes (Chapter 6: The Rape of Helen)}
Notes (Chapter 6: The Rape of Helen) 

1. Od. VIII, 81-2.

2. The World of Odysseus, p. 150.

3. So I am informed by the linguist, Malcolm Lowery, who adds, "conversion of original s
- to h - is also exampled by hex-six and hepta (septem, seven).

4. Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths, Vol. I., p. 161.

5. (Boston, Beacon Press, 1958) Fn. 9, p. 109.

6. "Astronomical Theory and Historical Data," in Alfred de Grazia, ed., The Velikovsky
Affair (New York: University Books, 1965), pp. 158-9.

7. My source is a discussion with Stecchini. On nine-day divisions of the months, see in
Worlds in collision, II, viii citing Sicke (1892), Kaegi (1891), Kugler( 1907), Naville
(1875), Roscher( 1903, 1904); and Ovid; for the ten -month year, he sites Schiefner
(1857), Male (1846), Nilssen (1920), and Frazer (1931) together with Plutarch, Eutropius
and Procopius.

8. "The Three Causes of the Secular C14 Fluctuations. Their Amplitudes and Time
Constants," Radiocarbon Variations and Absolute Chronology (Proceedings. 12th Nobel
Symposium at Uppsala Univ. 1969), ed. Ingrid V. Olsson (Almquist and Wiksell, Stockholm,
1970), p. 602, quoted in Pens‚e, Fall 1972, p. 41.

9. Worlds in Collision, p. 358.





{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS}
{P PART 2: }
{Q GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS }
{C Chapter 7: }
{T CRAZY HEROES OF DARK TIMES}
{S - }




THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART TWO:
GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS

CHAPTER SEVEN

CRAZY HEROES OF DARK TIMES

It was early Springtime  [1]  in Pylos, a Mycenaean town of the Peloponnesus, facing
the western sea. The year was between 776 and 687 B. C. It may even have been March 23,
-687. A force of 800 men was posted along 150 kilometers of shoreline. With them were
liaison officers from the Palace of King Nestor. The famous old sage of the Achaean
warriors himself would have been home from the siege of Troy.

A clay tablet, one of those inscribed "immediately before the destruction which baked
them and rendered them durable" [2] begins, "Thus are the watchers guarding the coastal
regions." [3] What could they be watching for? Obviously no enemy had been sighted nor
could the men be in fighting formation, so thinly dispersed were they. It might be as
in Jerusalem around this time, when Isaiah the Prophet was answering the call,
"Watchman, what of the night?" [4]

Another tablet may have been the last:

     A single large tablet bears evidence of haste and changes of mind during its writing.
     
     The retention of such an ill-written document in the archive might occasion surprise,
     unless it was in fact only written in the last day or two before the palace fell. The
     meaning of some key words is still uncertain, but there is no doubt that it records
     offerings to a long list of deities. The offerings are in each case a golden vessel,
     but the principal deities, if male, receive in addition a man, or, if female, a woman.
     It has been suggested that these human beings were being dedicated to the service of
     the deities, but the grisly possibility that they were human sacrifices cannot be
     lightly dismissed. At all events the offering of thirteen gold vessels and ten human
     beings to a whole pantheon of divinities must mark an important occasion; and what
     occasion more likely than a general supplication on the receipt of news of an imminent
     attack? [5]

The "occasion more likely" is catastrophe. Tidal waves were to be watched for, and the
setting of the sun behind the flaming horizons. Matters quickly worsened. The news was
bad. The gods and goddesses had taken to the skies. "The whole pantheon of divinities"
was supplicated, with the richest offerings; gold and human bodies. Not a solitary god
of the sea, or a single god of the hearth, or of love, of battle. All of the great sky-
gods seem to have been involved.

So Pylos perished. The Palace was destroyed in a "holocaust" which "consumed everything
that was inflammable within it, and even melted gold ornaments into lumps and drops of
metal." The flames melted brick and stone into "a solid mass... as hard as rock." In
one room two large pots were fused "into a molten vitrified layer which ran over the
whole floor." Everything that a human invader might desire was reduced to
shapelessness. Stone was burned into lime  [6] . No human hands and hand-set fires
could have wreaked such ruin. Only blasts from the sky-electrical, gaseous or both.



{S : THE SAGE WHO BRIDGED THE DARK AGES}
THE SAGE WHO BRIDGED THE DARK AGES 

The name of King Nestor graces both the annals of the siege of Troy in the Iliad and
the Linear B tablets. Which came first, the burning of Troy, or the disaster at Pylos,
or did they occur simultaneously? If Pylos were consumed by fire at the same time as
Troy was, than its King Nestor would have been away at the siege of Troy. He would have
been, shall we say, fifty-five years old, with plenty of fire left in him. One day,
before the gates of Troy, he told a long story, whose irrelevance is only seeming.
Professor Denys Page refers to it significantly as "a brilliant piece of late Ionian
composition, but it has a continuous pedigree ascending to the Mycenaean era." [7]
That is, ascending 400 years or so, by his reckoning; by mine, Nestor was a Mycenean in
the Homeric Age of 800 to 650 B. C.

When Nestor was a child, Hercules had descended upon Pylos and a battle of the gods
ensued. Hercules and Athena were on one side, while Ares was on the other, and Hercules
bested Ares. "Herakles had come in his strength against us and beaten us in the years
before, and all the bravest among us had been killed. For we who were sons of lordly
Neleus had been twelve, and now I alone was left of these, and all the others had
perished."

Little by little the Pylians had recovered until they were able to raid their northern
neighbors and revenge themselves somewhat for the ravages of old. The revenge came when
Nestor was still young - shall we say fifteen years older? Perhaps he was nineteen, for
he had been warned from the fight because of his youth, yet had become its hero. If he
was fifty-five in -700, say, he would have been nineteen in -736. The disaster that
killed all but a few Pylians would have come around -747.

Working in the other direction, one learns something else about the wise old time-
clock. Nestor lived to entertain Telemachus, son of Odysseus, shortly before the
latter's homecoming in Ithaca. Therefore, we would add ten years to Nestor and ten
years of life also to his palace. It could not have been destroyed when the city of
Troy was. Supposing Pylos to have been consumed by an atmospheric disaster, and Troy
VIIA by the same (for it was indeed incinerated), it is possible still then that the
end of Troy VI, which was wrecked by earthquake, might have marked the end of the
Trojan War and the departure of the Greeks. We recall two stories of the war: Poseidon
battered down the famous Achaean defensive wall near the sea after the Achaeans
departed; further, the breech in the Trojan Wall was made to admit the Trojan Horse,
which may have been the symbol of Horse-Tamer Poseidon, whose tides swept over all
barriers like charging steeds.

If such were the case, Pylos and Troy VIIa would go down in -687, along with pitiable
Phaeacia. Troy VI would go down eleven years before. And the War of Pylos involving
Hercules, Ares and Athena would be set around -747.

We may take this occasion also to tie in the "neighboring giants," who made life
impossible for the Phaeacians when they lived in Hypereia. These were probably astral
phenomena of monstrous shape who hurled debris upon them from the skies. The
Babylonians were chanting in their hymns to Mars-Nergal: "Great giants, with awesome
members, run at his right and at his left." [8]  This may have been part of the
terrible destruction wrought in Asia Minor in -747 in the time of King Uzziah  [9] .
For King Nausithous led them to Scheria, and he was the father of their present King,
Alcinous, who is in the prime of life.

The excavations of Schliemann and Blegen at Hisarlik were valuable as ordinary
archaeology; they contributed almost nothing to solve "the Homeric Questions." What we
derive from their reports is an important negative: if either Schliemann's Troy or
Blegen's Troys were "the real Troy," then Troy was destroyed not by the Achaeans, but
by "the gods" - by earthquake and by conflagrations exceeding any possible human agency
[10] .

Unfortunately, one cannot at this point be certain of how many celestial encounters in
the period -776 to -687 involved simply Mars alone. As we shall see, the years -687 and
-747 are candidates for the triple encounters.

If the Battle of the Gods and the Love Affair took place in 698 then, accepting the end
of the Trojan War in its tenth year and then years of wanderings of Ulysses, one would
have the destruction of Pylos and Odysseus' killing of the Suitors  [11] occurring at
the same time, eleven years later, 687 B. C. On both occasions, both Venus and Mars
were active in the sky. This is not impossible. Venus was "seeking" a circular orbit.
Mars may have been "knocked out of the ring" of its more regular orbit. Professor Earl
R. Milton and I discuss this matter in Solaria Binaria. Two encounters with Earth as a
participant might have been needed.

This interpretation is preferable to one that would dissolve the Odyssean temporal
sequence and have Pylos come crashing down at the same time as Troy, with Nestor in two
places at the same time. The scene at Pylos upon which Telemachus, son of Odysseus,
happens, when in search of news of his father, is convincing. Nestor tells him that he
himself had hastened home from Troy (wise old man that he was) in fear of divine wrath,
and that those who tarried suffered greatly. Now we find the King and his whole people
on the seashores sacrificing a hundred rich cattle to Poseidon. The skies and Earth
have not settled. It may be that a month later, Pylos will be destroyed by "star-fire"
or astro-flame. If we check back upon Velikovsky's accounting of concurrent events in
the Middle East, we see that Sennacherib's Assyrian Army was blasted in 687 B. C. but
also that the army of Esarhaddon, his son, fled in terror of astral phenomena on a
successive invasion of Palestine  [12] . Here again, the puzzle was whether to unite
the two events or treat them successively, and Velikovsky chose the latter course, as
do we.

The present state of speculation may be conveyed in tabular form:

The Pylos story is not ended, however. There is more to it, and it fashions a warning
to scholars who have accepted faithfully the theory that a Mycenaean age was ended
about 1200 B. C. by barbarian invasions and a "Dark Age" set in that was to be
illuminated by the great poets, Homer and Hesiod, finally around 800 B. C. The Love
Affair holds a light to the Dark Age and the disposition of the Dark Age provides a key
to the Love Affair.

To return to the story, we call upon the research of Isaacson on Pylos. The destruction
of Pylos has been compared with the destruction of Gordion, in Asia Minor. The city
whose Gordian knot was later cut by Alexander, perished also in a disaster. Pylos was
of Mycenaean Greek culture: Gordius was Phrygian. At Pylos were found ceramics that
resembled Mycenaean ware that was associated with Egyptian ware and therefore assigned
the Egyptian dates because these were the basis of Near Eastern chronology. The
Phrygians, however, are honored by their own archeological and historical dating system
and Gordius is said to be of the eighth century before Christ. 

Table 
Hypothetical Benchmarks: Planetary Encounters and Historical Coincidences


Calendar 	Elapsed time	Nestor's 	Personal events 			Other events			Sky encounters		  
(B. C.)* 	between 	possible
		periods		age
	 	 	 
================================================================================================================================================

776		- 		-		-					Olympic Games Founde 		Venus/ Mars/ Earth-Moon

761 		15 		-		-					Hercules Destroys Troy 		Mars/ Earth-Moon
											and Wins Olympic Games

747 	15 	5				Nausithous Moves to Phaeacia; 		Pylian War of Gods 		Venus/ Mars/ Earth-Moon
						Iliad and Odyssey begin Career 
						as Epic Cycles; Hercules and 
						Heralids in Peloponnesus 
						(Nestor Sole Survivor)

732 	15 	20				Atreus and Thyestes; 			Pylians Raid Elians 		Mars/ Earth-Moon
											(Nestor a Hero)


717 	15 	-				Alkinous Becomes King of Phaeacia					Mars/ Earth-Moon


702 	15 	45				Nestor and Odysseus at Troy		Start of Trojan War 		Venus/ Mars/ Earth-Moon 

698	-	55				Nestor at Troy; Agamemnon Fights 	Troy VI destroyed 		Mars/ Earth-Moon
						Memnon the Ethiopian Prince (Egypt)	by Earthquakes (War of Gods)

687 	11 	66				Demodocus Sings - Odysseus Returns. 	Troy VIIA Destroyed by Fire; 	Venus/ Mars/ Earth-Moon 
						Nestor and Telemachus at Pylos. 	Pylos Falls (Last War of Gods); 
						Homer Born.				Phaeacia Falls by Earthquake; 
											Sennacherib's
											
											Army Destroyed at Jerusalem	Skies clear 

670 	-	-									Greek Alphabet Developed 	Calendars Reordered; Earth Trembles 

630 	-	-				Iliad Revised and Transcribed by Homer 					Present skies 
						Odyessey Revised and Transcribed by Homer





     *The six major intervals are 15 years each, placed largely on the reasoning of
     Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, pp 362 ff., that Mars' present orbit is in "favorable
     opposition" respecting Earth every 15 years. Since Mars had a different orbit before -
     776 and might have changed its orbit at every encounter between -776 and -687, we must
     of course ultimately use historical evidence to plot all of the encounters. We must
     bear in mind, too, that the geological and ecological aftermaths of disaster provoked
     by celestial behavior can continue for some time. Here, also, we have reasoned that
     only an 11- year interval separated the last two disaster, that is. Mars was on its way
     to becoming an outer planet and suffered two encounters close together. Although the
     problem is not insoluble it will require a great deal of research to established
     empirically the dates of several peak disasters and the rate of subsidence of
     disturbances in the aftermaths. (Worlds in Collision, 274-8).

Charcoal of both burnt-out sites was tested at the same laboratory at the same time to
determine its carbon-14 loss. For it is by living that a plant or animal ingests carbon
14; after death the ingestion stops and a decay of this radioactive substance begins.
Measuring the loss of Carbon 14 in charcoal samples of the two towns, the investigators
discovered what they had expected: the samples of each site could give dates that
conventional archeology had already established. But to do so, the investigators
performed miracles of purification of the Gordian sample to reduce its age by several
hundred years, while they let the samples of Pylos go by polluted and unchallenged
because they "proved" what was expected.

Not content with casting the Pylos samples back into the ash-heap, Isaacson advanced
three further conclusions from the materials of these two towns far apart, whose dates
may now be said to be close together. He discovered that the C14 dates of the olive
pollen in a core from the bottom of a lake near Pylos conveyed eighth century readings
when the pollen was at its peak. Reasoning that Pylos was tending a maximum of olive
trees when the town was flourishing, and that there would be little cultivation in the
"Dark Ages" when the population would be sparse, Isaacson logically deduced that the
maximum of the short-lived pollen in the eighth century could mean that Pylos was in
full flower then as well, although, once destroyed, it remained uninhabited ever after.

He went on to a second point. Analyzing the famed reports of the University of
Cincinnati excavations at Pylos, he read in their pages accounts of the mysterious
mixing of Mycenaean pottery and geometric pottery in strata where neither could have
intruded upon the other. Yet these two types of ceramics were supposed to have been
fashioned centuries apart.

Now the basic and perhaps the only unassailable law of geology and archaeology is the
law of superposition. Unless proof of accident if brought forward, what is on top is
younger than what it rests upon. The Mycenaean and the Geometric Ages then had to be
contemporaneous! The "Dark Ages" of 400 to 500 years appeared to have been squeezed out
at Pylos. Pondering this point, one is led almost reluctantly to the third point of
Isaacson. Gordion of Phrygia in the 8th century has walls that strikingly resemble the
walls of Troy VI, which were devastated by earthquake. Archaeologists who are faithful
to their conventions must bargain with an architectural similarity that flatly denies
their 400 years' or more gap between Gordius and Troy.

Isaacson's work was following a trail already laid by Velikovsky, who had observed that
archaeologists of the 19th century had somehow lost their way. Velikovsky exposed the
problem and its probable solution in 1973 by the long-deferred publication of his
manuscript on the famous rampant lions gate of Mycenae  [13] .

In 1881, W. M. Ramsey had noted that the Gate closely resembled a Phrygian tomb gate of
the 8th century. Flinders Petrie, the renowned pioneer of Egyptian archaeology and
history, had established an authoritative chronology of Egypt which could be applied
wherever Egyptian artifacts were discovered, or conversely when foreign artifacts were
discovered in Egypt. Petrie discounted Ramsay's evidence, because Mycenae had already
been "dated" by the association of its artifacts with those of Egypt. Resemblance or
not, the Lions of the two cities were moved four hundred years apart.

Petrie's Egyptian chronological imperialism, spreading over the Near East and the
Mediterranean island, compelled scholars to invent a long period of Hellenic culture in
which "little happened," barbarism prevailed, the Greeks were illiterate, the arts and
sciences were lost - the Dark Ages of Greece, in short, conventionally dated between
1300 or 1200 B. C. and 800 B. C., a span of perhaps 500 years. Not until Velikovsky
[14] challenged the Egyptian chronology frontally could any scholar imagine that
various baffling puzzles of Phrygia, Mycenaean Greece, and Homeric Greece would have
ultimately simple solution; the Gordian Knot was cut. Isaacson's studies of the
excavation records at half-a-dozen famous sites, following Velikovsky's hypothesis,
have shattered the empirical foundations of the theory of the Dark Ages  [15] .



{S : SOCIETY IN SHOCK}
SOCIETY IN SHOCK 

Speaking of the aftermath of catastrophe, Plato declares of the survivors; "At first,
they would have natural fear ringing in their ears which would prevent their descending
from the heights into the plain." [16]

If one were, at this pint, to take up in order the authoritative works of history and
archaeology it might be shown that they are in every case affected by a blind spot in
regard to the Dark Ages. This method would be repeating much of Isaacson's work and
would expand unduly the present text. It may be better to fashion a new model of the
Homeric Age and, by demonstrating its consistency and efficiency, to buttress the
theory that the Love Affair portrays an astral and earthly disaster that had recently
occurred. Let us call this model, "The Crazed Survivors of Disaster."

It stands in contrast to the conventional "Greek Dark Ages" model. The latter holds
that the Mycenaean Age collapsed over the period of a century because of barbarian
invasions and that these barbarians in the course of centuries acquired the mentalities
and facilities of a civilized people.

The "Crazed Survivors" model is constructed from the theory that a general catastrophe
involving great ecological and cultural damage is followed by a shocked society. The
shocked society would exhibit a complex of expected behaviors that distinguish it from
stable or moderately changing or even revolutionary societies, or more significantly,
from a society that is slowly evolving from a "primitive" to a "civilized" culture. In
the societies of crazed survivors, personal and mass self-destructiveness and
destructiveness of others and of culture increase as terror and guilt interact on a
complex and massive scale. Depending upon the extent of the disaster, a totally
amnesiac and stupefied society of cultural degenerates may ensue or a more furious
cultural coping that may eventuate in a flowering of religious institutions, crafts,
and arts.

The Homeric heroes, Odysseus and Achilles among them, typified the bands of survivors
of the extensive Mycenaean civilization that was largely destroyed in the catastrophic
interventions of the planets Mars and Venus in the Earth-Moon system in the 8th
century. The plots of the Iliad and Odyssey, despite 2700 years of trying to make
something else of them, clearly point to the skies as the source of the disruptive and
awful events that produced the crazed heroes of the dark times. Western civilization
has treasured and imitated the posturings of these mad warriors, hardly ever realizing
what they were and how the docile mind of later generations would be affected when this
madness was presented to it as normality and for inspiration. We shall proceed now to
enumerate and describe briefly a number of psychological and social indications that we
are dealing with human beings behaving in the aftermath of catastrophe.

The Homeric Greeks developed a pantheon of skygods and assumed that these gods would
continuously manifest themselves by thunderbolts, showers of arrows, tidal waves,
earthquakes, meteorites, and so on. They venerated all sky signs and objects from the
sky, such as meteoric iron and stones. The earth itself was a living animal and
thoroughly animated in its parts  [17] . A number of gods and demi-gods contributed to
a continual geological and ecological restlessness. Animals, plants, and rocks changed
readily into humanoid forms and vice versa. Ovid's Metamorphoses elaborates this theme
interminably.

By the time of Thucydides, free will and controlled change were accredited to mankind,
but the Homeric Greeks were yoked to moira, fortune, destiny, lot - the law of chance
that determines human fate  [18] . Uncontrolled license and little self-discipline were
ascribed to (projected upon) the gods. Well-developed priesthoods had dissolved, just
as other specialized occupations crumpled into individuals. (Finley calculates that
over 100 occupations discernible in the linear B tablets dropped to a mere dozen in
Homer.) Nevertheless there were ritual guardians and diviners with prodigious memories,
aides to kings but not members of kingly families. Priests, bards, and madmen were
possessed by gods.

The priests "were guardians of ritual and of the forms and language of the sacramental
songs; preservers of the motions and rhythms for the due observance of ceremonial;
interpreters of those signs and often obscure sayings by which the gods manifested
their decrees, desires or warnings; and, lastly they were the custodians of the science
of precedents in all domains;" [19]

The preceding Mycenaean bureaucratic and feudal order had broken down. Finley and other
experts have described an oikos (household) system as a kind of feudal plantation
system that survived the collapse of bureaucratic urban centralism. It is true that the
oikos system prevails, but it is really a piratical or ship-wreck system in which
people gathered around surviving leaders. A great many expatriates, outcasts, outlaws
and refugees were to be found among the community. There is a remarkable lack of the
stable assignment of social, economic, and political rights to the types of people who
clustered in these strongholds.

Practically all of the titles of hierarchical officialdom disappeared. The chiefs of
households (that it would be a mistake to call "clans")  [20]  ruled a mixed community
as judge and religious-political protector.

The "Argive Kings" and the kings who were supposed to have developed from and after the
Homeric heroic age were actually the same traditional kings whose Greco-Mycenaean
kingdoms had come tumbling down in the disasters of the 8th and 7th centuries  [21] .
The warlords and oligarchies followed. Alcinous of Phaeacia rules like Agammemnon. We
quote Denys Page:

     When history dawns on the island of Lesbos in the seventh century B. C., we discover
     there a mode of government hardly distinguishable from that of Agamemnon at the siege
     of Troy. The will of the sovereign power, Agamemnon himself, is not absolute: he must
     first summon a council of elders, and whatever they approve must be declared to an
     agora, an assembly of all lesser noblemen. In the seventh century, B. C., at Lesbos the
     political constitution is exactly the same; and it happens that the sovereign power is
     still in the direct line of descent from the family of Agamemnon  [22] .

This startling claim is followed by one even more sweeping: "In this place certainly,
and in other places presumably, the royal family survived throughout the dark ages from
beginning to end." We cannot grant either the Lesbos presumption or the general
presumption. It is rare in the annals of history to find a genuine 400-year old
dynasty, and hard to imagine one that would have suffered 400 to 500 years of the so-
called Dark Ages. If the family of Agamemnon of Troy still ruled Lesbos in the seventh
century, it is simply because the Trojan War took place less than a century beforehand.

Indeed, Agamemnon himself had probably an upstart pedigree like most of the Homeric
heroes. The heroes spoke of home frequently but there is a lack of definition of their
homes, Nestor's account being exceptional in the Iliad and those of the Odyssey being
largely mythical and savage. The heroes boasted in the names of their parents, some of
their grandfathers, and usually stopped at this point; some lapsed into claims of
divine forebears in the second generation. Glaukos and Diomedes, in a famous encounter
in the Iliad, discovered while bragging of their antecedents that their grandfathers
were guest-friends and decided not to fight each other  [23] . The absence of "family
trees" among self-assertive "nobles" raises doubts that they either knew their
ancestors or, if they did, could claim any distinction on their behalf.

The Dark Ages, as a catastrophic century, found ancestors in short supply. So also
communities. Homer "does not talk a great deal about tribes and groups and clans and
sects and varieties of idealistic associations, whether pacific or belligerent. What
Homer does is to confine himself to the immediate family of the warrior in question."
[24]  Only a short paternal link is stressed, along with guest-friends. This is
exceedingly strange. It is not at all like "primitive peoples" whose lives are bound
into communities of blood served by totems. Nor like a bureaucratic society. But by the
"dawn of history," in the next century, we find definite blood lines as the basis of
organization of the Greek polis. Apparently, though missing in Homeric times, they are
quickly reestablished in the succeeding generations.

The warriors stayed away from their "homes" so long that we could question whether they
had any. They remind us of Vandals and Vikings who left home never to return. Of all of
Ithaca's warriors, only Odysseus ever reached home. Odysseus played the pirate -
looting, killing, raping. For the sake of Athena, he had to be brought home, there to
face and slay a horde of suitors of his "long-suffering" wife. His shepherd slave,
Eumaeus, was armed against other shepherds and wild beasts. Marauding was frequent, if
not from one's neighbors then from pirates and foreign warriors. Slaves abounded, of
various nationalities, one may note. It was a society where every man's hand was raised
against his neighbor. Homo lupus homini. "The bearing of arms, particularly lance and
sword, on all solemn occasions of civil life, was the distinguishing feature which,
more than any other, marked the separation of classes in Homer's time." [25]

In battle one encounters a frenzied behavior whereby fear is whipped up in order to
gain courage. Eliade's words apply to the heroes: "The frenzied berserker, ferocious
warriors, realized precisely the state of sacred fury... of the primordial world." [26]
In a famous scene of the Iliad, Achilles went so berserk that he battled the river, the
River-God and the gods themselves. Ajax went mad and finally committed suicide.

A frank, hollow, extreme braggadoccio characterized the best and the worst of the
fighters. The glorification of destructiveness seems interminable. Apart from a chosen
few, the women are subjects of aggressive degradation and measured by head of
livestock; yet some time before, in Minoan, if not Mycenaean, civilization, women had
achieved high position and status. More information about Mycenaean women is needed
before we can claim what we guess to be true: that the degradation of women was not a
trait of the Indo-European but was the outcome of catastrophically induced aggression.

Certain undercurrents of attitude haunt the passages of Homer. The boasts of the
warriors are often about the conquests and destruction of towns. The similes of Homer
are overwhelmingly rural and pastoral. May we surmise that the heroes sacked many a
half-destroyed town? There is a pervading sense of splendors of the past being gone and
citations of armies, cities, and wealth appear to be grossly exaggerated. This
pretentiousness is not that of nobles, or of a people who had lost something they once
knew, did not own, but had given them their character.

One senses also the general lack of awareness, a "mind-blown" stupidity, a calloused
morality. Am I reading feelings into Homer's poetry that are not there? Perhaps. But
the interpellations of morality in the Iliad and/ Odyssey are mostly those of the poet.
Are these traits not typical of "primitive man" ? Definitely not. It is only by getting

one's concept of primitive man from Homer that one can believe so, for usually modern
"primitive man" is gentle, aware, and only occasionally "possessed" or obsessed. The
Homeric warriors are not primitive types.

The "guest-stranger" concept of Homeric times is intriguing too. The Homeric peoples
had an ambivalence towards outsiders. Deep mistrust alternated with sometime hysterical
acceptance. Apparently, a person entering the precincts of an unknown community, one
such as Odysseus, for example, would not know whether he would be maltreated or well-
treated. This ambivalence appears to have gone beyond logic or normal behavior  [27] .
Odysseus was warned by Nausicaa that he should avoid being seen in Phaeacia because of
the general mistrust of strangers. Yet she also assured him, that if all went well, he
would be royally treated. And so he was. The forms of human relations, like the world
itself, were shaky. Augeas, "the king of the Epeians, treacherous to his very guest-
friends, not long thereafter saw his own rich city, under stark fire and the stroke of
iron, settling into the deep pit of destruction. Augeas was himself dragged to the edge
of steep death, nor escaped it." [28]  It was for double-dealing over the cleaning of
his stable that Augeas incurred the wrath of Hercules which destroyed his city and him.

We should say that this same Hercules is an active participant in many of the events of
the dark times and one day it may be confirmed that he is an alter ego of the planet
Mars. He destroyed Troy once before its destruction by the Achaeans of Homer. He
destroyed Nestor's Pylos once. He is often berserk, a paragon of the crazed survivor,
and was deified upon death.

Hercules (or Heracles) had progeny, the Heraclids. They were so many that they seemed
to be whole bands of people. More than that, they have been identified with the Dorians
whom scholars believe to be the Greek ethnic strain that devastated the Mycenaean
kingdoms and carried on their primitive development during the so-called "Dark Ages."
For example, Rhys Carpenter  [29]  is to be discovered on a magnificent tour de force
aimed at proving that long term intense climatic change from wet to dry caused the
Mycenaean civilization of the "14th century" literally to collapse and permitted the
starving country folk to sack and burn the centers of civilization in search of
necessities. The country and islands were practically abandoned, and only with time did
a better acclimated population begin its rise.

Carpenter encounters many obstacles, only two of which need be mentioned here. He is
confronted by sudden disaster; yet it is apparent from his own words and in meteorology
that climatic disaster can only be sudden and quite destructive if an immense external
source produces it. Second, everywhere he turns he sees terrible incendiarism (or,
rather, he turns everywhere to avoid seeing the terrible incendiarism that destroyed
Mycenaean civilization).

We cannot help but thank him, however, as one must thank practically every strainer and
stretcher of the Dark Ages. For he describes in many an incident the takeover of
Mycenaean areas by the Heraclids, whom he obligingly postulates as Mycenaean refugee
families returning a couple of generations later at the head of mixed bands of other
ethnic Greeks, especially Dorians. The Heraclids, in our theory, are crazed survivors,
sons, naturally, of Hercules, who is identifiable in myth with Ares or Mars, even
though he sometimes fights Ares. The Heraclids are borne back in the name of the God
who destroyed their kin and culture.

"How unsettled and mobile were all these heroes," writes Mireaux  [30] , after he has
devoted a book, like Finley, to discovering a social order that would make sense. "The
heroic world of the epics appears in our eyes as something mobile, effervescent and
tumultuous."

They depended upon the seas but were bad sailors. There was no class of specialized
sailors. Everyone was a "sailor." Maritime ventures were not materially distinguishable
from piratical excursions. We can imagine what confusion and fear drove them over the
seas to found their many colonies, for the period 750-600 B. C. was the great period of
colonial expansion. The journey from Crete to Egypt took five days and nights, "a
terrifying venture for such poor navigators as were the Greeks of Homer's time." [31]

They were meat-eaters: cattle, sheep, and wild game, animals of the uplands. "For Homer
fish is a detestable food, while Hesiod does not even deign to mention it. Never is
fish eaten at the Homeric repasts." [32]

Probably around 67\ 87 B. C. Gyges the Lydian overthrew the Heraclids of Maeonia in
Asia Minor, and struck the first coins. Actually they were not the first coins, but the
Greeks had largely abandoned coinage. Homer mentions a gold talent of fixed value,
reports Mireaux, but exchange was almost entirely in kind rather than in money.

Gift-giving was often a spectacular affair. It was more a system of exchange than a
pleasant supplement to normal exchange like bonuses or birthday presents. The things
given seem often to be for re-giving, to be untouched and unused, even homely objects
like linens, and the metal gifts seem all too frequently to have semidivine or divine
"makers" which, as false pedigrees conceal humble origins, may have concealed their
origins in loot and theft. Their description, too, conveys an awesomeness, as if they
were not familiar objects to the childhoods of the gift-exchangers. They are described
as pirates would speak of their misunderstood loot of pots and laces.

Altogether there is an incongruous mixture of ethnic names, events, artifacts and
practices in the works of Homer. Names that are "centuries old," and not to be heard
again in history, occur. Chariots are used, not as battle-wagons, but to convey
warriors to places where they would descend and fight. Their use was partly forgotten
or had not been familiar to the types who owned them. T. B. L. Webster  [33]  shows
that Homer is indebted to Minoan and near East influences in plots, style, and
references. He is influence by the archaic Mediterranean culture. He is very Mycenaean,
Webster concludes. But in all of his speculations, Webster does not speculate upon the
important chronological puzzle: If it is proper to imagine that all of these influences
happened so "early" and Homer came so late, why not speculate as well that all of these
similar bits actually existed almost within the living grasp of the poet? At one time,
many scholars believed that Troy and the Trojans were poetic inventions. Then
Schliemann discovered "Troy" or something that corresponded to indications found in the
poetry. His site at Hisarlik has revealed in successive excavations a number of
"Troys." It appears now that the Troy of levels VI and VIIa may have been Homer's Troy
but it also appears now that the Trojans were akin to the Greeks and that the Trojan
War( s) pitted Greek against Greek. Homer probably stressed differences between Greeks
and Trojans as a splendid device, first, to convey the battle of the gods, and, second,
to give the disarrayed and scattered Greek communities a common weltanschauung - a
common religious, political and cultural outlook on the world.

Moreover, now we permit ourselves another conjecture: The besieged Troy was a congress
of allied forces containing Greek and non-Greek forces, clustered survivors, who could
be called Greek or Anatolians, who might provide characters with connections as far
away as Etruria and send an Anatolian like Aeneas to seek kin in Italy after the wars
(as Virgil says).

The Trojan Wars were plural, most likely, during the Martian period. Armies may have
come and gone; the occupants of Troy may have changed several times. The artifacts dug
up could be interpreted as coming from a melange of cultures - Greek and Anatolian. The
revolution of heaven and earth is the heart of the primordial myth and the epic poem.
The Homeric epics are no exceptions to the rule. An old era was being destroyed and a
new one was arising  [34] .

The Iliad and the Odyssey used various dialects of Greek blended by the genius of the
bard. Homer used metaphors of the clearest and most ordinary kind, to the exclusion of
far-flown and fancy comparisons. Words expressing "fire" abound, for example. His
poetry seems to be addressing audiences of low verbal ability; or they might have
understood a melange of dialects and phrases, a lingua greca like a lingua franca or
both. On the other hand, his similes are prolonged and complicated, dealing with rural
and pastoral comparisons. Obviously Homer was not primitive, nor inexperienced, nor
bereft of imagination; nor were his confraternity of poets, nor their audiences. Why
should this melange be used, and not, say, a single preferred dialect like the Tuscan
that Dante's genius made to become the preferred Italian tongue? A reasonable answer
would be that there was then only a gathering of tongues: the audiences were related,
widespread, itinerant, and diffused.

More significant is the non-use of a sacred, liturgical language. If there had been a
Mycenaean dead language, like classical Greek is to modern Greek, or Latin to Italian,
then would not that have been the basis for portions of the epic poems? But it was not,
not even for prayers. Therefore it did not exist. Mycenaean Greek was probably a living
and related set of dialects whose standard expression had disappeared with its ruling
class and scribes.

It gives cause for bewilderment. If a sacred language was not understood, that would
place the old civilization far into the past; but there are many tie-ins of Homeric and
Mycenaean cultures. Conversely, the fact might indicate that the old civilization was
either foreign (which it was not) or largely destroyed (which we think was the case).

The linguistic melange (with its numerous catch-phrases of all Greek sub-cultures),
which was Homeric Greek, was "instant prosody." There had been no time, no more than a
couple of generations, to build an epic language. Yet such an epic language would
surely have evolved smoothly and uniformly over the several centuries of any "Dark
Ages." What emerges therefore is a people and culture exploding in space and time,
whose language, that of Homer, had not yet caught up with its expanding front.

The Greeks of Homer, to conclude, did not come as an invasion from afar. They consisted
of all kinds of Greeks. They were survivors, largely from the rural areas and the
interior highlands. From personal experience and hearsay, they knew of the centers of
their societies that had been destroyed. They often lacked kith and kin; they lacked
communal security; they lacked law and order; they lacked education; they trembled upon
the trembling earth.

The experts commonly remark on the unabashed juxtaposition of knowledge and ignorance
in the epics. Mireaux has said, "There was decidedly nothing primitive about Homeric
civilization." The very sophistication of the poets, like Homer and Hesiod, who told
about them, indicates an age whose savagery could easily be penetrated by civilized
forms.

For a grandly disciplined, informed, and stylized poet like Homer to write so
sympathetically of his subjects, he had to be of their age, and to be of their age
required that their age be the eighth century.

     The massive destruction of Mycenaean civilization fully attested in the
     archaeological record, was accompanied by a complete social transformation, in which
     all the institutions by which men organized their existence were refashioned to met the
     new situation... When Mycenae fell, the surviving Greeks, in their new kind of society,
     had no need for records or for scribes; in fact, on the evidence we have at present,
     they had no need for the art of writing and they lost it altogether, improbable as that
     may seem to modern men  [35] .

What seems "improbable" to us is that anything but abrupt catastrophe could cause "the
massive destruction" in so many places - Crete, Mycenae, and elsewhere. The Homeric
scribes, working with new dialects and a new alphabet, did not need centuries of time
to accumulate material on the chaotic life that followed.

Homer did his best to reassure the survivors and to set them on their way again. The
incongruences and inconsistencies of material culture, nomenclatures, customs, and
attitudes found in his works are not sloppy artistry; they are of the essence of the
people whom he was describing. And his work was not an oral conglomerate of centuries,
but a description, from two main sources, those of the Iliad and the Odyssey,  [36]
with as much consistency as he could import to them, of the suddenly produced cultural
chaos of the eighth and seventh centuries. He took as his task the assembly of plots
dealing with erratic and fear-driven survivors and inspiring these folk to become "one
nation under the gods."




{S : THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE}
THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE 

The contrast with conventional historiography is obvious: Homer flourished in the
middle seventh century. His writings were an agglomerate of the early century. The
pieces of his writing came from different quarters; many from the period -670 to -776,
some from times stretching far before (-766 to -1500). The people active in his
writings were from the crushed cultures of -776 to the beginning of his own lifetime.

The Mycenaean Civilization collapsed in a set of natural disasters. The marginal
survivors regrouped repeatedly in the following century. They fought bitterly amongst
themselves, used what they could manage of the old tools and skills. Homer sang about
them and their destroyed culture.

The assumption is tied to a brief time sequence derived from evidences of natural
disaster. (See the Chart on pages 64-65). The theory of causation seeks evidence of
abrupt takeover of a destroyed culture by marginal survivors who cast aside, or employ
ceremonially, practices they do not or cannot use or understand. Then they proceed to
draw from every source their new synthetic culture.

On the other hand, most Homeric experts nowadays believe that Homer lived a century
earlier, that his writings were an agglomerate of centuries before, that the pieces of
writings came from different quarters, some of them as early as 1500 B. C. The people
acting in his writings, they believe, are fictional characters referring to real
characters occupying a space of 400 to 500 years. Their culture is believed to be a
composite of all this time, but is concentrated in a true primitive culture that made
savage contact with the civilized world in 1300 B. C. or thereabout, and after half a
millennium, arrived at the stage of producing Homer and Hesiod. The Mycenaean
civilization weakened and then was ruined by invaders. Centuries of primitive
illiterate history followed. The pre-Homerics emerged and found new tools and skills.
Homer at this point sang about their deeds. They were learning to sail boats; they
disliked eating fish; they were learning to use chariots.

This conventional theory is tied to a time sequence derived from an incorrect Egyptian
chronology. The society and behavior of the pre-Homeric Hellenes are viewed in a
sequence, according to a theory of causation that has a culture being gradually born.
Practices are invented or adopted slowly from abroad.

Thus occurs the confrontation of two theories. The reader has already some means of
adjudging it. Other means will follow. But before this chapter is ended, a suggestion
may be offered to all those who read and write about the Dark Ages of ancient Greece.
The suggestion concerns methodology, or, more simply, logic.

The logic of writing about history, that is, about the sequence of cause and events, is
that events are arranged by time and then causes are uncovered. This usually works
because the succession of events is ordinarily known before the causes are discovered.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, though strictly speaking a logical fallacy, establishes a
presumption of cause: After this, therefore (perhaps) because of this. However, the
less the evidence of temporal sequences, the greater the possibility of logical
fallacies. Hysteron proteron, as the Aristotelians called it, or "putting the cart
before the horse" is one of them. When a temporal sequence is not known, but a
presumption of the sequence is held, then the possibility of the reversal of cause
increases. The logical problem that is involved in "putting the cart before the horse"
is exemplified in the saying, "If the Brahmin do not pray, the Sun will not set." Wise
skeptics know that "If the Sun will not set, the Brahmin will pray." (As a matter of
fact, they will pray anyhow, if only because in illo tempore the sun did not set.) At
the same time, many people, zealous or simply naive, will let the cart be placed before
the horse and believe that the cart pulls the horse. In a subtle way, much of the
writing about the Greek "Dark Ages" falls victim to this fallacy. Take, for instance,
the statement that "the Dark Age Greeks were poor sailors." This fact is usually
interpreted to mean that these Greeks were evolving from land animals into seafaring
animals; they had not learned yet to sail. But these Greeks had no reason to be good
sailors because they were raised as herders and warriors. Seamanship had disappeared
with the washing away and destruction of the seacoast settlements. Or take the fact
that "the Greek warriors before Troy misused their chariots, dismounting from them
instead of fighting from them." This fact is usually interpreted to mean that they were
just learning of the chariot from a superior culture with whom they were now coming
into contact. But their chariot subculture had just been destroyed with the palaces,
and the survivors had not been raised as chariot warriors but used chariots because
their "betters" had used them.

"The government of Phaecia was a typical emerging primitive state heading towards the
polis of classical Greece out of tribalism." But no tribe stands behind the Phaeacians;
they are a colony surviving its mother country and organized more simply than it was.

Or take the fact that the "The Achaeans attacked Troy in the name of their gods, and
Troy was destroyed." To most, the statement means that the Achaeans destroyed Troy. On
the contrary, "the gods" destroyed Troy and the Achaeans occupied it. Not, "the wrath
of Achilles elaborated into "the battles of the gods," but rather "the battles of the
gods reduced to the wrath of Achilles."

Finally, considering the Love Affair in this light, the "gods" do not act so that
people can have comedy; comedy is played so that the effects of the gods can be
controlled.

Further, the dance forms and opera theater of the Love Affair were ancient and Minoan.
So asserts Patroni  [37]  He points out that the dancing circle and chorus carried from
Minoan to the classical Greek theater. But when the Greek theater appeared, he writes,
we find the rustic god Dionysus, with a goat-cult of dancers cloaked in skins. The
poverty of the means, the few actors, the vagabond origins of the Thespian theater, all
showed - still according to Patroni who follows the Dark Age theory faithfully - that
the primitive real Greek theater was not receiving the subsidies of princes, not the
interest or participation of Mycenaean high society; it was left to the rural folk.
Again "the cart before the horse." In the general destruction of societies, the art of
the survivors made its way quickly forward. The elite and its sophisticated art forms
were destroyed; folk art (not primitive art) dominated the scene. An analogy with the
problems of geology is tempting. When folds and faults occur, the principle of
superposition is thrown off and the effects are baffling to explain. So in history,
when temporal evidence is scarce, the principle of post hoc ergo propter hoc loses its
ability to guide one. Then, in geology, one says of a layer of shells and pebbles:
"This land was raised from the sea", while another will say, "This land was once
flooded with shells and pebbles."

A rather lengthy example may be excused, especially since it is the last. After
describing what appears to have been a solid and regulated archaic system (which led me
to suspect my theory), Mireaux  [38]  concludes:

     Thus one is led to believe that the (lack of) care for agriculture, and the dispersal
     of a peasantry so firmly rooted in the soil, must have brought about, in most of the
     cities, at a quite early stage - and no doubt as early as Homeric time - the
     dissolution of the primitive brotherhoods of youth and soldierly companionship, and the
     breaking up of their community-centres. Nevertheless, even if the traditions of a life
     in common and an armed confraternity were growing looser, they were not yet so obsolete
     that they could not still color the lives of the rough peasant classes, guiding them
     and instilling into them the old ideals of honor and pride; for they still knew that
     their lands were only theirs as long as they could defend them, with helmet, buckler
     and javelin, after an appropriate training and a traditional initiation received at the
     hands of their elders.

In this quotation and all of the chapter containing it, Mireaux first establishes the
existence of a rigid (old) order, which he calls "primitive," because presumably he
believes it to have followed the Mycenaean culture over the centuries.

Then in the same breath, as above, he speaks as if this order preceded the Homeric
order which was a breakdown of it.

That is, he reverses the logic of his own evidence. He moves back and forth
uncertainly, reversing precedence and effect, and, of course, cause and effect. It is
more likely that the "primitive order" he describes was the collapsed remains of the
Mycenaean order that had persisted into the eighth century and was retained especially
long by the Spartans who clustered fearfully in villages rather than committing
themselves to a great polis. This order could only be feebly reinstituted by the
Homeric crazed heroes. But a new civilization, which developed out of the Homeric age,
moved in all directions; it quickly blended new and old forms. The Love Affair was an
effort, on the literary front, to establish the new age by mastering the trauma that
came with the end of the old age.




{S : Notes (Chapter 7: Crazy Heroes of Dark Times)}
Notes (Chapter 7: Crazy Heroes of Dark Times) 

1. The Cambridge Ancient History (1973), Vol II, Part I, p. 611. We recall the
suggestion that Odysseus may have awakened to Nausicaa's spring washing rites.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., p. 624.

4. Cf. Velikovsky (1950), p. 214 et passim.

5. The Cambridge Ancient History, loc. cit., 626.

6. The above details of this paragraph come from Israel M. Isaacson, 'Carbon 14 dates
and Velikovsky's Revision of Ancient History." III Pensee no. 3 (1973), 26, p. 29 who
is quoting C. W. Blegen and M. Rawson, The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western
Messenia (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1966), I, pp. 167, 40, 199, 210, 169, 66.

7. History and the Homeric Iliad (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ of California Press, 1959), p.
255.

8. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, 281, quoting Bollenbucher, Bebete and Hymnen and
Nergal, p. 29.

9. Worlds in Collision, p. 213.

10. T. Blegen, "Troy VI," Cambridge Ancient History (1973), p. 685.

11. The interpretation of this event, which we cannot take at face value, must await a
later day.

12. Worlds in Collision, pp. 268-9, quoting Sidney Smith's Babylonian Historical Texts
(1924), p. 5. I refer the reader to The Lately Tortured Earth for explanations of the
phenomena of extraterrestrially produced incineration and blasts.

13. "The Lion Gate at Mycenae," Pensee, III (1973). p. 31. supported in the same issued
by Lewis M. Greenberg, "The Lion Gate at Mycenae," p. 26.

14. Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History (1946); Ages in Chaos (1950);
"Astronomy and Chronology," III Pensee, No. 2. 38.

15. I. Issacson, op. cit., and "Applying the Revised Chronology," IV Pens‚e (Fall,
1974), 5. Posthumous studies of Velikovsky are expected in re Dark Ages and Issacson's
(Schorr's) studies are being prepared by him for publication.

16. Plato, The Laws, III, p. 57 of the translation of B. Jowett, Dialogues of Plato, v.
V (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1871).

17. Mireaux, p. 24.

18. Mireaux, p. 28.

19. Mireaux, p. 79. Cf. p. 14.

20. As e. g. Mireaux does, p. 55.

21. Contrary to Mireaux, cf. p. 31.

22. Denys Page, The Homeric Odyssey, pp. 145-6, citing Alcaeus and Aristotle.

23. IL, VI.

24. John Cowper Powys, "Preface to Homer and the Oether," p. 146, cf. Mireaux, 124-5.

25. Mireaux, p. 137.

26. The Myth of the Eternal Return, p. 21.

27. Cf. Finley, op. cit., pp. 115-20 et passim. Sociology delineates a "stranger"
concept and says it is always observable; but it is a quantitative ambivalence that has
a norm which is here far exceeded.

28. pindar, "Olympian Ode 10." (Loeb ed.) It would seem that Augeas and his city were
swallowed up by an earthquake or volcanic fissure.

29. Discontinuity in Greek Civilization (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1966).

30. p. 241.

31. Mireaux, p. 249 and 242-5.

32. Mireaux, p. 146, citing Od XII, 329-32, IV, 368-9.

33. From Mycenae to Homer (1964), p. 197 et passim.

34. See Mircea Eleade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, chap. IV.

35. Finley, p. 168.

36. See pages 134ff below.

37. Op. cit., pp. 250-2.

38. P. 124-5.





{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS}
{P PART 2: }
{Q GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS }
{C Chapter 8: }
{T THE TWO FACES OF LOVE}
{S - }




THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART TWO:
GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE TWO FACES OF LOVE

The Aphrodite of the light Olympian-age character plays opposite her usual star in the
Love Affair, Ares. Her husband, Hephaestus, earns little affection from her, and,
though the story is not mentioned here, she is the mother of three children by Ares.
She is one of the few ever to have expressed love for Ares, and in "The Battle of the
Gods," in the Iliad, she goes to his aid in battle and is roundly smacked by the
Goddess Athena.

If we look into Homer for the precise astronomical referents of Ares, Aphrodite,
Hephaestus and Athena, we are disappointed. Homer does not say that the three sky
bodies - planet mars, Moon, and planet Venus are represented by them, not in the Iliad,
nor the Odyssey, nor in the Love Affair. How then are we to assure ourselves that we
are on the right track when we allocate among them several celestial bodies? We cannot
be certain - not now, nor in ancient times, if we follow the record. Our difficult task
of astral-mythical correlation is to be made even harder by the requirement that we
show that Aphrodite in the Love Affair is, if not certainly, then most likely, the
Moon. However, we shall proceed to the task, taking four steps. First we inquire
whether Aphrodite was tied to the Moon in Greek, Near Eastern and other sources in
primeval and ancient times. Next we ask whether Aphrodite was the name of entities
other than the Moon. Further, we ask whether she was possibly both the Moon and another
entity. Finally, we ask whether Aphrodite stood for the Moon specifically in the Love
Affair, in the song of Demodocus.



{S : A MOST ANCIENT GODDESS}
A MOST ANCIENT GODDESS 

The Aphrodite of whom we speak is an old goddess. Always speaking in relative terms,
"old" means coming into recognizable form and identity before Jupiter, Venus and mars,
probably after Uranus, and possibly early in the age of Saturn - using the Greco-Roman
Eastern Mediterranean theogony and names as points of reference.

A quotation "On the worship of Venus-Urania throughout the East," from the work of a
famous scholar, G. Rawlinson, begins our introduction of the Love Affair's goddess:
[1]

     She was the 'Queen of Heaven, ' the Moon... she corresponded to Minerva, and in
     Greece to the original Aphrodite, who became at last the mere personification of beauty
     and voluptuousness.

In the work of another scholar, Jane E. Harrison  [2] , we read a passage from the
Danaides of Aeschylus, and we are told something of the jurisdiction of this Aphrodite
- words put into her mouth by the great dramatist:

     Lo, there is hunger in the holy Sky To pierce the body of the Earth, and in the Earth
     too Hunger to meet his arms. So falls the rain From Heaven that is her lover, making
     moist The bosom of the Earth: and she brings forth to man The flocks he feeds, the corn
     that is his life. To trees no less there cometh their own hour Of marriage which the
     gleam of watery things Makes fruitful - Of all these the cause am I.

These lines seem to convey what we would expect of a lunar goddess. We are moving far
back in time. In a passing reference, Mircea Eliade writes of a "regime brought about
by Aphrodite and later governed by Zeus, in which the species are fixed, there is
order, balance, and hierarchy." [3]  I have carried the birth of the Moon back in solar
system history to an astronomical catastrophe occurring even before the Age of Saturn.
We hear Theopompos quoted by Plutarch:  [4]  "From Kronos and Aphrodite all things take
their birth." So Aphrodite is moved back to the time of Kronos.

Back of Zeus, stands his father Kronos, and back of Kronos, his father, Ouranos. Hesiod
(8th century?), the earliest Greek source of all, places Aphrodite with the earliest
great god of the cloudy skies, Ouranos (Uranus). The motherless Aphrodite is daughter
of Ouranos, and Eros - a figure of love - seems to have been born with her, nor will
this divine helper ever leave her.

A little while after Hesiod wrote, Homer worked, and Homer alludes to a second
Aphrodite Pandemos, daughter of Zeus by Dione, aided by Eros Pandemos.

Cicero, a typical confusion emerging out of his elegant prose, has Hermes as husband of
the Uranian Aphrodite who is given Hephaestus as a husband and Ares as a lover. A third
Aphrodite is the sister of Hermes and daughter of Heaven and Die. Finally a fourth
Aphrodite emerges as a Syric-Cypriot wife of Adonis, by the name of Astarte.

We have almost nothing to say of the latter two personae. It is enough to discuss
Aphrodite Urania and Aphrodite Pandemos, if indeed they amount to two distinct
goddesses. If the former is the Moon, there is no reason to make of the second also the
Moon. Rather, this latter may even have been the planet Venus, who as the goddess
Athena, was born out of Zeus' forehead, lacking association in such case with either
Dione or Eros. Proclus, much later, but still authoritative, has this second later
Aphrodite also born from the sea like the first  [5] .

The first goddess, Aphrodite Urania, was born in the throes of the destruction of
Ouranos by his son Kronos (Saturn), who severed his father's genitals with a sickle of
jagged flint and flung them into the sea. From the foam of these organs arose
Aphrodite, a foam god, literally foam-born (aphrogenis), the "one who is generated from
foam."  [6]  Only three words in Greek are known to carry the Aphr-root: "foam"
(aphros), "recklessness," and "sexually stimulating," All are obvious associations with
Aphrodite's birth and character  [7] . This will become more significant when we ask
why Aphrodite Urania cannot have been Athena, or Ishtar, or another goddess.




{S : TURBULENT BIRTH IN MYTHS AND REALITY}
TURBULENT BIRTH IN MYTHS AND REALITY 

The later myth might have both confusing and clarifying elements, confusing in its
resemblances to the Uranian episode, clarifying in that, if it were Athena-Venus which
was involved, foam-covered seas are understandable (" Beaufort 10" in navigation has
the surface of the sea foaming, hence sperm) and a turbulent setting in which
Aphrodite-Moon (does Dione relate to Diana?) was destructively involved and Zeus'
activity might have been construed as an attempted (and actual) ravishment of the Moon
in the days of the birth of Athena seven hundred and more years before the Love Affair.
The Homeric "Hymn to Athena" reproduced in chapter X chants of the foaming seas
resulting from her birth.

"Sea" foam, we can see, had reason to be brought in a second time on a later date. Of
the name "Aphrodite" itself, a case can be made for its being of an origin earlier than
the planet Venus, because of the temporal precedence of the Moon and the definite
designation of Urania, an impossible name for a later deity; long before historical
nations began, Ouranos was a deus otiosus. The goddess Amphitrite Thalassa (" of the
Sea") shares this epithet with Typhon and his paredra, "making one being with foam-born
Aphrodite," according to F. Nork  [8] . Here is another indication that Aphrodite
Pandemos is lateborn and accompanies the birth (and death) of Typhon.

We employ the scenario of Aphrodite Urania in Chaos and Creation and Solaria Binaria to
approach the reality of those days. Uranus is a giant luminescent planet that fissions
in the earliest days of humanity. There occurs a separation from the electric arc or
"tree of life" which humans saw reaching up the god-planet. A major fragment from the
nova takes cometary form. In the severance from the tree and in the cometary form, a
castration of Ouranos is perceived. When the Moon is seen to arise from the disturbed
Earth, it is perceived as born out of the turbulent seas, out of the froth, and the
connection is made with the genitals of Ouranos, from which foam-born Aphrodite Urania
is generated and rises into the sky.

The bloodiness ascribed by myth to the foaming scene would refer to the ruddy color of
the turbulent elements and to the horrific analogy of the divine actions; the same
color relations would occur upon the much later occasion of the mythical fall of Typhon
and the birth of a new goddess. Many thousands of years separate this catastrophic
primordial scenario from the fully sublimated painting by Botticelli of a tender,
beautiful Aphrodite riding upon the sea-shell. In Sumerian mythology, the god of the
aether, Enlil, who can be compared with Uranus, separates the interlocked Earth Mother
and Father-Nammu, and then creates the Moon god, Nanna.

Among the thousands of verses of the Rig Vedas of ancient India there is an allusion to
the birth of the Moon, which is not among those presented in my other works but was
culled by J. Ziegler during his study of the Vedas. The Moon is "the Prudent (Moon)...
allied by birth to Heaven and Earth in kinship. The Gods discovered in the midst of
waters beautiful Agni (the Moon) with the Sister's labor. Him, Blessed One, Seven
strong Floods augmented, him white at birth and red when waxen mighty.... Then they,
ancient and young, who dwell together, Seven Sounding Rivers, as one germ received
him."  [9]

Ziegler has also identified as Moon-names of the Rig-Vedas : Pusan, Indu, Two-Mothered
Sun, Pavamana, Sura, Wanderer, Red Bird, Lord, Bull, Vaisvanara, Maghavan, Brhaspati,
Brahmanaspati, Kutsa, Sindhu, Sage, Shining One, Agni and Indra, and probably many
more. We note how other gods are called by Moon-names or there is a confusion, as with
Agni and Indra. The same duplicity may occur in the Mediterranean area.

John Bentley, writing of India, supports us from his peculiar point of vantage: in the
war between gods and giants, "the goddess Sri, or Lakshmi, was then born, or produced
from the Sea."

     "The Venus Aphroditus of the Western mythologists (is) emblematic of the lunisolar
     year; therefore she is called the goddess of increase, abundance, etc. She is the
     daughter of Durga, and the Proserpine of the West; and, considered as time, she is the
     same as her mother. Metaphysically, she may sometimes represent the Moon."  [10]

Later on, we shall see that Bentley's support has its problems. He may be confusing two
Aphrodites (Moon and planet Venus) and Hindu mythology, it seems, may have the same
problem as the Greek.

In geological terms, however, and according to a view that I present at length in the
Quantavolution Series, the Moon has recently arrived upon the sky. It was assembled
electro-gravitationally from a vast explosion of crustal material from the Earth. It
began to orbit the Earth, always facing it, within the traditional era of a cultured
humanity that recorded the events through legend later on. Inasmuch as a number of
ancient authors declare that there existed, still intact, cultures that claimed
existence prior to the Moon's appearance, there was a "Proselenian Period" before the
Moon existed  [11] .

Among the Proselenians, doubts existed; the Moon may have come into position earlier
but, owing to a thick canopy of clouds girdling the Earth, it may have merely come into
evidence at a later time, and therefore the Proselenians witnessed the coming of the
Moon as an emergence from behind a cloudy barrier, after it had been present in the
nearby sky for some time.

Around the world, the moon was more often attributed female gender for several reasons
that can be touched upon only briefly here. A matriarchal system may have come into
being at times and the Moon was deemed female. Or the rough coincidence of the normal
menstrual period of women and the cycle of lunar phases - 28 days, 36 days and perhaps
other periods as well, in various calendar ages - could have produced numerous
speculations, "confirmations," institutional and ritual tags for the measure of time
and religious behaviors. The Moon would thus become female because of its behavior
according to the menstrual cycle? Yet, we think, could not a male Moon have commanded
and ordered the menstrual cycle, according to the mythmaking mind? Only Venus, of the
planets, is often female. The others and the Sun are regularly male. A number of
qualities are associated with the Moon and these are also associated with the Moon and
these are also associated with the female sex. The chief among these is a role in
fertility. But could not the qualities have been ascribed to the Moon after they were
developed in females ? Not altogether, of course, because certain qualities are found
so universally among women that they would appear to have originated in a common source
such as the Moon. One refers here to the function of women in spinning and weaving. Do
these derive from lunar behavior?




{S : ENCYCLOPEDISTS AND THE MOON GODDESS}
ENCYCLOPEDISTS AND THE MOON GODDESS 

Robert Graves refers to "Selene the Moon, alias Aphrodite" and develops the lunar
traits of Aphrodite extensively. "The Athenians called Aphrodite Urania 'the eldest of
the Fates' because she was the Nymph-Goddess, to whom the sacred King had, in ancient
times, been sacrificed at the summer solstice... Aphrodite is the same wide-ruling
goddess who rose from Chaos and danced on the sea, and who was worshiped in Syria and
Palestine as Ishtar, or Ashtaroth  [12] . She was regarded as a queen-bee. "She
destroyed the sacred king, who mated with her on a mountain top, as a queen-bee
destroys the drone: by tearing out his sexual organs." As Cybele, Phrygian Aphrodite of
Mount Ida, she accepted "the ecstatic self-castration of her priests in memory of her
lover Attis."  [13]  Concessions, suggests Graves, to the need to grant her masculine
powers as society moved under the influence of Jovian patriarchy  [14] . Thus could
society employ the fantasy of bisexuality to further a political cause.

The Scythians, it is asserted in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (16-44) worshipped
"Artimpasa (Aphrodite Urania), goddess of the Moon." The famous Encyclopedia of Pauly-
Wissowa tells us that Philochorus, "resting on the oldest conceptions of nature," finds
a duplicity in Aphrodite and the Moon (p. 2738). It refers to Horace speaking of dances
to Aphrodite in the night under the Moon (Horace, Carm. I: 45). It pitches the Lemnos
myth of a marriage between Aphrodite and Hephaestus against a Theban myth of her
marriage to Ares, which are then merged in the Song of Demodocus (p. 2769); the Orphic
hymns stretch far back of the Homeric period of the Eighth and Seventh Centuries; the
image of Aphrodite here seems lunar rather than planetary, but we realize that the same
Mistress of the Heavens title is given to Astarte in Syria, who is probably more planet
Venus (with Ananna) than she is the Moon. Also, as Astarte is seen by some as Aphrodite
barbata (bearded), still Pauly-Wissowa can find at least that the ancient authority
Philochoros again calls the bearded goddess a Moon figure.

Numerous writers besides Graves, among them Winthuis, Jeremias, and Rix, have stressed
an original bisexuality of ancient deities.
The primordial All-Mother of ancient tradition is a man-woman, or a woman-man, virgin
not in the physiological but in the cosmic sense.... A naive androgynous symbolism for
the primeval mother, forming a part of the doctrine, is apparently shown in the oldest
temples to the Virgin Mother, when the All-Mother is represented with a beard...
Astarte may appear in a masculine form... sometimes with the characteristics of the
masculine sex. Certain authors have even offered the hypothesis of an androgynous
Ishtar [15] .

There are many of such androgynous representations of Aphrodite, as in Cyprus where the
goddess wears a beard, female garments, and seems unisexual. Pilgrims to Paphos there
received 'gifts of a phallus and salt, ' the latter standing probably for the sea-froth
and semen of which the goddess was born. In Rome, like New York City, anything could be
found, including this, too.

The case for bearded Aphrodites representing the planet Venus occurs partly because the
ankh (shown below), the crux ansata or 'cross with a handle, ' is associated with both
the planet and with a number of representations that must be regarded as the goddess
Aphrodite. The ankh is an ambivalent symbol that denotes bisexuality, a combined
phallus and vulva. The cometary references seem clear, for a comet's generally round
nucleus and straight-out long tail convey in the sky a genital meaning. Insofar as the
history of the planet Venus is known, and that may well be from its beginnings, the
ankh has been a sacred symbol and one appropriated for the planet Aphrodite-Venus.

Athena is not without bearded associations. Male, bearded serpents were to be found on
a pediment of the archaic Athenian Acropolis. These would have been representations of
the dragon who was Typhon, and also a part of Athena as cometary Venus. The larger
question to be dealt with later on, is whether Athena had a double, a male duplicity, a
god of prominence.

The Dictionnaire des Antiquit‚s is more confident than Pauly-Wissowa of the lunar
identity of the goddesses Aphrodite and Venus. It recognizes the duality of the Uranian
and Jovian Aphrodites which grew close with time or may even have been originally the
same. (91 fn1) We quote here two passages from the extensive article on Venus:
She came from Asia where almost all of the Semitic peoples worshiped a lunar deity
representation of fertility and animal fecundity. Artakatis-Derketo at Ascalon, Mylitta
at Babylon, Ishtar in Assyria, and above all, Astarte among the ancients.

From Cyprus and Phoenicia, the goddess moved North to the shores of the Black Sea,
Northwest across the Cyclades, West to Cytherea, to Sparta, to Sicily, Carthage,
Latium.
Aphrodite Urania is identical to lunar Astarte of the Semites, who appeared at Carthage
under the name of the Celestial Virgin. The relations of Aphrodite with the night star
are further implied in the myth of Phaeton whom the goddess seized to make guardian of
her temple. Phaeton is, in effect, the star of the morning and evening, whose vivid
brightness naturally associated it with the Moon whose brilliant acolyte it appeared to
be. This star, among other names, is also called the star of Venus, and the
assimilation of the goddess to this double star contributed, at Cyprus and Pamphylia,
to the idea of an androgynous Aphrodite.

It is to be noted that this authority not only awards Aphrodite and Venus to the Moon,
but also Ishtar and Astarte, two goddesses that a number of writers, the present author
included, assign confidently to the catastrophic comet-planet Venus. Are we to win one
position only in order to surrender another, perhaps more important in the total
picture? For much of the best material on the history of the disasters of the mid-
second millenium B. C. comes out of the histories of Ishtar and Astarte.

Sophie Lunais tells us that lunar cults are more ancient than solar, that the Moon was
worshiped more than the sun, that Diana came to be identified with the Moon and so,
too, Artemis, and of course Hecate, Selene, and Luna, but despite all of this,
"curiously the mythology of the Moon is practically nonexistent." [16]  Her surprise is
not surprising, considering that often myths of the Moon do not come forth labeled
clearly as such, and that in the book is to be found no reference to Aphrodite ! Most
of the mythology of Aphrodite is lunar mythology. Diana and Artemis were late arrivals
as Moon goddesses, she reports; certainly later than Aphrodite, we add. We could
further add that, if moon mythology is not abundant in the Latin authors, it is because
Aphrodite tended to monopolize it, and in art as well.

Reports Graves: "The later Hellenes belittled the Great Goddess of the Mediterranean,
who had long been supreme at Corinth, Sparta, Thespiae, and Athens, by placing her
under male tutelage and regarding her solemn sex-orgies as adulterous indiscretions."
[17]

Graves continues: the Moon, to whom "the sun yields precedence"  [18]  in early myth
has three phases - the maiden of spring, the nubile nymph of summer, and the crone of
winter, to correspond to her three phases: new, full, and old. She could also be
identified with Mother Earth's vegetative year, who produced first leaves and buds,
then flowers and fruits, and then a withered barrenness. "She could later be conceived
as yet another triad: the maiden of the upper air, the nymph of the earth or sea, the
crone of the underworld - typified respectively by Selene, Aphrodite, and Hecate. These
mystical analogues fostered the sacredness of the number three, and the Moon-goddess
became enlarged to nine when each of the three persons - maiden, nymph, and crone -
appear in triad to demonstrate her divinity." (We note, in passing, that the council of
Phaeacia numbered nine men, who measured the magic circle of the dance and whom we have
also associated with a nine-day week.)

Aphrodite was the nubile female, par excellence, declares Graves. She wore the Golden
Girdle of the Moon, whose magic would incite concupiscence in any man. In addition, she
could stand in the place of the "General Chairwoman," from time to time and from place
to place, as the Great Goddess protem.

By the time Demodocus sang, Aphrodite was officially of the family of Olympian Gods, a
daughter of Zeus, a relatively specialized god of desire, and the moon by inference as
the dark time of trysting and loving. She is fickle, light-hearted, willful, beautiful,
golden, perfumed, and anointed, with, of course, all the powers of her station in
respect to humanity and an invulnerability in fact to terrible retribution from her
father or sisters and brothers. She was a seductive, but no longer active, force.

Still, the universal help and harm, of which she was capable in earlier ages and even
now, remained impressed upon the minds of the audience of Demodocus. Whatever happened
to Aphrodite was of importance and if she might be treated good-humoredly, it would be
still with respect, with awe, with ceremony, and behind the protective shield of other
gods, who alone could be the causes of whatever embarrassment her shameless character
would permit her.



{S : THE COSMIC SPINNER}
THE COSMIC SPINNER 

The most penetrating studies of Aphrodite as the Moon Goddess come from Elmer George
Suhr. He entitles one of his books Venus de Milo, The Spinner; the Link between a
Famous Art Mystery and Ancient Fertility Symbols  [19]  A decade later he published The
Spinning Aphrodite; The Evolution of the Goddess from Earliest Pre-Hellenic Symbolism
through Late Classical Times  [20] . The Venus de Milo, as is well-known, is a statue
without arms. Suhr, reconstructing the statue anatomically and on the basis of more
complete representations of Aphrodite, concluded that she was occupied at spinning
yarn. A fine picture is to be found on the Berlin lekythos where beside the spinning
goddess are Ares and Eros. "The moon... is in full view behind Aphrodite, where it
serves as the total center for the whole composition." Suhr associated a whole complex
of attributes and functions with Aphrodite: the Moon directly, the shadow of the Moon
(its cone), spinning, the vortex theme in myth, the emblem of the spiral, the dew and
rain, Klotho, Hecate, Medusa, the omphalos (sacred navel of the world), rainfall (the
dropping of threads upon the Earth), the turning of the vault of Heaven, the forming of
thunderhead on her distaff with the help of Ares, lunar calendars. She was "worshiped
as the dispenser of the divine elixir running through all life, the mistress of fate
and fortune, the author of all things fair and lovable." She is generally antagonistic
in various manifestations to Athena. She is a long-time enemy of Athena, in the Iliad
but elsewhere, too.

Aphrodite, Suhr thinks, was reduced in importance during the age of Zeus, but could not
be fundamentally deprived of form and function.
The Moon, which heretofore had played an important part in this program (of cloud,
thunder, and lightning) was also relegated to the background. But Aphrodite was too
powerful to be lightly brushed aside. As a goddess of love and beauty she became a
respectable member of the Olympian family, both causing the other gods much trouble and
bringing them countless pleasures by trapping them in the net of desire. Since Zeus was
a male, he never took over the spinning equipment as an adjunct of creation; such an
attribute was below the dignity of the father of the gods and men. Aphrodite was
allowed to keep this attribute and though she remained a powerful divinity, she was
pushed aside in Athens, no doubt in the days of Theseus, by Athena, the bachelor girl
goddess who became a favored child of Zeus.

That the Moon goddess was a spinner is also to be discovered in Meso-America and Egypt.
Hence if Aphrodite is connected with spinning in Greece and the Near East, then
Aphrodite is to be connected with the Moon, for the Moon and spinning are generally
associated.

An article and photograph of the National Geographic Magazine (Dec. 1975) describe
.... The Mayan moon goddess Ixchel, patroness of fertility, weaving, and medicine. Wife
of the sun, she consorted with other gods, just as the moon crosses paths with the
stars and planets. In this 4 3/ 4-inch figurine from Jaina Island, off Yucatan, the
moon goddess takes a grinning rabbit for her partner.

The grinning rabbit might in other place be taken to be a wolf, a mouse, a dove or
another animal such as have been associated with the planet Mars-Ares in Greece, Rome,
and the Near East. The Indo-Iranian texts of the Bundahis refer to a planet called
"Gokihar" or "Wolf -  progeny" as "special disturber of the Moon"  [21]  while the
Slavs beheld a wolf-shaped Vukadlak that devoured the moon (or sun)  [22] .

Medusa is identified with Aphrodite and with Selene (moon) by Suhr, who points out that
Selene was the patroness of generation and "as a friend of Poseidon (one among other
reasons) she became offensive to Athena." We bear this in mind when we see Odysseus
protected by Athena and murderously pursued by Poseidon, and when we see Poseidon in
the Love Affair arranging an easy exit for Aphrodite and Ares out of the vengeful hands
of Hephaestus (hence Athena who, we shall see, is tied to Hephaestus and a protagonist
and director of the action in the Love Affair).

Suhr speaks of the countless clay cones of Mesopotamia that copy the shadow of the
Moon. They rotate upon the face of the dark land, and become a type of menhir turned by
human figures of stone. Nannar the moon god of Mesopotamia works hard to keep the cone
rotating. The cone emblem is found on a coin of Byblos (Syria) and at the city of
Paphos (Cyprus) where a large cone stood in the open court of the Temple of Aphrodite.
With regard both to Aphrodite of Cyprus and Astarte of Syria there was a close
association with the Moon. "Both are heiresses of the moon god of the city of Ur" with
many cone figures.



{S : CONFUSION COMPOUNDED}
CONFUSION COMPOUNDED 

We have already given reasons for the oriental associations of lunar Aphrodite so we
are not surprised but confirmed at finding her great temple at Paphos, Cyprus,
constructed in the Phoenician style (or is it vice versa? No matter here, but relevant
chronologies should be approached skeptically). In this temple, we have noted, stood a
monolith that Tacitus, the Roman historian, described as "A rounded mass rising like a
cone from a broad base to a small circumference." Some scholars think it to have been
an aerolith or meteoroid that had fallen and was emplaced in honor of Aphrodite. This,
indeed, it may have been. To suspect that the fallen stone may be set up in deference
to a cometary Venus or would be a meteoroid associated somehow with Athena is certainly
permissible. We know of a Palladium of Troy, a probable meteoritic stone, associated
with Pallas Athena  [23] , who is herself identified with the planet Venus. Other
meteoroids have been associated with other gods. In the present instance at Paphos, and
following Suhr's earlier theory, we would have more reason to see in the meteoritic
cone an accidental resemblance to the Shadow Cone of the Moon, and its many fabricated
images going back to the city of Ur. Aphrodite of Paphos would then be, if not
exclusively lunar Aphrodite, largely or partly such.

Pliny, the natural historian of Rome, writes that Venus is given the name Lucifer as
another sun bringing the dawn, whereas when it shines after sunset it is named Vesper
as prolonging the daylight, or as deputy of the Moon, and he credits the discovery of
the twin property of planet- Venus to Pythagoras of Samos, 142 years after the founding
of Rome. Others besides Pythagoras are also credited with the discovery, Parmenides and
Ibycus of Rhegium among them.

One implication of this remark, corroborated broadly in Plato, is that planet Venues
did not occupy the same course after the incidents that we are tracing in the Love
Affair. Planet Venus arrived to be deputy of the Moon following the disastrous scenario
in time.

At some period when the planet Venus was emplaced in its modern orbit and coming to be
recognized as such, in its morning and evening manifestations, there may have been a
movement in Greece to call it Hera, for Hera it was called by some. Perhaps the
astronomers, more in touch with oriental thought, won out with their name, Aphrodite.

Another source of confusion turns up in the pages of Robert Graves, where he
distinguishes the animals of the Moon, Selene, and Aphrodite as those that 'parted the
hoof' in the manner of lunar crescents so that the lunar symbol occurred as two facing
arcs, contrasting with the single simple disc of the sun. The sacred cow that directed
Cadmus (from Ugarit, facing West) to the site of Thebes was so branded on each flank.

At Denderah a red bull was sacrificed formally as Typhon. Temples there for Isis and
Aphrodite were found, as well as shrines for Seth-Typhon. Cows, young bulls, bulls, red
bulls: to whom does each category belong, to what gods, in what aspects? There were
more sky-bovines than bovine species to assign to them. It will be a long time before
the pattern is fully discovered. At Denderah, there is something of Aphrodite as the
Venusian goddess implicated in the mid-second millennial events. Cloven-hoofed animals
are not alone of the Moon, whatever may be the inclination of the symbol of the double-
facing crescents elsewhere. Just as Lucifer is the light-bearer of the morning, but is
also the Prince of Darkness, Satan, Seth - the light that brought darkness, the
darkness of wanderings in the wilderness, of Egypt following the Great Light?

What, then, should one do with the many indications from Egypt, the Near East, and
Western and Northern Europe that the Planet Venus is associated with the cow and even
the young bull (as in the Revolt of the Golden Calf in Hebrew Exodus)? It would appear
that we are dealing once again with mysteries of the succession and amalgamation of
divinities in the course of experiencing and forgetting, mnemotechnology. Especially
because of the ultimately close physical association of the Moon and Venus and the
skies, the facile mirage of celestial horns, and the shapes that comets take, we can
reason that Aphrodite would be party to and victim of a confusion between Moon and the
Star of the Moon. Hence, Symbols of the one may develop some distinction from those of
the other, but an overlapping occurs, enough to tell of the merger of gods, a merger
perhaps supremely important in preventing the human mind from taking sides against
itself. That is, the very confusion that sets us to arguing is the therapy enabling us
to live mentally with historically opposing gods. And such is carried into the
sublimations of the arts. "There is something for everyone," "everyone" being the
society seeking consensus (therefore a consistent history) and the individual seeking
personal sacred integrity.



{S : A MATCH OF SOURCES}
A MATCH OF SOURCES 

The time has come, it appears, to switch perspectives, to show how it might be argued
that Aphrodite is also tied to the planet Venus, thus rescuing the several goddesses of
the planet Venus from capture by the Moon.

Perhaps following Plutarch, St. Augustine went as far as to assign the archetype of the
comet-planet Venus, Athena, to the Moon.
As for Minerva (Athena), they have given her the responsibility for the arts of
mankind; but they have not found her a star to be her habitation, and so they have
identified her with the upper region of the ether, or even with the Moon.

We can do without this sort of help. This is as unlikely an assignment as any
identification can get in mythology and I join Peter James in dismissing it. But James'
adamancy on the balance of the equation remains to be dissolved. It lets him turn
around and accept Augustine's comment that Aphrodite won the Judgment of Paris about
which goddess should represent Venus (the golden apple), "but as usual Venus wins. For
the overwhelming majority give the star to Venus."  [24]  Is it not once more likely
that Aphrodite won the star of Venus, that is, the planet that attended the Aphrodisian
Moon? The Greeks, he insists, regularly applied the name Aphrodite to the planet Venus,
and addressed prayers to that body as the planet associated with her. They could not
really be thinking of the Moon in all of this.
If Velikovsky and de Grazia are right, then Lucian of Samosata, Ptolemy, Aristotle,
Plotinus, Diordorus Siculus, Manetho, Sappho, Bion, the Emperor Julian, Nonnus, ... and
... the ancient Greeks were all wrong.

My list of debatable sources here is perhaps as long and may be longer. Several of the
star witnesses are contradictory and can be controverted. Augustine mentions two
groups, one awarding planet Venus to the goddess Venus, another insisting also that
Venus is the Moon. Other witnesses can be called: where are Hesiod, Homer, Plutarch,
Cicero, Hyginus, Augustine, Proclus? And where are the modern encyclopedists?

They may do no worse, or better : James of course knows them well; I have already
joined him in discussing Plutarch and Augustine. But to take another example, Hesiod is
the earliest source extant to refer to the transformation of Phaeton, felled by Zeus
for threatening the destruction of Earth, into a star. Hesiod writes of "Phaeton, a man
like the gods, whom... laughter-loving Aphrodite seized and caught up and made a keeper
of her shrine by night, a divine spirit" (987ff). Clearly in line with what we are
saying the proto-planet Venus was said to be captured upon her fall from the skies by
Moon-Aphrodite and thereafter employed as her divine priest. In a second example, I
cannot understand why Sappho is forced to take sides. She sings:
And may Hesperus lead thee full willingly to the place where thou shalt marvel at the
silver-throned Lady of Wedlock.

Here, clearly, planet- Venus is performing as the acolyte of the Moon. Nor, to take
another instance, is Bion less than a Moonie. The pastoral poet addresses the
Evening star, which art the Golden light of the lovely Child of The Foam, which are the
holy Jewel of the blue night.

Here again we are permitted to regard the Moon as lovely Child of the Foam, Aphrodite,
whose acolyte is the Evening Star. I suggest that the passage and the poet are
ambiguous, and would not rely upon it for support or denial in the argument.

The ancient source Nonnus speaks of an astrologer who "looked especially for Ares and
spied the wife robber over the sunset house along with the evening star of the
Cyprian." Is the evening star "the Cyprian" or "of the Cyprian;" if "of the Cyprian"
then the evening star is the planet Venus and the Cyprian is the Moon, whether present
or absent. The modern source Jean Richer (G‚ographie Sacr‚e du Monde Grec) speaks of
"... Cythere, whose Venus was foremost a lunar goddess."

On the other hand, Cicero is often confused, too. Cicero writes that "Diana they
identify as the moon... while the name Luna is derived from Lucere, 'to shine; '" and
he says that Diana to the Greeks is Lucifera (the Light-Bearer) and is one of the seven
planets or wanderers. Diana is generally involved with the Moon, it is agreed, and with
menstruation and childbirth, hence the Greeks were making an erroneous transfer unless
they carry the Moon as a wanderer and planet which in fact was often done; so Lucifera
could be the Moon as well as the planet Venus of the morning. I prefer to renounce the
lunar argument here, and to let go of Cicero, rather than to assert it as evidence. The
best that can be said is that Lucifera is a feminine brightness that can be ascribed to
the Moon as well as to its primary reference, the Morning Star.

James would cease to "strenuously deny that Aphrodite had anything to do with the
Moon," perhaps, if he were to realize how large a contribution his own work has made,
first, to my being able to reinforce the Moon identification of Aphrodite and,
secondly, to arrive at my final theory on the matter, namely that the two bodies - Moon
and planet - interacted physically, became confused in history and myth in certain
regards (though not in many others) and were to be found, in the end, to have played
now one role and then another. I have shown that their alternation of roles occurred
elsewhere; I would only insist that Aphrodite is quite capable of the lunar role I
assign to her (and believe that subconsciously the Greeks assigned to her) in the Love
Song of Demodocus in Book VIII of the Odyssey of Homer.

Peter James proposes another theory - or sub - theory - on the issue, suggesting that a
lunar Aphrodite can be totally excluded from consideration if only we imagine that
warlike Athena was early granted the Morning Star (Phosphoros) while peaceful Aphrodite
was given the Evening Star (Hesperos); thus both goddesses might be accounted for and
the Moon excluded.

No less an authority than Kugler can be called on to state James' position on the
double nature of Ishtar, hence planet Venus, in his work, Sibyllinischer Sternkampf und
Phaethon (1927, p. 14) he says of the Babylonian Ishtar: "Venus-morning star there
represented Ishtar-Kakkabe, 'Ishtar of the Star', and is thought of as 'masculine' - in
distinct contrast to Venus-evening star, the Belit-ile, 'Queen of the Gods, ' the
goddess of love and motherhood."

In examining a rock relief of the Hittite pantheon, James discovered that the Venusian
planet Shaushga held a double identity and preceded the Moon god on the one side and
the Sun god on the other. She also wore wings. She must be here the planet in its
morning and evening aspects  [25] . This indicates a young (Velikovskian) age, not an
old (Jamesian) age of the rocks, if one believes that the planet did not settle into
its morning-evening routine until the period of the Love Affair. Still, one should
acknowledge that the double goddess and the Moon are distinctly different.

Steven Langdon, another authority, has it that the morning star was called in Babylonia
"the male Venus" and the evening star the "female Venus", with Ishtar, of course, as
the word for Venus; there is "Ishtar of Agade" and "Ishtar of Anech", for morning and
evening manifestations of the planet.

We can go so far as to say that Athena was Venus in her cometary phase, ending in her
status as the morning star during the early years of the new status of the morning
star. We cannot well imagine the second because of definite statements associating
Hesperos with Moon-Aphrodite. We accept, too, that Lucifer was planet-Venus and the
morning-star. Such were Ishtar and Astarte, and other gods.

At the same time, although the Aphrodite of the morning was not the Aphrodite of the
night, the morning-planet-Aphrodite was working her way into many of the traits of the
night-moon-Aphrodite, so that goddesses of the morning star could ultimately possess
traits genetically possessed by the Moon goddess - lovingness, peacefulness, sexuality,
Queen of Heaven. S. A., Bedini, too, sees this process as occurring - that Ishtar, for
instance, guaranteed contract among men together with the Moon God Sin. She was goddess
of love, fertility and war. She took qualities from the Moon with her when she moved
fully to occupy the morning and evening stars, Venus [26] . Also, long after and for
many centuries of the present era, many Arabs worshiped the morning star as both
Lucifer and Aphrodite, never mind the evening star.

The scum of the salty foaming sea, held in revulsion by Egyptians, was again two foams,
the original Aphrodite-Moon foam of the seed of Ouranos, and the later Aphrodite-Typhon
foam transferred from the mid-second millennium. The latter foam came about, the
Egyptians thought, from the falling of Typhon (the cometary tail of proto-Venus) into
the sea (after Zeus had struck him with a thunderbolt, according to the Greeks), this
according to Plutarch. There are in sum numerous reasons to explain the confusion, to
assign the name to the planet, and to retain it for the Moon for all the purposes that
we have in mind here.



{S : HOW TO NAME A PLANET?}
HOW TO NAME A PLANET? 

We know that the Moon had names - Selene, Luna, Sin, etc. - which an astronomer or
educated layman could apply, whether in Greek or Latin; but the planet Phosphoros and
Hesperos had only this double name, implying two distinct bodies, and the Greek
intellectual reformers needed a name for the planet that would denote a single entity,
a point that they were trying to get across to their public.

They could not and would not take away Moon's name and affix it to a planet. But
Aphrodite had long since left the Moon in a conscious sense though she was stubbornly,
obsessively the Moon in the subconscious. The literal minds - such as Pythagoras,
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Diodorus, Manetho, Pliny and Cicero were less (or
differently) imprisoned by their subconscious: "Let the planet be called Aphrodite,
after the famous goddess." Today we name a new planet Neptune or Pluto; such is
astronomical tradition of naming; it can be false to history, unless saved by
subconscious memory. Aphrodite was still Aphrodite in a host of connotations, memories
and expectations - and she had a wandering star named for her. All the other planets
had names of gods, new names, though the names had long traditions behind them - Zeus,
Kronos, Ares, Hermes. Now the Romans too would call them Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and
Mercury. As for the Moon, it already had names enough.

But what did the Greeks call the planet before it received its new name? It is said
Phosphorus-Hesperus. What was its name when, as our scheme calls for, it was raging
through the heavens as a new blazing comet? Perhaps then it was called Phaeton, Typhon,
Pallas, Baal, El, the Archangel, or "Daughter of Zeus," or "Athena," or perhaps "She"
and then "He," or "The Thing," "It," or why not "the God." Hundred of appellations can
be found for it around the globe. What did the Mycenaeans call the planet? No one yet
knows. Under such conditions, it would be foolish to be hooked by a name assignment, to
neglect natural and human history, and to become illogical in the face of other types
of evidence, especially when we are fairly confident that the name was deliberately
imposed upon the planetary body by highly sublimated intellectuals.

Does this mean that the Greeks and Romans then stopped upon applying he word, and never
added their prior traits of goddess Aphrodite to the planet? No. As soon as an object
is called by a name with a history, the history begins to flow onto the name. Further
all that was previously attached to the object continues with it.

Suppose nowadays we were to decide that the asteroidal belt, whose materials are being
discovered in every greater detail, had to be called by a name, and hence called it the
"Belt of Mars." Suppose that subsequently some traits of the ancient god were evidenced
in the asteroidal belt and some students decided to call it "the Belt of Apollo." This
does not make Apollo out of Mars, or vice versa. It brings confusion. Soon the word
"belt" would be dropped, and just the names would be used. The "Mars Program" and the
"Apollo Program" would be erroneously associated with the planets. After a century or
so, only some priests of NASA would be able to explain the history, and, if NASA were
dissolved, practically no one would know the story. And, after a sky-war in which
civilizations were shocked and reduced to subsistence level, only a cultist now and
then would revive the terms. Where would truth exist under such circumstances? Probably
where truth exists under present circumstances concerning the ancient history of Venus
and the Moon.

In the case of the planet Aphrodite-Venus, some of what was Aphrodite in the collective
mind attached itself to the new Aphrodite. Furthermore, some that was in Astarte,
Ishtar, Isis, and a dozen other Eastern relatives, began to be transferred over to the
name Aphrodite.

In the end, the goddess Aphrodite changed. She was now two psychic entities, Siamese
twins, in the categories of the mind. Concurrently, the gods that have lent their
qualities to the new member of the planet-family, borrow her qualities of old; they
take on the history and rights of the Moon. This reverse borrowing results in dubious
but understandable claims that Ishtar is the Moon, Astarte is the Moon, even Athene is
the Moon (Plutarch, Bedini, etc.). The confusion that must always occur in the
association of great gods with natural objects and events here was compounded and
intensified by the transference of Aphrodite to an actually antagonistic planet.

We must reckon, too, that a new god may be given an older name in order that humans may
prove to the god that "we knew all along who you were, even if it seemed not so. We did
not have to await your coming to destroy us before knowing of your eternal being." ("
Therefore, planet Venus, cease and desist from your threats to the Earth and Moon.")

On one occasion, depending upon prior conditions such as the background of the subject,
the subject's felt needs, and the information and setting provided the subject, the god
who appears is a selection of one set of divine expectations. On another occasion, the
god who appears may be different. In God's Fire, I explain how impossible is true
monotheism, and that even Moses was in a realistic psychological sense a polytheist.
The same reasoning may be applied here, where Aphrodite is now one god and now another.
It is unscientific and pedantic to charge that a name is all that there is to a complex
and subtle mental operation.

After the name Aphrodite is given to the planet, the Greeks began revising their
religious history. Planetary conjunctions of Venus and Mars were of course known. So
now Lucian of Samosata could claim that it was the juncture of Aphrodite and Ares that
creates the poetry of Homer, and probably means by her the planet and not the Moon. So
Eratosthenes and others. But this is not a proof of what Homer meant or, regardless of
what Homer meant, that Aphrodite was not the Moon in the reality behind the poem and
psychically in those who heard the Song of Demodocus chanted. Especially are these
reservations proper if Athena is conceded to stand for the comet Venus, whence it may
be truly said that the war is between planet Venus and planet Mars, but certainly,
since Aphrodite and Ares were allies, the epics of Homer could never have been plotted
on the liaison or juncture of Ares and Athena. So insistent are the ancient claims of
the classical age that the same planet was at a late time discovered to be not two but
one, and therefore given a name, that of Aphrodite, that we must believe so and allow
that in the mind of Homer and Demodocus, Aphrodite did not posses that planet, except
as the Moon. Several generations had lived and died between the last Battle of the Gods
and the willful emplacement of the name of Aphrodite upon the planet. By the time of
Plato only vague memories stirred of the original behavior of this doubly duplicitous
body and of its dramatic roles in the skies of times past.

Revivals occur. Suhr writes that "the association of Aphrodite with clouds, the moon,
spinning and fertility was more popular in Greece after Alexander had opened up the
channels for a free exchange of ideas with the East than before, but this we may
consider a revival; Aphrodite was known and worshiped, even in Athens, in very early
times."

There is no suggestion that Aphrodite of the Love Affair is trespassing upon the
identity of Ishtar. Ishtar is goddess of the morning star and also of the evening star
in the usage of a removed culture. Aphrodite of the Greeks is made to be the goddess
standing behind Phosphorus and Hesperus and their duality. Meanwhile she remains
goddess of the Moon. Plato mentions a Syrian law-giver as the source of the name. But
after considering this surprising suggestion for some time, I think now that Plato may
have been of the opinion that a Syrian lawgiver with the advice of the court
astronomers gave to the planet Venus the name of Ishtar or Astarte or another such
name. In following this learned and authoritative source, the Greeks applied the old
name Aphrodite to the planet. Once to the Europeans, the Western hemisphere had no
names - or rather, numerous names. A geographer published a map drawn by an Italian
navigator, Amerigo Vespucci. It was the map of Amerigo, describing a vast land. What
was the land called? Not the "country of Amerigo" but, eventually "Amerigo," Latin
masculine Americus, for a feminine country becomes "America."



{S : THE ROMAN VENUS}
THE ROMAN VENUS 

We ought not settle the Aphrodite identity without a parallel investigation of the word
"Venus." Malcolm Lowery conducted appropriate etymological research. Its root, he
discovered, contained the senses of seek, desire, want, wish, and winsome, while its
relative venire (to come) also relates to the same root, that includes the word "to go"
in Greek. Velilovsky follows Cicero's idea that "Venus" meant "the goddess who comes to
all things" and extended it to mean "newly come" to fit his theory.

Lowery effectively discusses Velikovsky's speculation and limits Cicero to a possibly
very old truth about the word, a truth established long before the time when the
goddess would have been attached to the planet Venus. An implication here is that the
goddess called Venus may earlier have been attached to a conception of a goddess like
Aphrodite, even lunar, before the planet Venus was identified.

Lowery may err in his innuendo that the Roman Venus was "unlike the Greek Aphrodite,
whose name, meaning 'foam-born, ' was subsequently applied to the human activity of
which she served as patron, namely love-making. born in and from sperm." If the modern,
vernacular of the English-speaking world uses the word "come" to designate an orgasm,
there is reason to suppose that the less sexually restrained ancient Greeks and Romans
could employ the same word in their goddess of coming and thus allow to the Latin word
its obvious root meaning.

Lowery misunderstood his own contradiction, for he writes that "the layman may find the
range of meaning here attributed to one root something of an obstacle to acceptance of
this reconstruction: achievement, supposition, habit and delight are, after all, rather
a distance from seeking or desiring." Rather a small distance, we should say. And, once
again, we see an old goddess at work, a lunar goddess, a pre-planet-Venus goddess at
work, an Aphrodite of the Love Song of Demodocus.

Some etymologists say that the word "Venus" is of an unknown Italian origin but crept
out of fertility and bucolic functions onto the skies, where it may have become a
mistress of heaven but ultimately became the planet Venus, when the Greeks named their
planet Aphrodite.

The Greeks have no letter "V". The letter "B" is used instead. The intermediate Greek-
English Lexicon of Liddell and Scott offers only two words beginning with "ben." One is
"benthos," poetical for "bathos," meaning the "depth of the sea." This is not too
removed from the lunar role, for the Moon rules the night and the night seas, and was
born from the sea.

The second meaning is "Bendis" which is a name of the Thracian Artemis, found in
Lucian. This is more suggestive to us. For if Aeneas and the Trojans of Northwest
Anatolia brought their gods with them, Bendis may have been among them; Thrace is not
far away. And if Bendis is Artemis; and Artemis, we know, is the Moon; and if Bendis is
a progenitor of Venus, then Venus, too, is lunar, and there is good reason to tie her
to Aphrodite as Venus.

The faithful Aeneas, on this way to found settlements in Latium, that later spread to
Rome, may well have founded a town in Thrace, as he did Aphrodisia in the Southeastern
Peloponnesus (Gulf of Boiai) and other settlements elsewhere. This shows not only how
disorganized and turbulent were the eighth-seventh century decades of Mars-Ares, but
also how Aphrodite may have come to Italy, there to become identified with Venus, who
thereafter came to be identified with the later Jovian Aphrodite, which came then to be
connected, in the wake of Greek insistence, with planet-Venus. We note, however, that
the Aphrodite of Aeneas was she of the Iliad and Odyssey, and of the Love Affair, enemy
of the Athena-Venus-Aphrodite goddess therefore and holding to the Moon in history and
traits except that now her name superficially will be taken over almost entirely by the
planet Venus.

Or, as some believe, Venus may have come out of the Etruscan Pantheon, whence she may
too have arrived as Bendis, for we think that the Etruscans came from Anatolia, as we
shall argue later; further the island of Lemnos between Troy and Thrace contains
Etruscan inscriptions, and, as we develop the argument, is significantly connected with
Hephaestus, a principal character of the Love Affair. Aeneas was a son of Venus, that
is, Aphrodite, and Romulus a son of Mars. Julius Caesar claimed the same descent.

If we did not believe that substantive connections may have existed between Aphrodite
and the Moon, we should not be so concerned with demonstrating the linguistic
associations. In our case, the allegation that Aphrodite was not thought to represent
the Moon to the audience of Demodocus is tantamount to refusing much of the theory of
this book. It is not the same as asking whether the Venus of Willendorf is really the
planet Venus, or Aphrodite, or whatever; this is a conventional term invented for a
class of small, crude prehistoric stone sculptures of obese females, and is little else
than a playfully applied name, which we hope, will not throw our descendants into
confusion a thousand years from now.

Those going before Plato knew Aphrodite as a goddess, and probably as a lunar figure,
although this latter may have become subconscious. "A new ferment was introduced by the
first knowledge appearing with Plato of the oriental significance of Aphrodite as a
star."  [27]  It would seem that the Greeks, especially the astrologers among them,
were now to call Hesperus and Phosphorus the stars of Aphrodite, and were thereafter to
live with two sets of symbols and references intermingling and causing confusion.

There were enough similarities to permit the duplicity to endure to our day. Both were
"foam-born." Further, each in her own way was "One who wanders over the foam," (Aphr-
Oditi). Both were strongly female, even while male on occasion. Both were beautiful, in
their own way. Often they traveled the night skies together. Whether referring to the
planet or the satellite, both could be "of Aphrodite." Both might be called the "Queen
of Heaven." Both had been heavily involved with Mars-Ares, and in destructive behavior
with regards to Earth. Both were in the Olympian family and council of gods, one as
Moon-Aphrodite, the other as Athena-Aphrodite, but who was to say or needed to say,
after Hesiod's time, which heavenly body the two goddesses possessed? On the other
hand, each goddess - call one of the Moon and the other of planet-Venus - owned
peculiar traits that never to be reconciled or assimilated one to the other.

The possibility that "foam-born" could be rationalized for the birth of the Planet-
Venus-Aphrodite should not obscure the importance of this difference. Being foam-born
from the Uranus incident means from the seed in the genital and blood foam, not a mere
roughing of the waters that would occur with the passage of cometary-Aphrodite.

Another important distinction was occupational. Athena-Minerva-Ishtar-( Aphrodite)
never lost her military and craftsman-like qualities. Greek and Roman warriors marched
into battle led by these but not by Aphrodite. Why not Aphrodite, if she were among
them? On the other hand, Aphrodite-Moon never lost her connection with the motions of
the spinning complex in the domestic occupation that emulated the motions of the
universe.

Yet another kind of difference persisted in the realm of love. Aphrodite-Moon generally
portrayed what today's vernacular would call "straight" sexuality, while Aphrodite-
Ishtar-Athena would be assigned to "kinky" sex. The former was the marrying type, the
latter an independent and ambiguous lover. Eros helped Aphrodite-Moon, and Suhr has
placed this child-god in the closest association with her; he helps her spin and weave
to attract "straight" lovers. It is possible that Eros, though as old as Moon-
Aphrodite, merged with Hesperus, the Evening Star, and carries this association as
well. Eros certainly resembles the later cherubs that float around the Mother of God in
Roman Catholic paintings.

The stimulation of fertility belongs to Ishtar-types as well as to Moon-Aphrodite, yet
not so much so, and this must be a quantitative judgement for the moment. Virginity is
a technical word and should not be confounded with the idea of concupiscence. But
consider that Athena-Ishtar is celebrated for her virginity and in one startling
portrait is carrying her babies in a basket. "Not only was she never in woman's womb,"
wrote Helene Deutsch, "but she herself apparently had no womb, for when she carried
children, it was in a basket."  [28]  Such marsupial behavior is hardly the symbol of
fertility for womankind. Planetary Aphrodite is semper parata like the U. S. Marines.
Granted that planet-Aphrodite or Venus was once a comet that lost its tail, then the
aura of sexual "kinkiness" around Athena-Ishtar-Aphrodite makes sense: bisexuality,
unisexuality, technical virginity, androgyny, vestal virgins, castration - these
cluster around the cometary Aphrodite and relate to the phallicized comet that loses
its male organ in a sky-conflict and becomes a special type of female. She is not
sexually stimulating, at least not to a conventional male. Moon-Aphrodite is more
languid, less aggressive, usually "there when you need or want her." Athena and her
planetary counterparts are artists appearing one moment here, the next moment gone.

The materials assembled here help us to understand that the nations at some point were
observers of a great change in the sky, an implantation upon the human vision: a single
body of double aspect and less terror.

A cometary Venus was greatly feared in the period 1500 to 700 B. C. and the Moon god
had been heavily worshiped long before then. We will suppose, therefore, a competition
of these two gods, female, for a long time before the disastrous natural events of the
Eighth and Seventh centuries that involved Mars. By the process that might be called
divine succession, the god of cometary Venus was the more terrible in this period of
700 year and took over a number of traits and much of the obeisance given previously to
the Moon goddess. The Shaushga, Astarte, Annana, Anat, Minerva, Ishtaroth, Ishtar,
Isis, and Aphrodite figures would have become largely proto-planet Venus in their
connotations, orientation, and imagery. The Aphrodite idea would have moved from lunar
to cometary, carrying a conglomerate of old and new traits.

When, however, the catastrophes of the Martians age reduced and confounded the pre-
existing civilizations - Mycenaean, Trojan, Near-Eastern - a readjustment of the
Pantheon had to occur. New relationships had to be invented within the family structure
of the gods. Mars, for one, had to be granted a larger role. Proto-planet Venus was at
a new peak of activity, but was apparently tamed by the god of Mars.

When the disasters subsided, the skies had to be resurveyed; a new astronomy occurred.
After some decades, astronomers discovered, first, that two new bodies existed, a
Morning Star and an Evening Star. The former was quickly re-identified as old cometary
Venus, on a new regular and unthreatening orbit. Soon thereafter the Evening Star was
declared to be the same planet-star. Then came the fateful attachment of the old names,
once ambiguous and now still ambiguous, to the planet in both of its manifestations.
Goddess Aphrodite once more became strongly planet Venus, with lunar attributes. With
the passage of time, Aphrodite became a more ambiguous figure, because peace had
settled upon the heavens; she was once again lunar, a peaceful spinner, a sensual
lover. To some, psychically, she was the planet Venus; to others she was the Moon and
the planet was "of Aphrodite the Moon;" to others she was the god of night and the
lunar heavenly spaces. So she was a complex "herself," the goddess, rather like the
Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, which, they say, was neither "holy" nor "Roman", but
he could act either way on occasion.

After all of this complicated research and reasoning, it is hard to recall ourselves to
the present issue and to its vulgar denouement. The question is still, "How did the
Phaeacian sailors, women, courtiers, adolescents and priests imagine the heroine of
Demodocus' Love Affair?" As in a modern public opinion poll, the gravest questions of
world concern have to be reduced to extremely simple questions. Here our respondents
(in Phaeacia, Naxos, Athens, or Syracuse of about 650 B. C. before the Scientific
Revolution of Thales et al.) are to be interrogated, with (I think) the following
results:
"There are those who say that Aphrodite stands for the Moon (Selene)?" Do you (indicate
the response closest to your opinion): agree-15%; maybe-25%, disagree-10%; no opinion
or don't know-50%.

Next, of those (10%) who disagreed, the question is asked: "Who, then, does Aphrodite
stand for?" Athena-3%; Hera-5%; Hesperus-32% Phosphorus-10%, No opinion or don't know -
50%.

That is, I would estimate that even on the conscious level, there is a tendency to tie
Aphrodite to the Moon. The high level of unconcern and ignorance as to the question
would signify that the Love Affair is making no demands of ordinary people to extract
subconscious materials and bring them into consciousness. Both this figure and the 25%
of "maybe's" would indicate that many persons mixed up Aphrodite with the Moon, Athena,
Artemis, Hera, et al. I would maintain that on the subconscious level, the
identification with the Moon would be much more common and intense. I have tried to
describe earlier what the subconscious contained, and will try to express this
subconscious mood in a later chapter.

It does not matter that elsewhere and at other times and among other people, the name
Aphrodite signifies the planet Venus. Indeed we have been pleased to contribute to an
understanding of her plural personality and worship. On the basis of this chapter and
of other congruencies and support found throughout our work, we conclude that for the
purposes of this book and in the scene of the Love Affair Aphrodite acts the role of
the Moon and is so understood by the audience. Aphrodite represents the Moon in the
drama and, insofar as the drama represents a memory, then Aphrodite acts out this
memory.




{S : Notes (Chapter 8: The Two Faces of Love)}
Notes (Chapter 8: The Two Faces of Love) 

1. Appendix to Herodotus, Histories, Bk III.

2. Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion and Themis, Cambridge, Eng. 1921,
reprinted IIyde Park, N. Y. : University Books, 1962, p. 176.

3. Patterns in Comparative Religion, p. 77.

4. Isis and Osiris, Lxix.

5. Plat. Kraty. 1-116.

6. Hesiod, Theogony, 196.

7. Using the Liddell-Scott Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford : Clarendon Press, 7th ed,
1968.

8. Etym., Symbol. Mythol. W”rterbuch, 1844, reference kindly supplied by Dr. Zvi Rix.

9. J. Ziegler, The Vedas pp. 233-4 (1983, unpubl. mss)

10. A Historical Review of the Indian Astronomy Part I "The Ancient Astronomy" (1825;
reprinted 1970, Osnabr�ck: Biblio Verlag).

11. A. M. Paterson, "Giordano Bruno's View on the Earth without a Moon," Pens‚e,
(winter, 1973), pp. 46-7; I. Velikovsky, "Earth without a Moon," Ibid., p. 26. Both
writers, at least then, believed that the Moon was recently captured. The present
author decided upon the Earth-fission model in the years that followed, cf. Chaos and
Creation, Lately Tortured Earth, and was supported by Earl R. Milton, cf. Solaria
Binaria.

12. Graves, I, 49. We disagree that Ishtar was the Moon, at least finally, for she is
clearly Athena and Planed Venus, cf. Velikovsky. Further, on Aphrodite as the Moon, see
the conclusion of this chapter.

13. Graves, I, 71. Unity with the goddess excited anxiety over violating the incest
taboo and brings on sacrifice of kings and priests.

"As Goddess of Death-in-Life, Aphrodite earned many titles which seem inconsistent with
her beauty and complaisance" - Melaenis (black one), Scotia (dark one), Androphonos
(man-slaver), and Epitymbria (of the tombs). At Cyprus she would sometimes wear a
beard, and was also portrayed as "bearded and having the male member, but clad in a
female dress and holding a sceptre," 1 George Hill, A History of Cyprus (Cambridge:
University Press, 1972), Vol. I, 79-80, citing Macrobius (Sat. III, 8) and Fragmenta
Historica Graecorum (1878-85), Vol. I, p. 386.

14. Graves I, 73. When Plato (Epinomis, lines 99-101) gave the name Aphrodite to the
planet that we call Venus, he said that he was using the name of "a Syrian lawgiver"
and in the next statement uses the pronoun "him" in referring back to it. He could mean
the "authority" or "in the name of" the Syrian.

15. Personal letter to the author from Dr. Z. Rix.

16. Sophie Lunais, Les Auteurs Latins -Recherche sur la Lune, I, Brill: Leiden,
1979,99.

17. Graves, I, p. 18. I.

18. Graves, I, p. 12.

19. New York: Exposition Press, 1958, Foreword by Rhys Carpenter.

20. New York: Helios Press, 1969.

21. Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision, Part II : 3.

22. Ibid., ch. 4.

23. See Harrison, op. cit., p. 87, who finds "Pallas" in the "Palladium."

24. Citing The City of God, VII: 15.

25. Op. cit., I : 2, pp 3-4.

26. S. A. Bedini, p. 23, in Bedini, Werner von Braun, and F. L. Whipple, Moon: Man's
Greatest Adventure (New York: Abrams, n. d., ca. 1970).

27. Pauly-Wissowa, p. 2772.

28. A Psychoanalytic Study of the Myth of Dionysus and Apollo, New York: Int'I U.
Press, 1969.





{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS}
{P PART 2: }
{Q GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS }
{C Chapter 9: }
{T THE RUINED FACE OF A CLASSIC BEAUTY}
{S - }



THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART TWO:
GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS

CHAPTER NINE

THE RUINED FACE OF A CLASSIC BEAUTY

In the Iliad, Aphrodite leads her wounded lover Ares off the field of battle after he is
pierced by the spear of warlike Athena-Venus, and in so doing is herself struck.

The poets and historians of ancient times may have known more than we do of disasters
among the planets, "That the Moon was attacked and scarred by the comet Venus was known
to the Greeks and described graphically by Nonnus." So writes Peter James, and we quote
the fine passage from this historian of late ancient times, Nonnus:
"Many a time he (Typhon) took a bull at rest from his rustic plowtree and shook him with
a threatening hand, bellow as he would, then shot him against the Moon like another
moon, and stayed her course, then rushed hissing against the goddess, checking with the
bridle her bulls' white yoke-straps, while he poured out the mortal whistle of a poison
spitting viper."

But Titan Mene would not yield to the attack. Battling against the Giant's heads, like-
horned to hers, she carved many a scar on the shining orb of her bull's horn; and
Selene's radiant cattle bellowed amazed at the gaping chasm of Typhon's throat."  [1]

The fable bespeaks cosmic cyclones, where earthly and celestial effects are
simultaneously visible and apparently connected by an uncontrolled raging dragon-god.



{S : THE INNOCENT ASTRONAUTS}
THE INNOCENT ASTRONAUTS 

The Moon, as a round rock in the sky, was a manifestation of the Goddess Aphrodite. What
happened to it happened to her and what happened to her, in many cases, happened to it.
We turn, therefore, to geology and astrophysics and ask what, if anything, happened to
the Moon in the time of Homer. The Moon is old, as all matter and energy may be said to
be old - even infinitely old if one considers that "matter" and "energy" are convertible
events and that neither can become space or non-being. That is not a point to be
disputed.

The question is whether the Moon, as a chemical agglomerate, pursued its present set of
motions at the time of which Homer wrote. Moreover, was its chemistry the same after
that time as it was before?

The moon is enveloped by a crust of igneous anorthosite to the depth of 35 kilometers,
"which must have resulted from melted rock of at least twice that depth."  [2]  Lunar
rocks were discovered to have undergone heating and bubbling, probably more recently. A
large part of the soil consisted of tiny glass spheres, probably resulting from the
evaporation of boiled lunar rock that collapsed back upon condensation in the cold. Some
trace of organic, aromatic hydrocarbons were found in lunar sample returned by the
astronauts of Apollo XI. Carbide rocks were found on the lunar surface. Rocks of the
moon also revealed magnetic properties, a remanent magnetism that could not have been
implanted by the moon's own weak magnetic field and certainly not at any time since the
rocks solidified from a molten or gaseous state. The equipment implanted on the moon by
astronauts of Apollo XII returned to its monitors on earth a record of moonquakes,
averaging one a day. Lunar rocks were found to be rich in argon and neon; the larger the
ratio of surface to mass, that is, the smaller the rock particle, the more of these
gases was contained in it, leading to the conclusion that the source of the gases was
external. Some unusually radioactive "hot spots" were observed.

It thus appears likely that the Moon experienced devastating events within a period of
time into which the Love Affair might have fallen. Conventional theorists of lunar
history have been relieved of a number of expectations, founded on the belief in a three
to four billion years old object that, since then, "has been a remarkably quiet body
suffering only the occasional large meteorite impact. Subsequent modification of the
surface features has been mainly erosion due to the impact of small meteorites, cosmic
rays, and particles from the sun. This is in great contrast with the earth's history
which has been one of continued volcanic and mountain-building activity up to the
present day."  [3]



{S : RADIOACTIVE CLOCKS}
RADIOACTIVE CLOCKS 

Nowadays, such statements are not to be heard. It is difficult to conceive how such
could even have been written in 1972 in view of the lunar quakes and the other
discoveries recited two paragraphs above. But the author of the quotation, Derek York,
was holding fast to what others were telling him about the general situation and was
supporting his faith by work that he had been hired as a specialist to do: radioactive
clockwork. He used three clocks: the uranium-lead, the rubidium-strontium, and the
potassium-argon methods of determining the ages of rock samples picked up and returned
to Earth by the astronauts.

York offered, against Velikovsky's proposition of a recently molten lunar surface,
alternative explanations based on the fact that all three tests showed the lunar surface
to have been last molten 3.6 billion years ago at least. In each case, a determination
of the amount of the first chemical element that radioactively decayed into the second
element was used to estimate age, since physicists believe that we know the rate of such
transmutation and can rely on its constancy over all conceivable time spans. York
therefore argued that either
(a) this part of Velikovsky's thesis is wrong. (b) Velikovsky is right but the four
Apollo landings and the Soviet Luna 16 landings were in areas which escaped the
'catastrophes' referred to by Velikovsky. (c) There is something seriously wrong with
the radioactive clocks or our reading of them.

In reply, Velikovsky cited two additional "commonsense" tests in his favor. Geologist
examining the samples of Apollo XI recorded "the extremely fresh appearance of the
interior of all crystalline rocks, in spite of their microfractures and high potassium-
argon age."  [4]  Moreover, noting a widespread glazing of the lunar surface, T. Gold,
writing in Science had conjectured upon "a giant solar outburst in geologically recent
times" that glazed lunar surfaces less than 30,000 years ago." [5]

Velikovsky mentioned here yet another prediction of his, earlier in time, that gained in
validity when the Apollo 15 team discovered that the outflow of heat below the surface
was almost three times greater than expected by those who believed that the moon
originated gaseous and then became molten: those who thought the moon had always been
thoroughly cold could make nothing of this internal heat at all.

Specifically with regard to the challenge of the tests, Velikovsky argued that lunar
rocks would be argon-rich (and therefore seem very old) because they would have
captured, while molten, some of the argon of the atmosphere of Mars. (In 1974, Russian
reports spoke of a Martian atmosphere of argon in the 10's of percent.)  [6] As for the
reading of the uranium-lead test, the explorers had apparently sampled rocks not only
poor in lead but in all volatile elements: bismuth, cadmium, thallium, indium, etc. He
surmised, therefore, that the volatile elements had escaped their rock housings in a
period of high heat and melting, such as the episode in Homer that occupies our
attention. The third radioactive clock appears to be the most absurd of the three, since
rubidium vaporizes and migrates from its housing with strontium even under the
conditions of present-day temperatures of the lunar day (+ 150 degrees Celsius) and the
continuous bombardment of surface rocks by hydrogen ions from the solar wind. A period
of electrically and gravitationally induced heating such as occurred in the Love Affair
would have greatly reduced the rubidium present in the tested rocks. Velikovsky and
Wright  [7]  are not alone in their criticism of these tests. We cannot close these
brief passages without referring to the brilliant critique offered of these and other
clocks by Melvin Cook in his book, Prehistory and Earth Models 1966. In brief, what York
regarded as impossible was true. "There is something seriously wrong with the
radioactive clocks..."  [8]

The one test that Velikovsky asked for was to determine the degree of thermoluminescence
of lunar surface cores extracted at about three feet of depth to avoid contamination of
the test by the effects of normal solar heat. The more the time that passes after a
heat-up of over 150 degrees Celsius, the more luminescence is stored and given off in a
laboratory re-heating. When the tests were performed on cores gathered by Apollo XII
between 4 and 13 centimeters underground, it showed "anomalies resulting from
disturbances "10,000 years ago." Such disturbances had to be thermal, that is, events of
great heat upon the moon. Velikovsky thought that increased radioactivity may have
promoted a quick-aging effect on even this test and suggests sampling from sites that
are least radioactive.

We return now to the problem of the remanent magnetism in the rock samples brought back
from all Apollo missions. Velikovsky's theory of the Mars-Moon encounters required that
such fossil magnetism be traceable in the rocks, and it was found. Robert Treat has
written the history of the affair, from which we quote:
Scientific deliberations grew in intensity after the third (Apollo IV), and the fourth
(Apollo XV) missions testified to the bewilderment of astrophysicists. It transpired
that sometime in the past the moon must have been heated in the presence of a strong
magnetic field. The best guess was: 'It is a thermoremanent magnetism acquired when the
specimen cooled in the presence of a magnetic field. ' Other possibilities were
weighted. Was the inducing field due to a close approach of the moon to the earth? "In
this model the hard remanence suggests a distance of closest approach of 2 to 3 earth
radii," But this is 'an uncomfortable proximity to the Roche limit.... ' The moon would
have been broken into pieces if it ever approached the earth so closely. Another team of
scientists found that the magnetization "shows a well defined curie temperature at 775
degrees Celsius": the lunar surface must have been heated above this temperature in the
presence of a magnetic field and must have cooled off thereafter  [9] .

Surface marring, "hot spots" of radioactivity, high past heat, and encounter with
another large celestial body spell devastation. Fresh-looking rock, high
thermoluminescence levels, "hot spots" seismic movement, and below surface heat spell
recency.

The "recency" suggested by our interpretation of the explorations of the moon is "under
10,000 years." The world-wide historical and legendary record strongly indicates about
2700 years. There is good reason, therefore, after having passed the 10,000 year
barrier, to proceed without hesitation to the 2700-year point.



{S : THE RILLES OF MOON}
THE RILLES OF MOON 

The recent devastation of the Moon is the subject of an analysis also by Ralph Juergens 
[10] . He focused especially upon its hundreds of wavy rilles, its canyons and its
craters. The craters are sites of explosions. Some, like Aristarchus, are still warm.
The rilles cleave the surface and often seem to feed into the craters, going up-ground
to do so with whatever they might once have carried. The craters seem to have exploded
after the rilles reached them, since debris obscures the ends of the rilles.

Juergens examinations of the rilles shows that they cannot have been produced by water
erosion; they flow uphill and have no deltas. Nor can they have been produced from the
collapse of underground tubes that once carried lava; for the margins of the rilles
reveal upturned strata and empty bottoms; Nor can gas explosions have created the
rilles, for they are exceedingly tortuous; and they are not vented holes. Only
electrical currents, declares Juergens, could produce the jagged trenches. The currents
erupt, heat up the land and excavate it, and cause secondary melting in the rille
valleys. They move as streamers upwards. A return stroke explodes the ground and creates
a crater.

What caused the rilles to erupt and the craters to burst? On the basis of his general
theory of the electrical nature of the solar system, to be explained later, Juergens
posits that Mars and Earth-Moon each held (and hold) massive electrical charges of
negative valence. These charges, on the close approach of the bodies, repel each other.
But if the bodies are approaching with great momentum, the repulsion is not sufficient
to divert them entirely. The charges are driven to accommodate. By "accommodation" is
meant that, if there is any possibility of a reversal of charges on one or both bodies,
the negative electrons will "flee" from each other. Assuming that Mars, with an
atmosphere, and a larger surface, more readily permitted its electrons to flee to
regions far removed from the nearest points of contact, positive ions would congregate
and set up an anode-cathode relationship, that is, a situation matured for an exchange
of thunderbolts. The rilles ditches erupted by a rapidly moving and charge-accumulating
current. Craters are the spots where the exchange of opposite charges, attracted for
discharge, occurred, usually at prominences of the two bodies. A map of the major rilles
of the moon shows a concentration of them in the general area of the great crater,
Aristarchus. Emanations of radon-222, whose parent element is radium-226, were detected
from Aristarchus. The rays are several times more intense there than in areas farther
removed, indicating a local source. Radium 226 isotopes decay rapidly. In 1620 years,
half the element is transmutated; that is, it has a half-life of 1620 years. "If the
radium were produced by an electric discharge to the Aristarchus site some 2700 years
ago, more than 25% of it would still be there, emitting radon -222."  [11]  Lightning
strokes of 100 billion volts can constitute a high-energy projectile capable of creating
heavy elements such as radium-226.

It should also be pointed out that visible light, as well as heat, has been observed
from time to time, from Aristarchus and other sources. Again, a sign of recency.

Glass found that glass ejecta along the banks of the Hadley Rille and procured by the
astronauts of the Apollo 15 and 17 expeditions exhibited significant peculiarities in
comparison with other moon glasses. Tests on one sample showed that cooling rates of
1000 F/ sec. were necessary to form the glass. The researchers considered the
possibility that volcanic eruption might have caused the glass to form, but the cooling
rate was too fast. So they conjectured meteoritic impacts. However, for meteorites, the
glasses are too uniform and are not splashed or shattered. Furthermore, meteorites would
not line themselves up along a rille valley, if such is the case here. Juergens
conclusion is acceptable  [12] . The glass is a product of an electrical current that
melts instantaneously, explodes simultaneously, and withdraws its heat immediately along
the meandering course of the rille before streaming upwards from the ground at the end
of the rille.

The surprises that the Moon holds for scientists are not ended. Because of the
nonexistence or prior extirpation of life forms that would have ingested radioactive
carbon, there appear to be no possibilities of applying Carbon 14 tests to Moon
material. Still, the electrical mechanical behavior of the Moon and Moon-space are
coming to be better understood. The Moon's several spherical asymmetries deserve
pondering. Unmanned excavating apparatus may bring back more material for analysis.
Moreover, ancient records and myths are still largely unanalyzed.

The "beauty of raiment" with which the Graces "clothe her body" and the "refulgent
ointment" with which they anointed the Moon, once her love affair with Mars was ended,
may refer to a shift to a position nearer Earth; the month of 29.5 days replaced a
longer month  [13] . Greater brilliance indicates that the change was in orbital radius,
rather than in orbital speed.

It is also possible that the lines of Homer may be a reference to a chain of colorful
low mountains whose origin has baffled astrophysicists. Juergens has suggested that, if
the theory of electrical discharges is credible, the explanation of these anomalous
protruberances may lay in a simple and surprising theory of cosmic welding  [14] . They
are Martian material electrically heated and exploded, which fastened electrically upon
the surface of the Moon.

To the wishful eyes of men, women, and children of the eighth and seventh century,
Aphrodite emerged more beautiful than ever from her escapade with Mars. Perhaps it grew
less lovely thereafter, for Plutarch was speaking of its craggy appearance seven
centuries later  [15] . The astronauts and geophysicists of today have to report the
disillusioning fact that the face of the classical beauty was ruined.




{S : Notes (Chapter 9: The Ruined Face of a Classic Beauty)}
Notes (Chapter 9: The Ruined Face of a Classic Beauty) 

1. Dionysiaca, I, 213-23, trans. W. M. D. Rouse (Loeb Library).

2. Neil P. Ruzie, "The case for Returning to the Moon," Industrial Research (July,
1973), pp. 48-54, p. 51.

3. Derek York, "Lunar Rocks and Velikovsky's Claims," II Pens‚e no. 2( May 1972), p. 18.

4. "When Was The Lunar Surface Last Molten," II Pens‚e, no. 2,( May 1972), p. 19.

5. Ibid.

6. James B. Pollack, "Mars," 233 Scientific American (Sept. 1975), p. 110.

7. Also in Pens‚e (May 1972), loc. cit.

8. Ibid., p. 21

9. "Magnetic Remanence of Lunar Rocks: A Candid Look at Scientific Misbehavior," II
Pens‚e, no. 2 (May, 1972), p. 21-2.

10. "Electrical Discharges and the Transmutation of Elements," IV Pens‚e 3, (1974), pp.
45-6; "Of the Moon and Mars, Part I," IV Pensee 4 (1974), pp. 21-30.

11. Juergens, "Electrical Discharges...," op. cit., pp. 45-6.

12. "Of The Moon..," op. cit., pp. 27-8.

13. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, pp. 342-4.

14. In a communication to the author, October 1973.

15. "The Face of the Moon."




{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS}
{P PART 2: }
{Q GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS }
{C Chapter 10: }
{T HE WHO SHINES BY DAY}
{S - }




THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART TWO:
GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS

CHAPTER TEN

HE WHO SHINES BY DAY

Not satisfied with setting up the production of the Love Affair, Athena, the virtuoso
of Olympia, must play a leading role in it. Will it be masculine? Athena has been known
to play such roles. Actually, she ends the Odyssey playing the male role of Mentor,
Counselor of State. By now we know that gods can readily become transvestites.
Hercules, for all his impressive masculinity, dresses and behaves like a woman when he
lives in the court of Omphale, Queen of Libya. More strikingly there is the beautiful
Aphrodite who sports a beard as the so-called Cyprian Aphrodite.

A major role is intended. In the Love Affair, there is only one such role for her that
is logical: that is Hephaestus. Athena, the goddess of the Planet Venus is Hephaestus,
also the planet Venus. No one appears to have said so, but the evidence is strong to
that effect.

Velikovsky and the scholars associated with him have presented evidence that Pallas
Athene was the god of the planet Venus, that the planet appeared in the sky sometime
before 1500 B. C., that she behaved as a comet, traveled on an eccentric orbit that
brought her perilously close to Earth, and that around 1500 B. C. and on several other
occasions caused tremendous destruction here. The foundations or refounding of the city
of Athens may be of this date  [1] , just as those of Rome were concurrent with the
raging appearance in the skies of the planet-god Mars 700 years later. References from
a number of cultures lead one to believe that, as the Greek theogony put it, Athena
sprang from Zeus fully-armed with a shout.
Athena sprang quickly from the immortal head and stood before Zeus who holds the aegis,
shaking a sharp spear: great Olympus began to reel horribly at the might of the bright-
eyed goddess, and earth round about cried fearfully, and the sea was moved and tossed
with dark waves, while foam burst forth suddenly; the bright Son of Hyperion stopped
his swift-footed horses a long while, until the maiden Pallas Athene had stripped the
heavenly armor from her immortal shoulders  [2] .

Hephaestus, some said, had to split Jove's aching head with an ax to help him give
birth.



{S : THE EPITHETS OF VENUS}
THE EPITHETS OF VENUS 

Velikovsky, James and others offer numerous connections between Planet Venus and Pallas
Athena through analogies of birth, traits and deeds. They further offer persuasive
cross-identifications of Athena and Planet-Venus with the corresponding divinities of
the same planet from other cultures, among them the Hebrew, Egyptian, Babylonian,
Chinese, Mexican, and American Indian.

Graves, for example, lays out in detail the material on Pallas, whose primary myth-
ensemble is as foster-sister to Athena. Pallas means simply "youth" or "maiden." Athena
and Pallas were raised on the shores of Lake Triton in Africa. While playing at armed
combat Athena accidentally killed Pallas. In grief, she placed the name Pallas before
her own. The incident is symbolic of the world tragedy of that time. An immense Saharan
lake, called Triton by the ancients, suddenly disappeared, leaving a great desert and
some marshes, with the dry beds of rivers and streams. A flourishing civilization
subsided with the lake, a civilization that perhaps dominated the Mediterranean and
surely represented a pre-Hellenic, matriarchal culture, whose women wore the same
garments and aegis of Athena, even down through many centuries following the
catastrophe.

The destruction provoked and wrought by Planet Venus probably encompassed in North
Africa not only the Egypt of the Exodus but the recently explored Saharan "Libyan"
culture. And if, as Velikovsky argues convincingly, Phaeton, which plunged somewhere
along the longitude of the Red Sea, was a part of Comet-Venus, Planet-to-be, then
Pallas was the earthly destructive force of comet Venus in North Central Africa.
Stecchini, from his studies of the architectural measurements of the Parthenon, the
crowning temple of the Virgin Athena on the Acropolis of Athens, offers a confirmation.
The Temple was erected in the glorious late period of empire. The Athenians,
subconsciously true to remote history, set their Pallas Athena pediment facing directly
and accurately towards the marshes of present-day Tunisia, and portrayed on the
pediment the birth of Pallas Athena  [3] .

In the manner of legend, an alternative myth is offered. "Some Hellenes say that Athena
had a father named Pallas, a winged goatish giant, who later attempted to outrage her,
and whose name she added to her own after stripping him of skin to make the aegis, and
of his wings for her own shoulders...."  [4] . Hardly a "maiden" and hardly a maidenly
reprisal. Perhaps, as Graves suggests, the myth came from an ancient story of one of
Athena's many combats. But, more interested in what force can have carried this
underground myth, we would suggest that this "fake Pallas" is a diabolic representation
of Zeus; the physical contacts of Athena with the Father of Gods are numerous. And
humans, as already argued, have ways of getting back at the gods who caused them so
much fear and suffering.

"Pallas" may also designate Athena as a comet before it lost its appendage. Visually
and astronomically, it should be recalled that everyone speaks of the "tail" of a
comet, whereas this "tail" sometimes moves in directions parallel to the "head" and
"coma." The ancients often were excited by the image of the comet "tail" as a phallus.
Hence Athena would be phallus-Athena before Pallas was destroyed and she became a
proto-planet without a penis. In Sanskrit, palas means Phallus. The altars of Athena
were called Palladia, as at Troy. The dropping of the "ph" (j) sound takes away the
sexual "fire."

One would proceed farther. The "goatish giant" who attempted to outrage her has
additional dimensions. He may stand for Hephaestus who, in another legend, attempted to
rape Athena at his smithy and was repulsed. So that Athena's killing of this monster
corresponds to the professed Hellenic triumph over the powerful proto-mediterranean
religious culture. The mythic mind can support this idea along with the contradictory
apotheosis of Athena as the ideal castrating female of psychoanalytic theory.

Hephaestus has a resemblance to the Etruscan smith-god and death-demon, Tuchulcha, who
dispatches people with a giant hammer. Tuchulcha is assisted by a winged demon with
snakes [5] , So that the composite suggests a god-monster like Typhon, a devastating
winged dragon who, like Seth and Lucifer is sent crashing into the underground, there
to fulfill his destiny.

The Love Affair lends support to the quadrilateral relationship: Hephaestus/ Tuchulcha:
Greeks/ Etruscans. There one hears Demodocus singing that the cherished home-island of
Hephaestus was Lemnos. Also, he has Ares speaking disrespectfully of Hephaestus having
left to join his barbarous-speaking Sintians of Lemnos. (By "barbarous" is probably
meant non-Greek.) Now recently some inscriptions found on Lemnos have been identified
as Etruscan  [6] , even though they are not yet deciphered. Etruscan has been connected
also with Hittite and Minoan (Linear A) by Barry Fell  [7] . New information has
appeared, too, placing Etruscan relatives in the area at the same time as the Love
Affair. These people of Lake Van are not only culturally close but close in blood types
to the Etruscans  [8] . The Etruscans feared and were obsessed by this Hephaestus-
Tuchulcha. They offered human sacrifices frequently: the planet Venus, says Nicolo
Rilli, was a favored object of such bloody supplications  [9] .

It will be a long time before the identities of the gods of one and all cultures are
clarified. The sublimation of God requires a smokescreen of confusion and the
allocation of ambivalence. If a god has been given too much of good, a balancing evil
is allocated, and vice versa. The interplay of names and epithets is part of this
process, but more unconsciously, the neural equivalents must function. Basically such
is the meaning of the practically universal theological belief: "God cannot exist
without the Devil."

Athena was a "glorious goddess, bright-eyed, inventive, unbending of heart, pure
virgin, savior of cities."  [10]  She was brilliantly beautiful, a great warrior; she
enjoyed the confidence of Zeus to an extent unequaled by any other god. In the Iliad
(iv, 74), she sweeps down upon the Trojan plain like "a shooting star," trailing fire.
She was furthermore the most creative god, mother of invention, teacher of the arts and
sciences. It is bizarre that we should find her the female counterpart of Hephaestus.
But that she was, of course, an evil destroyer as well, emerges from many an earlier
description. She was, in the Greek mind, a desexualized good-bad mother. Many deeds
ascribed to her directly and indirectly would make lame and slow Hephaestus appear
quite harmless and capable of exciting laughter of a grim sort. She in fact, as a
planet, broke up the Jovian order of the universe and kept it in confusion until the
eighth century, when Zeus, through Homer's and Hesiod's work, deserved to the full his
reputation as the law-giver. At least so far as Greek myth was concerned, and we cannot
go farther here.



{S : CONGENITALITY AND HOMOLOGY}
CONGENITALITY AND HOMOLOGY 

Athena's birth from Zeus
is expressly related to the birth of Hephaestus. A quarrel between Zeus and Hera had
been mentioned in what preceded the fragment (of Chrysippus), and in consequence of
this quarrel, Hera gave birth to Hephaestus without Zeus' aid, and Zeus lay with Metis
and swallowed her. But she conceived Athena, and Zeus gave birth through his head. That
Hephaestus' birth was a complement to Athena's, and connected with a quarrel between
Zeus and Hera, is also implied in (Hesiod's) Theogony (924-9), but the logical order of
events has been destroyed.

So writes West in his Commentary on Hesiod's Theogony (pp. 401-3). We need not agree
that Metis was the mother of Athena, because Athena is not only called parthenos
(virgin) but also parthenogenous (the offspring of a single sex).

West (with others) suspects that the quarrel may have arisen over the capacities of the
sexes. Hera and Zeus disagreed concerning whether man or woman achieved more pleasure
in sexual intercourse. Teiresias, called to arbitrate, declared that the pleasure is
woman's in the ratio of ten to one. Hera, a poor loser, blinded Teiresias and Zeus gave
him the gift of prophesy as a consolation. Then each defied the other and gave birth
parthenogenously. Hera to Hephaestus, Zeus to Athena. In a striking parallel, Hera also
bore parthenogenously the monster Typhon, who was also sent crashing to Earth by Zeus
[11] .

Plato has Critias (109 b-d) declaring that Hephaestus and Athena are of the same
father. They are of the same nature. "In the days of old the Gods shared out the earth
among themselves... Hephaestus and Athena, for instance, being brother and sister...
obtained this our land as their joint portion... They raised its aboriginal population
to the status of a great nation." It was protocatastrophic Attica, much larger in
extent, before the disasters that ended an epoch. When Poseidon (god of deluges and
waters and chief god of Atalanta, the Moon) struggled to possess Attica, he had to
contend with both Hephaestus and Athena.

We find in Robert Graves' The Greek Myths these words:
Hephaestus and Athene shared temples at Athens, and his name, if it does not stand for
hemerophaistos, 'he who shines by day' (i. e. the sun), is perhaps a masculine for he
apaista (shortened in Stesichorus: Fragment 97 to aista), 'the goddess who removes from
sight, ' namely Athene, the original inventor of all mechanical arts  [12] .

Graves, like most authors upon whom we depend, did not ascribe real celestial behavior
to the gods and demigods, planetary or otherwise. When a celestial reference is forced
upon Athena, the Sun or Moon or other bodies are called upon. This has resulted in the
Sun, workaday Helios, being elevated to a divine status such as he never achieved in
the minds of the ancients. If the minds of scholars had not been embraced by
uniformitarian principles, that is, the ideology of science of the nineteenth and early
twentieth century, they might have asked, as for instance in this case, why "shining by
day" should be the exclusive prerogative of Helios or, at least, why bother to name a
god by this trait which is so ordinary and expected? Every ordinary thing shines by day
as well.

A nearby cometary body, meteorite, or planet, especially if it is incandescent, as was
Athena (Hephaestus), will shine like the sun, and supplement the brilliance of the day
to a painful degree until clouds intervene, mercifully in some cases, destructively in
others if they shower down red waters, brimstone, ashes, and noxious gases. She and he
have a habit of disappearing. They blind humans; and they cover up deeds. Both are
great dissemblers.

As for the alternative base of his name, we can rephrase what was just said: His name
again would be a name of Athena, for the action implied is the beclouding of the human
vision. Who might shine brilliantly and also block vision - contrasting behaviors? A
cometary intruder in the skies is one answer, and there are not very good alternative
answers, especially when the details of both behaviors are collected. An enormous
volcano will shine brilliantly in the daytime as it erupts, and afterward darken the
vision of humans. But one volcano does not inspire a whole people in communication over
thousands of miles to create a major god. Hephaestus is, for that matter, god of
volcanoes and fire, but this is not his sole or even major life-activity.

Graves reports (I, 51-2) that Hephaestus seems to have been the title of the sacred
king as solar demi-god. We have alluded to the former; for "solar" we insist upon
"Venusian," because the sacred kings of the ancient Mediterranean flourished
concurrently with Cretan and Minoan civilizations and were both well-remembered and
hated as an institution by the misogynist Hellenes, for whom kings were not to be
periodically set up the sacrificed by queens.

Hephaestus ruled with Athena over the realm of arts and crafts.
Sing, clear-voiced muse, of Hephaestus famed for inventions. With bright-eyed Athene he
taught men glorious crafts throughout the world, - men who before used to dwell in
caves in the mountains like wild beasts [13] .

"Athena was frequently linked with Hephaestus, as in the simile in which a comparison
is drawn with a goldsmith, 'a skillful man whom Hephaestus and Pallas Athena taught all
kinds of craft (techne). '"  [14]  Hephaestus was the Smith-god  [15] , suggests
Graves, to be found in many distinct cultures. We understand that Hephaestus is a
technical genius, like Athena. He is more circumscribed; he is a Master Electrician, a
fabricator of thunderbolts. Often he is portrayed as lame; sometimes the smiths were
lames, says Graves to prevent their wandering far from their proprietary city. This is
all very well. We recognize the need for towns to retain their smiths, even as we
recognize  [16]  that the smith was one of the few "strangers" to be invariably
welcomed in their wanderings, along with poets.

However, one must acknowledge that just as there are sacred kings who are put to death
annually, there may be "sacred smiths" who have to be lamed in order that they behave
like the god whose skills they possess. "Smith-god" surrogates, like "sacred kings,"
were also anciently killed in sacrifice, every 20 years, says Graves, to correspond
with a solar-lunar calendar conjunction; we are entitled to question whether it may be
a Venus-Moon conjunction, the 20 years being a playback of time of modern calendar
reckoning, but we find no grounds presently to challenge the periodicity and its
source.

Which leads us to the general problem of the lameness of Hephaestus, the god and the
Planet. There is more than one legend of the source of his disability.

One legend would have it that Hera chose a monster to conceive of Hephaestus and,
naturally, the offspring was ugly and deformed. So she cast it from heaven.

A second is that Hephaestus defended his mother, Hera, for leading a revolt against
Zeus and Zeus cast him from Mount Olympus to Earth, crippling him. Here we find
Hephaestus as the monster, Typhon, that part of Athena the planet that was struck by a
thunderbolt of Zeus while it was wreaking destruction upon Earth, and crashed, some say
near the Red Sea, others say upon what is now the Sahara, burning and drying up the
area and pushing the waters of the Great Lake Triton into the ocean.

To pursue the parallel, instead of the monster Typhon, it was Hephaestus who came
crashing down and, presumably, he picked himself up, physically the worse for the
experience, and rejoined the Olympian party of gods when the father of the gods graced
him with his pardon. Vase paintings show Hephaestus mounted upon a mule (symbol of
sexual barrenness), plodding back up to Heaven, escorted by Bacchus (Dionysus), satyrs,
and bacchantes.

Both descents of Hephaestus-Athena from the skies precede Homeric times by 700 years.
Krates of Pergamon explains that Zeus was determining the measure of the universe by
means of "two torches moving with the same speed:" the Sun from east to west, and
Hephaestus from Olympus to Lemnos. Hephaestus struck Earth as the sun was setting. The
measure of a new age of the world was taken  [17] . Graves points out the Hephaestus
has affinities with Prometheus  [18] , Talos, Daedalus, Icarus, and Minos  [19] .

Graves further illuminates the emerging picture in giving us further details of the
birth of Athena Tritongeneia. "As Zeus walked by Lake Triton [the great Saharan Lake
that disappeared]", say the priestesses of Athene, "he was seized by a headache and he
howled until all heaven echoed. Hermes ran up, divined the cause, and persuaded
Hephaestus (or possibly Prometheus) to take a wedge and beetle and make a breach in
Zeus' skull, from which Athene sprang, fully armed, with a mighty shout."  [20]  So
Hephaestus was involved in Athena's birth.

Hephaestus has enough reason to be lamed. However, a marvel of myth, like creative
works in general, is that several levels of meaning can be simultaneously conveyed,
both consciously and unconsciously. If Athena is a virgin, and ushered in legions of
virgins in many parts of the world (as Peter Tompkins relates in The Virgin and the
Eunuch, citing the Vestal Virgins of Rome, among others), not to mention their
contraries, the sacred harlots of the temples, then how would Hephaestus portray the
analogous quality? By being a eunuch, a castrato, one would reply. But a god, not, in
any event, a Homeric Hellenic god, could not suffer this indignity unless, like
Ouranos, he was Deus Otiosus, that is, permanently removed from the scene.

The lameness, we are bound to suggest, was a genital lameness. To match Athena,
Hephaestus had to be unsexed. The crippled feet would represent this to the
unconscious. Psychoanalysts find such to be the case in their analyses of dreams. We
note again how Hephaestus in pictured riding a mule, a barren animal, on his way back
to heaven after his fall. Also, the Roman Hephaestus is Vulcan; Vulcan is represented
by several Roman authors in the form of a phallus in the hearthfire  [21] , an image
that joins together Hephaestus fire, and the comet's severed phallus-tail.

Slater stresses not so much the idea of Hephaestus' lameness as a symbolic castration
but "what might be called his 'interpersonal' self-castration. By this I mean his
withdrawal from the lists of sexual and marital rivalry, his role of clown - in a
sense, his resignation from manhood."  [22]  Consistently, he is rejected both by Zeus
and Hera, for he was also cast into the sea by his mother, Hera.

Now again, one may ask about the marriage of Hephaestus and his famous marriage bed,
that four-posted imitation of the four-pillared sky he was wont to occupy with
Aphrodite in the Love Affair. It was on the instigation of Zeus, once, perhaps as a bad
practical joke, that Hephaestus when Athena arrived to be fitted for a fine suit of
armor, made the amorous advances upon her, which she repulsed. Apart from marking a
further association of these two parthenogenous gods, mulishly incapable of offspring,
the tale stresses Hephaestus' unluckiness in love. Aphrodite is his "better half,"
fully sexed, unlike Athena; he wants her (the Moon) but also rejects her, for he cannot
cope with her.

Aphrodite has not been known to copulate with him recently, although in a dim past
there was a marriage and contacts resembling sexual relations. But now, in the Love
Affair, the bed is cold. Aphrodite's children come from others, including especially
Ares. Hephaestus may be the indignant husband, but he is impotent in sexual affairs and
it is perhaps because of this empty show of dignity that the gods Apollo and Hermes
laugh.

Hephaestus' advances upon Athena were strangely fruitful, says another account. As he
gazed at Athena, he ejaculated and his seed fell upon Gaia, "the Earth," from whom
Erichthonios (Auriga) was born. Athena succored the infant when Gaia rejected him. He
was half-man and half-serpent; later on he became King of Athens and instituted her
worship  [23] . Once more we find interconnected Athena-Hephaestus - sexual
incapacities, the serpent Typhon, destruction visited upon Gaia, and the Athens
connection. Dr. Z. Rix of Jerusalem, a medical doctor and mythologist, writes me on
January 26, 1975, that :

"Hephaestus is the primordial father whom Freud recognized again and again in his
patients' dreams. He is cometary Venus who struck by Jupiter's lightning fell from
heaven. Many mythological narratives recount the event of Lucifer's, Phaeton's, and
Typhon's (the Egyptian devil's) fall. It is comprehensible that the onlookers wished
that the forbidding figure should lose its tail - conceived as male attribute - with
which it threatened to annihilate the whole population of the earth."

Again, Dr. Rix calls my attention to the deity, Nephthys (in Egypt, Nebti), who is wife
and sister of Typhon. She is the seashores: Typhon is the sea, according to the ancient
Egyptians. This same Nephthys is pictured in various Egyptian sources  [24]  together
with Isis (the Egyptian Athena), lifting the sun-ship at dawn. Surely this is
additional evidence of the connection Athena-Hephaestus, corresponding to Nephthys-
Typhon. Herodotus mentions that there were numerous temples to Hephaestus in Egypt.

At the same time, such is the overlapping that readily occurs in the memory of the gods
as the ages pass, that foam-born Aphrodite later is said to be created, not by Uranus,
as we assert, but by the seed of the drowned Typhon that becomes the salt-foam of the
sea. Now one may perceive how some confusion between Athena-Aphrodite-Urania and
Aphrodite-Planet Venus arose: the former sprang out of the sea earlier from the fallen
member of Uranus; the latter arose later from the seed of the fallen Python. Probably
the new myth was grafted upon the old.

On still another level of suggestibility is the profile that the hobbling smith in the
sky would provide. It is easy to see in many artifacts the shapes that celestial bodies
like meteors and comets take. Nevertheless it may be of some value to mention that a
comet in a typical apparition is an angel with wings and flowing gown, a head with
horns, a helmeted head (Athena), a long-haired one (coma means hair in Greek), a
phallus with testes, and even a head with two massive arms - "Hephaestus of the two
strong arms," Murray translates the phrase, and then, curiously, notes that other
scholars translate the phrase as "Hephaestus of the lame legs." We wonder at the
possible original sight of the mighty-armed bronze-smith trailing his feeble legs like
the tail of the comet, and at the etymology that could cause such an alternative
construction. In connection with the language of the Love Affair, to be treated below,
additional symbolic issues will be discussed.

Finally there is the sentence: "The slow catches the swift; even as now Hephaestus,
slow though he is, has outstripped Ares for all that he is the swiftest of the gods who
hold Olympus. Lame though he is, he has caught him by craft." Once more the
synchronization of reality into a plausible plot seems incredible. To take part in the
cosmic drama, as it probably occurred, Hephaestus (as Planet-Venus) would make his
planetary approaches at a great distance and behind Moon and Mars, which would put him
actually a half-million miles distant from the pair with a gravitational-electrical
effect sufficient to repel the Earth's magnetic envelope and cause their liberation.
Under the circumstances, Hephaestus would move with apparent slowness, as would,
mirabile dictu, be in accord with his crippled condition.

So it was then, that Pallas Athena, Hephaestus the strong-armed Smith, and the planet
Venus are locked in unconscious identity in the human mind as indissolubly and
unbreakably as Ares and Aphrodite were by the invisible net.



{S : ATHENA'S LAST BATTLES}
ATHENA'S LAST BATTLES 

Velikovsky summarizes the late history of the protoplanet that became Venus in the
following words :
Venus, which collided with the earth in the fifteenth century before the present era,
collided with Mars in the eighth century. At that time Venus was moving at a lower
elliptical velocity than when it first encountered the earth; but Mars, being only
about one-eighth the mass of Venus, was no match for her. It was therefore a notable
achievement that Mars, though thrown out of the ring, nevertheless was instrumental in
bringing Venus from an elliptical to a nearly circular orbit. Looked at from the Earth,
Venus was removed from a path that ran high to the zenith and over the zenith to its
present path in which it never retreats from the sun more than 48 degrees, thus
becoming a morning or an evening star that precedes the rising sun or follows the
setting sun. The awe of the world for many centuries, Venus has become a tame planet
[25] .

The planet now called Venus, identified with the goddess Athena (and later with
Aphrodite ) in Greece, Minerva in Rome, Tistrya in Iran, Ishtar in Babylon, Baal and
Lucifer-Mazzaroth in Judea, Hathor in Egypt, and Quetzalcohuatl in Toltec Mexico, was
to become only the morning and evening star, an ever-pleasant sight, if, at the sight,
people could rid themselves of its historical connotations. The planet circle nearer to
the horizon, and, because it did not approach Earth closely again, was smaller in
apparent size. Isaiah proclaimed (14: 12-13):
How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, Son of the Morning ! How art thou cast down
to the ground Who did weaken the nations!

Still human sacrifices were offered to Venus, the planet, when she approached closest
to Earth on her famed journey. Still she was the greatest goddess of Athens and the
fountain of some of the world's greatest literature. Still, in the sixth century, Jews
evading the Babylonian captivity and settling in Egypt rued their abandonment of Venus-
Baal for the abstract single God. At the same time, the Greeks were circulating a
legend of Cadmus who had killed a dragon, a son of Hephaistos, no less, and the
devilish lame Hephaestus had laid upon Cadmus and his descendents, including Oedipus, a
curse; thus was the sin of castration punished in hereditary succession  [26] , and the
sin of Oedipus foredoomed. And walk down any street where astrologers tell fortunes or
pick up any book on astrology, and see that the deeds and spirit of Venus are still
part of human nature, speaking now literally, and not even of the unconscious role she
plays in our religious rites and our forms of thought and behavior.

But in those days when it was visible to mankind that "the star Venus pursued Mars and
inflamed him with an ardent passion," as the geographer-astrologist Erastosthenes wrote
in the third century, B. C., (thinking probably of the planet as the Aphrodite of the
Love Affair, in the confusion which we addressed earlier) what happened to Venus is
marked upon her today. From the encounters with Mars, of the eighth and seventh
centuries, we seek positive evidence, and that is difficult to find.

Velikovsky has been proven correct in several of his judgements respecting her seven-
hundred-year reign of terror. It is now known, as Velikovsky claimed beforehand, that
Venus is a hot planet, whose surface attains 9250 Kelvin without explanation except by
a recent origin (from Zeus) and/ or a recent heating-up  [27] . Although only more
simple compounds have until now been found, her fifteen miles of dense clouds may
contain some of the chemicals that could have mixed with the Earth's upper Atmosphere
under electrical discharges to make and precipitate the ambrosia and manna that
tradition says preserved various early peoples wandering in desolation and darkness
[28] . We know an ever-enlarging fraction of what the surface of the earth and
archaeology can tell us about the catastrophic events of her pre-Martian period. We are
aware of, and shall soon understand better, how the horror of her visitations affected
the human mind.

But precisely because of her erratic, destructive, and self-destructive, earlier
history, it is difficult, more difficult than in the case of Mars, say, to pinpoint her
presence by the scars left upon her by the Love Affair. Let us look again to the song
of Demodocus and see whether Hephaestus-Venus signals any possible effects of its role.

Velikovsky has gathered historical, legendary, and geographical evidence to the effect
that the shortened tail of the cometary proto-planet was effectively destroyed in the
Mars encounters. Hephaestus trails his legs; that may be indicative of the tail. He
also manufactures his gossamer trap in a shower of sparks and lays it about the
trysting place of Mars and Moon. These actions may signify the shedding of cometary
material in great quantities, producing meteoric effects of high visibility and
destructiveness. Some of the voluminous debris here portrayed as sparks off the anvil
and netting for the trap may be what supplied Mars with the troop of "terrible ones"
that stories from Greece, Palestine, India and elsewhere described, a host of
terrifying images in the sky and real storms of missiles and gases.

As a result of the Martian encounters, several gods of planet Venus became lesser gods,
the Fallen Lucifer and the Etruscan Tuchulcha, an underworld god. In the Love Affair,
Hephaestus does not win his case: he has been the victim of the crime of cuckoldry. He
has discovered the culprits. He has captured them and turned them over to the police
and to the great judge. Yet, instead of retribution and triumph, he receives
indifferent admiration for his technical skill, a jest from a policeman that he would
commit the same crime if he could, jeering laughter, a bail that may or may not be
paid, and a bail-jumping by the criminal. The great judge does not even put in an
appearance. Indeed, how Lucifer is fallen !

Does Hephaestus change his ways? Does the orbit of Venus change from the elliptical to
the circular to some degree, in the course of the Love Affair? This is difficult to
say. He is wont to visit the barbarous-speaking Sintians of Lemnos. He starts back to
see them, but doubles back again to view the lovers caught in his trap. This may
signify an axial tilt of Earth. (See Chap. XIII.) Does Hephaestus ever return to
Lemnos, as the others return to their familiar places? Probably not. Like many an old
warrior, the time has come to write his memoirs and live off his past deeds. Still
heated up but without a tail, the planet is braked as it has been for some time by its
own viscous surface, but more speedily. Then it is struck and forced into an inner
orbit by the combined energy of Earth and Mars. Thus it may have achieved the circular
orbit it has maintained since the regularization of Venusian movements. Records, newly
ascribed to the eighth century in Babylon, appear to show that by the seventh century
Venus was approaching a circular orbit and, by the sixth century, it is definitely
revolving on a near perfect movement  [29] .

Not only was there an orbital change in this period, but also a rotational deceleration
of the earth was experienced. Velikovsky shows that the day grew longer, at one point,
and then shorter. Also, the Moon changed its orbital speed. Also an axial tilt was
experienced. Can these possibly be accounted for from a small treasury of poetic lines?

Hardly. As the next chapters will show, many motions can and probably do change at the
same time. We may solve some of the problems in the future, but at this time, we can
only point to two indications of such change. The Sun, Helios, appears to have behaved
erratically. Patroni, we recall, thought that the Sun had to send a messenger to inform
Hephaestus of events in his brazen palace. This might literally indicate a tilting of
the earth's axis momentarily, and twice, as a matter of fact. During such tilts the Sun
and Venus, as seen from the Earth, would apparently come closer together and then
resume their distances. However, electrical solar flares of great magnitude might have
stretched out from Helios to give the same impression, as Kugler surmised.

The second indicator of changed position in the story would be the freezing of the
action at its climax. Hephaestus roars his anger to the skies. (Was this when, in the
Battle of Troy, Athena "uttered her loud cry. And over against her spouted Ares, dread
as a dark whirlwind, calling with shrill tones to the Trojans"?) The gods stand with
him at the threshold. Ares and Aphrodite are paralyzed in their trap. The Sun may be
gone. There is a definite and portentous pause here. It could be the climactic
conjunction of the four bodies: Earth, Mars, Moon, and Venus. It could be a moment when
"the sun stood still," or more likely, when the night lengthened and the day refused to
come. But what a night ! The sky would have been more lighted up and colorful than ever
by ordinary solar day.

Finally, Planet-Venus may be searched for some signs of surface and atmospheric damage
that might be attributed to the Love Affair. It is easy to say, and undeniable, that
since Venus suffered such an experience also with Earth, Moon and Mars, then it would
have to exhibit the same effects as they did, given, of course, the differences in its
composition. An already hot planet would be heated up more, but other effects could
cool it. More of its atmosphere would be dissipated to a larger planet and some gained
from a smaller planet that possessed any, but this would depend, too, upon the
composition, atomic weight, electrical discharges and pressures exerted.

More recently, an important set of observations of the surface of Venus was made by the
use of radar  [30] . In August of 1973, American astrophysicists announced that they
had penetrated the hot dense clouds by radio waves, which were then able to probe
features of the unknown surface. They discovered the equatorial region to be marked by
craters of large diameter, dozens and hundreds of miles wide. But these gave shallow
soundings. A crater of one hundred miles diameter appeared to have basin whose depth
was only a quarter of a mile. We should expect a depth of several miles.

If Venus were incandescent in 1500 B. C., it will have been cooling up to the present.
Originally, any exchanges of material that might have occurred in its encounters with
Earth and Moon would have been promptly concealed by the sinking and melting of the
foreign bodies. Over time, the temperature of the molten surface would have reduced to
that of today.

It is conceivable that by 776 B. C. the surface temperature might have solidified to a
point that would register the imprint of a large body falling upon it through its dense
cloud formations. Of course, the foreign body would itself become heated, but if it
were large enough it might not disintegrate before striking home. If the craters had
been formed by electrical explosions, again the soft terrain would have shortly reduced
their depth. Shallow craters would, then, be explainable either by explosions alone or
by an exploding body, and would tend to support the theory of Venus' cometary history,
and the theory of its exchanges with Mars, Earth and Moon of the eighth and seventh
centuries.

In 1975, Soviet scientists landed an apparatus upon Venus, named Venera. Venera endured
the hostile environment long enough to register brisk winds and to photograph, in a
surprising amount of natural light, a shambles of sharp rocks. The rocks were described
as seemingly "new." They are probably new. Whether the area in which they were found
was struck by planetary debris or by electrical discharges, a splattering of foreign
and indigenous rock would have occurred in and around the craters. The great heat, the
heavy winds, and the high atmospheric pressure (90 times that of Earth) would very
shortly have metamorphosed any terrain of sharp rocks. Volcanism, of course, would not
throw off sharp rocks, but lava and Tephra. Therefore, Venus may now exhibit the scars
of very recent events.

Such were the effects of Athena's last battles. As if to commemorate the occasion,
planet-Venus resonates periodically with the Earth. On April 23, 1966, P. Goldreich and
S. J. Peale reported to the American Geophysical Union the surprising discovery that
every time Venus passes between the Sun and the Earth it turns the same face towards
Earth. T. J. Gordon, rocket scientist and author, wrote, "This type of resonant motion
resists outside disturbances; once locked, the motion tends to remain locked. When did
the Earth capture Venus' rotation?"  [31]  Might it not have been on or about 687 B.
C.?




{S : APPENDIX TO CHAPTER TEN  LOGIC OF IDENTIFYING RELATIONS SUCH AS "HEPHAESTUS IS ATHENA"}

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER TEN
LOGIC OF IDENTIFYING RELATIONS SUCH AS "HEPHAESTUS IS ATHENA" 

We are pursuing a set of identifications in this book. We say Hephaestus stands for
Athena, for instance, and Athena is also the planet Venus, and the goddess of the
Greeks. She is also Hathor, Ishtar, Lucifer, and Minerva. Some aspects of a lunar deity
have also affected her identity. To a remarkable degree the validity of this book
depends upon such identifications. In this chapter, for example, everything said which
favors the identification of Hephaestus with Athena-planet Venus ipso facto supports a
separate Aphrodisian identity for the Moon. We must be careful of the word "is," short
of writing a volume of philosophy on the question. For "is" can never mean some
absolutely simple "is." It has to mean something that never quite "is" no matter how
close two things are to being the same.

One scholar who appreciates this process in which mythologists commonly engage is
Philip E. Slater. In his book on The Story of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek
Family (1958), we read:
"To demand an exclusive interpretation is equivalent to insisting that a Spanish
peasant, a tropical flower, the Hudson River, an oyster, and the fountains of the Villa
d'Este are identical because they contain H2O. It tells too much and therefore tells us
too little of what we need to know precisely... A myth draws material from events in
the history of a group, but orders it according to the desires and stresses common to
those participating in the culture of that group."

An extreme example can be offered. Suppose we say A is H, or A is P. We intend by these
two statements that: A and H refer to one and the same thing; A and O refer to one and
the same thing; and H and O are the same. Even so they differ - these A and H and O -
by the fact that they are named differently, and, however complete their shared
identity, they are called by a different name. And every name has some connotation,
some affect-load in the sensing organism. Now let us proceed to the other extreme, and
declare: A is quite non-B. We will, no sooner than we are told this, tend to affirm an
identity of A and B, namely that the two are associated in the same sentence, capable
of undergoing the same logical analysis, have qualities that are comparable, and
further that he who says so has some ulterior motive which joins them in his mind.

From these examples we are led to various surmises, pertinent to the Love Affair. One
is linguistic. One symbol can excite stimuli by being related logically and empirically
to a predicate. It must be also related illogically, through sheer conditioning by
"irrelevancies."

We can imagine this seemingly foolish conversation:

1st speaker: "See the planet."

All: "Yes."

1st speaker: "It is Athena."

2nd speaker: "It is Lucifer."

1st and 2nd speakers: "Athena is Lucifer."

3rd speaker: "I sacrifice when the planet arises. You must sacrifice too."

4th speaker: "I sacrifice only to the god Hephaestus who helps me make sturdy plows."

3rd speaker: "My planet represents the invention of the plow."

1st speaker : "Athena invented the plow."

1st, 3rd, 4th speakers: "All hail to the plow, the planet and the gods Hephaestus and
Athena. Preserve our way of life."

2nd speaker: "Lucifer is cast down by God."

All others: "Lucifer is cast down but restored to heaven by his father, Zeus. If you
don't believe it, we shall hate you."

2nd speaker: "Lucifer is not Athena or Hephaestus. Lucifer is the devil cast down."

All others: "Go to the Devil! Hail the gods of Olympus! '


Let us proceed with speakers (1, 3, 4) whom we recognize now as a group of the Olympian
Culture. We find in them: "H is A" meaning
a. H is identical with A
b. H is related to A
c. H represents A
d. H symbolizes A
e. H & A share similar relations to L in each case with respect to:

1) Speakers 1, 3, 4 for certain subjective functions, but
2) H and A are separate for other functions serving speakers 1, 3, 4.

That is, Athena is Hephaestus and vice versa when and insofar as they share similar
qualities (traits and behavior) in the minds of any person or group.

Athena is Hephaestus when the effects of Hephaestus and Athena produced on any person
or group are similar.

Athena is Hephaestus when their names are used interchangeably.

Athena is Hephaestus when their names are not used interchangeably, because to avoid
the interchange permits the fulfillment of and resolution of a cognitive dissonance.
That is, where what must be said about the one psychically precludes that the same be
said about the other.

For understanding both natural and social relations, all forms of "is" must be taken
into account.

When a Q-behavior of A produces changes in X that H also produces, then A is HQ and H
is AQ. When a speaker affirms (or denies in such a manner as to affirm) that A and H
are the same, in respect to Q, this is evidence also that AQ is HQ.

When the behavior of a body X activates A and H with similar effects AQ( X) and HQ( X),
then A and H are also given an identity.

When similar X effects are observed upon A, H, L, S... n, then we can say that A has
psychological and organic existence in the group (A, H, L, S... n).

To say that A "is" or has existence apart from (XQAG) and (YQAG), we resort to a second
group (abc... n) and observe whether (XQVg) and (YGVg) are observable. If yes, then
this is a confirmation. If (XQVg) and (YQVg) are different than (XQVG) and (YQVG) then
we must investigate whether the two sets of effects are reconcilable according to the
logic of each group, G and g. That is, discover whether Q is the same, despite the
different logics of G and g. This is essentially what we do when we inquire whether the
planet Venus know to modern observation (G) is the same as the planet Venus known to
the ancients (g).

Carl Sagan is only reciting a phenomenon well-known to ethnologists when he says:
"legends and myths, handed down by illiterate people from generation to generation, are
in general of great historical value."

From the remnants of what has been handed down, we are here trying to discover a
history in which "who is who?" and "Who is what?" are central questions.

Notes (Chapter 10: He Who Shines by Day)

1. Stecchini, op. cit., p. 145. The destruction of Thera-Santorini about 1100 B. C.
would have overwhelmed the Attic shores, even if it bad occurred as a solitary
catastrophe (Cf. S. Marinatos, whose writings on the subject began on Minoan Crete,
XIII Antiquity (1939), p. 425); Velikovsky interprets the myth of Solon concerning
Atlantis as occurring around 1500 B. C. (W in C, pp. 146-8). Plato refers to Athens
after Atlantis as a remnant civilization, peopled by illiterate survivors. I believe
that Solon's Atlantis was sunk about 4000 B. C., but that Plato, not knowing of the
disasters of 1500 B. C., telescoped the two catastrophes in his mind, and made them
more ethnocentrically Athenian.

2. "Hymn to Athena" XXVIII.

3. Telephone communication of October, 1973.

4. Graves, I, ch. 9, p. 45.

5. See Dennis, Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, II, frontispiece.

6. Patroni, op. cit., p. 244, fn. 3; Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. II (1973).

7. Occasional Publ., Epigraphic Society, Vol. 4, no. 77 (Sept. 1977), Harvard
University.

8. G. A. Wainwright, "The Teresh, the Etruscans, and Asia Minor," IX Anatolian Studies.

9. Conversation with the author, 1966. Cf. his Gli Etruschi a Sesto Fiorentino
(Firenze: Tipografia Giuntina, 1964), where the Etruscan obsessions with lightning,
flood, and fire are treated.

10. Homeric "Hymn to Athena," no. xxviii.

11. Slater, op. cit., 130; see Apollodorus i, 3, 5; Homeric Hymns to Apollo; Hesiod,
Theogony 924-5.

12. Vol. I, p. 87; 23: 1; cf. I, 393.

13. Homeric Hymns, no. XX, in the Loeb edition of Hesiod. The "men" referred to are
possibly the catastrophized victims of this same pair 700 years earlier.

14. Finley, p. 83, citing Odyssey, 6, 232-4.

15. The Greek Myths, I, 51-2.

16. Cf. Finley.

17. Giorgio di Santillana and Hertha von Dechand, Hamlet's Mill (Boston: Gambit, inc.,
1969), pp. 273-4; cf. 73-4. This book contains on page 272 a design from ancient China
showing twin deities, male and female, dragon footed, surrounded by constellations and
carrying a plumb bob, square, and compass, reproduced in Chaos and Creation and Solaria
Binaria.

18. Graves, The Greek Myths, I, 149.

19. Ibid., 1, 315-6, 172.

20. Ibid., p. 46.

21. Ovid, Fasti VI, 627; Pliny, 36.70; Ling, I, 39; Plutarch, Lives, Rom., 2; Pauly-
Wissowa, Realenzyklop„die article on Tullius, Ocrisia, Tarchetius; Frazer, Golden
Bough; II, 198; O. Gruppe, Griech-Mythologie (1906), p. 1311. (Citations kindly
supplied by the late Dr. Z. Rix, Jerusalem.)

22. Op. cit., 130.

23. Ibid., p. 264; Graves, I, 25b, c, d, 1, 2. Erichthonios means "wool-strife-earth"
or, possibly, "from the land of heather," but the heather-country meaning may picture
the former meaning.

24. Cf. Pauly-Wissowa, "Nephthys," Vol 53, p. 100.

25. W in C, p. 259.

26. Anton Ehrenzweig, "The Origin of the Scientific and Heroic Urge," 30 International
Journal of Psychoanalysis (1949), 115.

27. See Eric Crew, "Thermal Equations of Venus," 3 Society Interdisc. Stud. Workshop 4
(Ap. 1981) 1-4.

28. See The Lately Tortured Earth and God's Fire surveying recent research on these
matters.

29. Lynn Rose, "Babylonian Observations of Venus," III Pensee no. I (Winter, 1973), pp.
18-22; C. J. Ransom and L. H. Hoffee, "The Orbits of Venus," " Ibid., 22-25.

30. E. Driscoll, Science News, 4 August 1973, p. 72; Andrew and Louise Young, "Venus,"
Scientific American, 233 (Sept. 1975), pp. 70, 78.

31. Ideas in Conflict (New York, 1966), p. 37.



{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS}
{P PART 2: }
{Q GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS }
{C Chapter 11: }
{T THE BLASTED CAREER OF THE MIGHTY SWORDSMAN}
{S - }




THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART TWO:
GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE BLASTED CAREER OF THE MIGHTY SWORDSMAN

A Homeric hymn addressed Ares:
"who whirl your fiery sphere among the planets in their sevenfold courses through the
aether wherein your blazing steeds ever bear your above the third firmament of heaven."
[1]

Ares had many names and epithets in and among the peoples of the world. He is Mars of
the Romans, Nergal of the Babylonians, Gokihar (and Indra) of the Hindus, Odin of the
Teutons, Huitzilopochtili of the Aztecs, and the Archangel Gabriel of the Jews. In
Babylonia, writes P. F. Gossmann, he is Nergal, and also Era, Irra, and Death  [2] .
Odin had over fifty names and epithets. This Gokihar of the Hindus was "born of the
wolf," was a "special disturber of the Moon," and became involved in yuddha, which in
ancient Hindu astronomy meant a clash of planets in conjunction  [3] .



{S : THE QUALITIES OF ARES}
THE QUALITIES OF ARES 

Ares, scholars typically assert, was the simplest character among the Olympian gods.
Ares means in Greek "male warrior." Eris, "strife," is his sister. He is bloodthirsty,
ruthless, warlike, fleet, ruddy, and, of course, well-muscled. He is drunken,
quarrelsome, impetuous, and a favorite lover of Aphrodite; he had a number of children
by her and other women.

"Rushing Stars" often appear to the vision as swords Ares seemed especially prone to the
sword. Velikovsky expounds the theme of the sword in the international background of
Ares. He quotes a hymn to Nergal:
Shine of horror, god Nergal, prince of battle, Thy face is glare, thy mouth is fire,
Raging Flame-god, god Nergal.

Thou art Anguish and Terror, Great Sword-god Lord who wanderest in the night, Horrible,
raging Flame-god... Whose storming is a storm flood  [4] .

Of the Scythians, Solinus wrote: "The god of this people is Mars; instead of images they
worship swords."  [5] . Herodotus tells that they sacrificed human beings and poured
their blood upon the sacred sword.

The Romans, sons of Mars, perfected their sword, a short, straight, double-edged steel
weapon with an obtuse-angled point. Their drill, their fighting formations, and their
tactics were based upon the sword in the hand of the legionnaire.

The male-chauvinist Greeks and Romans made Mars out to be a handsome athletic lover. He
both vanquished and loved Aphrodite-Venus. The sword is a phallic symbol by an easy
stretch of the imagination: a "dashing young blade" and "a swordsman" are used in
vernacular epithets today of the sexually eager pursuers of women.

Homer, pro-Athena, grants her the victory over Ares in his epics, but around the world,
Mars is victor more than vanquished because planet Athena never threatened Earth again
after the age of Mars. Ares was called "Alloprosallos" because he fought
indiscriminately, without principle, "on one side or the other."

We have pointed to Odysseus in his wanderings as the representative of Athena in her
planetary behavior over the centuries. It would be well to investigate Hercules as the
representative of Ares, performing an analogous set of tasks. Although his exploits find
him sometimes assisted by Athena and in opposition to Ares, he is said to be Mars
himself by Eratosthenes and Varro, the ancient commentators. Hercules, son of Zeus,
wanders and is directed over much of the world. He destroys Pylos; he captures Troy in a
preview of the Trojan War. At times he goes mad, explicitly so. His stories often do
parallel the probably older Babylonian Gilgamish, but his exploits are sometimes
transferred to the western regions where the Greeks have gone in large numbers. Indeed
Hercules is engaged in measuring the new dimensions of the world.

Hercules spawns the Heraclids who are identifiable with the Dorian invaders (reinvaders)
of post-Mycenaean Greek places in the period following the planetary disasters visited
upon earth in the eighth and seventh centuries. More than Odysseus, Hercules is one of
our crazed heroes of the catastrophic generation, just as his godhead is a cause of the
catastrophes.

Gods, like people, have different reputations depending upon whom you ask about them.
Priests, poets, and people - all have a say. Gods have a good side and a bad side. In
the case of Aphrodite - sheer beauty and concupiscence may pass for good in the later
Greek lexicon, whereas sheer irresponsibility denominates evil. In the case of Ares,
physical beauty combine with swift force on the good side; ruthless destructiveness
highlights the bad.

The terrible presence of Mars attended the birth of Rome and warranted him a longer and
more fateful career than the Greeks could afford him. The Judeans, striving for
monotheism, incorporated the visitations of Mars variously - now as a divine
intervention of the Lord (and the archangels) against the army of Sennacherib, blasting
it to death, then again as a divine retribution for a collective "immorality" that the
population and its rulers appeared to exhibit prior to each natural or human disaster
visited upon them  [6] .

Good and bad traits of a god are, hence, a combination of what happened alike to a set
of cultures, what happened differently to them, and whether in either event what
happened chanced to be good or bad in its contemporary historical circumstances  [7] .
Also, the fear of offending a god brought about the coinage of multiple names and
related gods, so that good and bad epithets might be buried in obscure and "innocent"
references.



{S : THE FATAL WOUND}
THE FATAL WOUND 

Let us examine more closely the present and possible prior condition of the "blood-
stained stormer of walls" as the Iliad called Ares. The state of Mars today is known not
only by means of transcribed legends, but by telescopes and space explorations.

Ancient history, myth, and theology have advised what to expect in general. They suggest
that Mars underwent severe electrical encounters and some exchanges of material
involving Venus, Moon and Earth. Its satellites entered the picture as the Steeds of
Mars, the Maruts, etc., terrifying "animals" or "angels" indeed, if we heed the ancient
accounts. J. Ziegler, a physicist interpreting the Hindu Vedas, finds the "Maruts" to be
electrical phenomena, or at least short-circuits and resistors for cosmic electricity
[8] .

The two satellites of Mars are rough rocks of small size. Today they are called Phobos
(fear) and Deimos (rout), names given to the steeds of Mars by the ancients. There is
some likelihood that, although they are invisible now, the ancients may have recognized
them  [9] . Legend has it that they are the sons of Aphrodite . Hence we must raise the
possibility that they were engendered in the Love Affair, the lovers' last encounters.
Just as some mascons of the Moon may have been welded upon it by interplanetary
thunderbolts, the sons of Aphrodite and Mars may have been exploded from the Moon and
carried off by their father. They were part of a frightful bombardment of debris and
ball-lightning which Earth suffered in the days of the Vedas and the Hebrew Prophets
[10] .

Velikovsky wrote in 1950 that an atmosphere, now residual, existed on Mars and that
organic carbons may characterize the polar caps. Soviet sources now report that a
considerable proportion of the thin Martian atmosphere is of argon. Recent photographs
indicate that the polar caps, which advance and retreat seasonally, are composed of
solid carbon dioxide with possibly some ice beneath  [11] . In Solaria Binaria, Milton
and I speculate that all planets have had experience with life forms. That the surface
of Mars was devastated beyond recognition and beyond any remaining possibility of
"higher" forms of life is consistent with the legendary damage done to the warrior god,
and also with the legend concerning the removal of Venus from an orbit that threatened
Earth.

As was remarked in Chapter Six, a heavy contamination of the carbon constant was noted
to have occurred in the 8th century B. C. This might result from several causes, granted
the near presence of Mars in the sky. Electrical and geological disturbances on Earth
and material and atmospheric exchanges among Earth, Moon and mars are suggested.
Electrical charges can assemble and disassemble molecules of many different types. As a
smaller planet, Mars was much larger than Moon and might devastate it, but be equally
devastated in turn by Earth. In the heavens, even more than among men, the larger force
strips the smaller.

The present features of Mars are becoming known and even give hints of what it might
have lost 3200 years ago. First its geosphere. The mariner IX flight (1972) that
provided year-long observations by camera in orbit provide evidence that, in
Velikovsky's words (1950), "Mars has been subjected to stress, heating and bubbling
activity in recent times."  [12] . Also that hot spots of presumed radioactivity would
be found as evidences of electrical exchanges  [13] . The cracks of Mars, concentrated
upon one face and along the equator, appeared quite fresh to the readers of its
photographs. Little erosion has occurred. It was as if, some said, a highly vigorous
water system had carved itself onto Mars' face and then all the water had been instantly
removed.

How fresh is "fresh"? No one will speak up, unless one has a prior theory (the
Velikovsky position). The uniformitarians are hesitant.
"One week?"
"Impossible, we would have photographed it."
"One century?"
"No, we would have observed something going on through our telescopes."
"One-two-three thousand years?"
"Events of this magnitude even then would have caused apparitions that are neither
recorded nor geologically possible if not observed."
"Apparitions were observed in the eighth and seventh centuries B. C. respecting Mars."
"That is astronomically impossible."
"Well, how fresh is fresh, then, do tell?"
"Fresh is millions of years. It has to be."
"What happened then?"
"We don't know, but we know that you cannot know either."

As Eugene Rabinowitch, physicist and editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists once
wrote, historical evidence is "inevitably tentative and often controversial matter."
[14] "I see.. Unlike historical geology."

The "erosion," "vulcanism," or devastation of Mars is most impressive, by earthly
standards. Its major feature consists of a canyon running along the equator for nearly
2200 miles in a sinuous line that brings the "crack" to 3300 miles. The canyon, called
Coprates, is over 300 miles wide near its center, and about 4 miles deep. Proceeding
beyond the canyon and various associated faults with the same general orientation, one
encounters "volcanoes" of massive diameters and great heights relative to earthly
experience. Nix Olympica, previously believed to be a crater, appears now to have a base
that is 300 miles wide and a 100-mile peak. The Island of Hawaii, the world's largest
volcano, can be easily lost in it, along with Fujiyama, Vesuvius, and Etna.

The response of the scientific establishment to the evidence produced by its own work
may have been predicted but is continually frustrating. It is not only that conventional
hypotheses are advanced, but that they are exclusively employed. For example, an article
by Bruce C. Murray in the Scientific American of January 1973 is possessed of full
documentation from the flight of Mariner IX and illuminated by all the graphic tools
that imagination and skillful hypothetical speculation might demand. The article
describes the enormous canyons and craters, and a number of features of the battered
Martian hemisphere.

But faced with the facts, the same author reverts to conventional theory. He accepts the
eternal, unchanging order of the heavens. He resorts to internal heat and vulcanism. He
wonders at the sudden burst of activity that must have erupted upon an earth-like
atmosphere and that produced canyons, craters, and liquid flows in dozens of meandering
rifts by a single event. Then a sudden freeze, et voil…, the present surface of Mars.
The author says he cannot believe this could happen but he is forced to believe in
miracle. The "waters" that "produced" the vast canyon and rift system are nowhere to be
found, nor is there evidence that they existed. Further, the "waters" would have existed
solely in one region of the Martian surface.

The claim is made that Mars has no magnetic field, yet the enormous dust storms that
howl over the planet go unexplained, too. The cameras of Mariner IX circled the planet
for weeks before the dust settled enough to photograph the surface. Now would not
cavities miles deep and many miles across, and craters that would contain cosily the
great cities of Earth offer a settling place for this dust? How does this dust pick
itself up and fly about the planet? And, if it is once up, and accelerated in a vacuous
atmosphere, whatever brings it down? It would seem reasonable to assume that the Martian
"atmosphere" is capable of regular electrical phenomena such as produce clouds, winds
and tides on Earth even if the constituent material is so humble as to be called "dust."
In fact, as Ralph Juergens has mentioned, airborne dust is an ideal medium in which to
"brew" electrical discharges  [15] .

Nor, for that matter, is Murray perturbed by the fact that the carbon dioxide caps
photographed at the poles of Mars are a couple of hundreds of kilometers off center.
Here, again, is evidence of a tilting of the axis of the planet. The obvious hypothesis
is that Mars was intruded upon externally in recent times; and suffered an axial tilt.
The polar caps have not had time to reassemble around the true geographic poles.

Furthermore "Mariner 9's pictures also disclosed a most peculiar terrain in the south
polar area... It covers much of the south polar region up to about 70 degrees south
latitude. The laminated terrain is composed of very thick layers, alternately light and
dark, whose gently sloping faces exhibit a certain amount of texture, or relief."  [16] 
These "plates" are perhaps half a kilometer thick and up to 200 kilometers across, with
slopes that face outward. They exist only in the polar regions. They have few impact
craters.

To our eyes the feature appears as a frosting to a turning cake applied erratically by a
baker between filing orders, each layer flowing out and hardening before the next
diminished batch was poured over the center. In the wintertime of mars, the error is
partially concealed by a coating of carbon dioxide. These laminated plates may well
reflect a series of meltings of the Martian surface, produced concurrently with a series
of axial tilts. If in the six or seven near passes of Mars with Earth, the Earth's axis
tilted twice (or, for that matter, not at all), the possibility of more numerous changes
in the Martian axis of rotation would be greater.

However, there is also to be considered, given the thermal melting of the surface, the
possibility that a period of axial wobbling from a single blow would produce the "start-
stop" effect observable on the poured-out area. The thermal melting itself might have
been produced by the rush of electrons to the poles of Mars, when, with a negatively
charged surface, Mars approached other like-charged bodies, especially Moon,
equatorially; there the electrons would pour out into space inciting discharges upon
encounter with the positive ions that had been contained from them hitherto by a neutral
belt.

Whereupon we return to the main features of the devastation of "fiery, bridling" Mars:
the canyons and crater system. None of the hundreds of Mariner-watchers who have spoken
up under establishment sponsorship by the time these words are written have dared to
mention an external force. Much more is at stake for the human mind than a scientific
theory; Holy Dreamtime is threatened if a disorderly cosmos is recalled. Only a few non-
establishment scientists, almost exclusively sympathizers with the ideas of Velikovsky,
were quick to recognize how relevant were the materials of Mariner 9 to the theory of an
erratic cosmos.

Allan Kelly has described what may have happened to create the gigantic canyon of
Coprates. He had written, with Frank Dachille, a seminal book on comets and geology in
1953, and has lately come to regard close-encounter as important as collision in the
carving of planetary surface  [17] . An "Intruder (much more massive than Mars) was
traveling in the same direction as Mars and in nearly the same direction as the Martian
rotation about its axis. This nearly parallel movement of the two bodies provided a
relatively long period of time in which the gravitational force could act... As the two
bodies approached each other, the gravitational power of the Intruder suddenly came to a
focus [we would say "arrived at a sufficient intensity"] on the surface of Mars, ripping
off the crust in a swirling motion beginning at the eastern end of the canyon called
Coprates." Mars was zipped open. The sinuous "unzipping" we would imagine to be the
effect of erratic jostling between Mars and the Intruder.

From the wound crustal material exploded and lava flowed. Possibly the satellites of
Mars, with their rough shapes, blew out at this time along with a stream of material
that was not recaptured. The metaphor of the unzippering of Mars reminds one of the
battle of the gods in the Iliad, when Pallas Athena charged Ares and cast her spear
"mightily against his nethermost belly," upon which "the brazen Ares bellowed loud as
nine thousand or ten thousand warriors cry in battle, when they join in the strife of
the Wargod." And Homer adds, marvelously, "Even as a black darkness appears from the
clouds when after heat a blustering wind arises, even thus... did brazen Ares appear as
he made his way among the clouds towards the sky."

As for the "volcanoes" of Mars, Kelly argues, these number twenty and all except one are
found along the same straight line, but at some distance from the unzippered canyon.
These Kelly explains as being created by related, gravitationally induced, explosions
produced as the Intruder pulled away from Mars.

In the Iliad (Books XX and XXI) we find additional details of the fighting between
Athena and Ares. Athena screams great war cries (one thinks of Wagner's Valkyrie). Ares
comes "spouting" against her, shrieking to his Trojans, and leaps at her with his spear,
driving it into her tasseled aegis. She gives ground, but smites him on the neck with a
huge rock that "loosed his limbs," or, as we say, "shook him from head to foot." When
Aphrodite tried to help him off the battlefield, she too was struck by the hand of
Athena and her heart melted.

Planet Athena-Venus was probably the Intruder that devastated Mars. The Earth, while
doing damage also, was too remote to have produced the Coprates complex. Yet it may be
incorrect to believe that the Coprates complex was a product of gravitational explosion
alone. Electrical forces were assisting. True, the point of minimal distance and weakest
material strength between two bodies would be the first disrupted area. But to overcome
the resistant gravitation of these two points inwards upon their parent body is not all
that is needed to cause material dislocation. At the protruding points, the chemical
bonding of the material would have to be overcome. That is, a rock is self-contained
hardly at all by its center of gravity, but is held together by the chemical ties among
its molecules. Otherwise mountains would flow down to the sea like water.

The Coprates complex exhibits the important qualities of the rilles of the Moon, which
the electrical theory of Juergens appears to explain. The zig-zag eruptions (also
explainable as "wobbling"), the sharp cleavages in the waterless environment, pointy
canyon bottoms, "river" valleys that stop in the middle of nowhere instead of by the
banks of a sea, and rilles that do not approach "volcanic" mountains close enough to
"drain" them of liquid are reasons to diagnose the "blood-stained stormer of walls" as a
victim of electrical as well as of gravitational disruption.

Therefore, probably both Moon and Mars were affected during the Love Affair by
electrical discharges building on gravitational pulls. These were sufficient to soften
and break the chemical bonds of many places on both spheres. Such, at least, is the
terminology I am using in this book. Elsewhere, most prominently in Solaria Binaria, I
join with Earl R. Milton in an exclusively electrical formulation of interactions
between large bodies. We find that the concept of gravitation is no longer needed, in
accounting for the transactions.

From all over the world, a small collection of peculiar meteoritic stones has been
collected over the past hundred and fifty years, half of which were originally seen to
fall from the sky, none of them anywhere near active volcanos. Lately, examinations have
been made of the rocks by new techniques, and they have been deemed to have originated
from Mars. A high content of mineral maskelynite along with crystals of augite,
indicates that they were originally igneous feldspar and later were converted by an
explosion or impact that did not melt them. Their chemical composition is "unlike that
of any known Moon rock," reports S. P. Maran  [18] . The clouds of Venus would prevent
such material from escaping. The rocks are young with respect to the time of impact
(assigned 180 m/ y), and they could not be part of the asteroid belt because the
asteroids are supposed to be much older and a large one would have to explode more
recently producing a great many more small rocks of the same age than have been
observed. Io, the explosive Jupiter satellite, is dismissed because it appears to have
much more sulphur in its constitution than these so-called SNC meteorites. "The tests
reveal that the meteorite's content of neon, argon, krypton, and xenon, and especially
the relative amounts of two isotopes of argon and two isotopes of xenon, have an uncanny
resemblance to the relative abundances of these gases as measured in the Martian
atmosphere by the Viking Landers." There is an equally good match with the chemical
composition of Martian soils.

"Mars would accordingly appear to be the parent body of the SNC meteorites," writes
Maran, "but how did they get from there to here? Alternative theories are, first,
collision, but the heat of such would have melted the rocks when they separated from the
parent body, or, second, a glancing encounter with an obliquely approaching body that
pulled off rock fragments in its vapor stream without melting them." This problem is not
serious, it seems to the present author. Furthermore, to these two mechanical theories
may be added electrical effects: lightning strokes can pull up material from the ground
without melting it; so can tornadoes which are closely related to lightning phenomena; I
discuss such matters in The Lately Tortured Earth.

As expected, the dates given to these episodes by the investigators are uniformly far
older than the mere 2700 years of which we speak in Moon and Mars. Still, within their
very old framework, the SNC meteorites "represent notable exceptions," to all other
extraterrestrial ages, 1.3 b/ y instead of 4.5 b/ y. Also, the shock waves that produced
the maskelynite are dated only 180 b/ y. In the grossly short-time perspective of the
Quantavolution Series, the .180 b/ y figure would be 2700 y and the 1.3 b/ y figure
would be between .5 and 1 m/ y.

As to whether the Earth or Venus was the wounder of Mars, Venus seems the more likely,
astrophysically as well as historically. The evidences of change and destruction on
Earth, although great, are less than those of its earlier encounters with Venus.
Furthermore its motions changed less than did those of Mars and Venus. Tentatively
Venus-Hephaestus is designated as the assailant.

More will be said on this subject later on, in pondering "How the Gods Fly." For now, it
is proposed that the main encounter devastated Mars - that it was caused by Venus, that
an enormously long venting fissure and holes opened up, and that it was recent. Too, the
blow was forceful enough to change any and/ or every motion that characterized Mars
beforehand.

Furthermore, the Martian surface and atmosphere may have been quite different before
this particular incident, as before the series of incidents with Venus, Moon, and Earth
that Mars experienced. It probably vented poisonous carbon dioxide clouds through the
Earth's atmosphere, in association with electrical discharges, resulting in occasional
episodes of mass asphyxiation such as I have cited in The Lately Tortured Earth. It may
also have lost a considerable atmosphere, a soil (that precious few feet upon which all
terrestrial life depends) and a hydrosphere (on which all marine life depends).

Apart from signs and remnants of these features, the planet Mars has been reduced to a
naked force, resembling what the Greeks thought of Ares as a god, a narrow-minded
compulsively destructive force whose solitary spark of sensitivity was reflected in the
perverse love that Aphrodite bore for him. But virtue triumphed:
"Behold on wrong Swift vengeance waits...

... and the god of arms Must pay the penalty for lawless charms."



{S : Notes (Chapter 11: The Blasted Career of the Mighty Swordsman)}
Notes (Chapter 11: The Blasted Career of the Mighty Swordsman) 

1. Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard U. Press, Loeb edition, 1950), p. 433.

2. Das Era-Epos (Wurzburg, 1956).

3. W in C, p. 256.

4. W in C, p. 261.

5. Ibid., p. 263.

6. W in C, Part II, Chapter 1.

7. See the author's The Divine Succession (1983).

8. Manuscript kindly lent to the author for reading, 1982.

9. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, 279-80.

10. Ibid.

11. Bruce C. Murray, "Mars from Mariner 9," The Scientific American, January, 1973, p.
60.

12. Worlds in Collision, 36-5, 367-8.

13. Ibid., 368.

14. Actually in a letter to the author, June 23, 1964.

15. Letter to the author, Oct. 27, 1973.

16. Bruce Murray, p. 60.

17. The early work was Target: Earth (1953); the present account is based upon an
unpublished paper kindly furnished the author by Mr. Kelly.

18. "Rocks from Mars," Sky Reporter, 36-9, 38.




{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS}
{P PART 2: }
{Q GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS }
{C Chapter 12: }
{T THE LAUGHING GODS}
{S - }




THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART TWO:
GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE LAUGHING GODS

When Hephaestus roared out his anguish and humiliation at being cuckolded, he demanded
that "Father Zeus and all you other eternal and blessed gods come here to see for
yourself this laughable, this unyielding truth." But not all the gods came to gaze upon
the trapped "embedded" couple at his copper-floored house. There came Poseidon, Hermes,
and Apollo, all three being important Olympian sky gods.

From Father Zeus came only silence. He deigned neither to appear nor to return the
bride-price that Hephaestus had paid him. The "gifts of wooing" were unlike the gifts of
Ares to Aphrodite; they were injuries received, not injuries given. Most of the gods had
"taken their lumps" from the Father, from time to time.

To imagine Zeus upon the scene could only occur to the raving Hephaestus. He is not to
be called upon for a laughable matter. Indeed, the presumptuousness of calling upon him
is comic. The scene would become too heavy, the literary critic would say, if Zeus
should appear. Besides, Zeus was in truth absent. In the tragic setting of the Trojan
War, Zeus had been engaged, acting to preserve the balance of power so as to work out
the preordained plot, arbitrating, mediating. Still he is remarkably aloof, even there,
his thunderbolts remembered by gods and men alike, but held in a kind of nuclear
missiles reserve. His deeds were deeply etched upon human memory but physically he was
receding into the far skies.

Why then, would Hermes, Apollo, and Poseidon make an appearance?



{S : MERCURY}
MERCURY 

Hermes does not enter upon the action, As the planet Mercury, he may have been in a
conjunction with one or more of the principles, in which event he may have vented some
unusual expression. He may have presented an apparition at the time. For the scene may
not have had the celestial clarity in the actuality that it achieved in the dancing
circle. In a time of storm, of darkness and ashes, of lightning strokes, of different
visual and acoustical perspectives - especially at the climax of the celestial
disturbances - it is possible that a convocation of the gods was perceived.

Perhaps Mercury appeared as an optical illusion and also as a re-engagement of memory,
as both crisis and the memory of crisis struck hammer blows upon the mind and, later on,
made demands upon the unconscious to recreate the "pluperfect" along with the "perfect."
Venus was there; Mercury had been there, too. The climax of tension produces in the mind
both memories overlaid.

The fourth day of the month in Greece was sacred jointly to Aphrodite and Hermes,
celebrating a game of dice between Moon and Hermes, the outcome of which added five days
to the year, bringing it from 360 to 365 days. (The legend is probably of Egyptian
origin.) In my book of Chaos and Creation (1981), Mercury was assigned a period of heavy
worship between 2200 and 1500 B. C., that is, up to the Exodus, when Athena-Venus became
the cynosure of Earthly eyes. M. Mandelkehr has more recently informed me of several
additional authoritative sources who found Thoth active throughout the Old Kingdom of
Egypt, and points out that his ibis symbol existed even before dynastic times  [1] .

One should not be astonished by the implication that the planet Mercury had inflicted
its presence upon Earth. Other volumes of the Quantavolution Series have explored this
possibility in detail. The natural history of Mercury is significantly marked by its
appearance earlier as a most prominent god in the succession of gods. Its physical
composition and size resemble the Moon's; the two bodies possess, too, with one of Zeus'
satellites, an odd angular momentum. Like the Moon, it has suffered heavy bombardment
from space.

Called by different names in different cultures, he was represented often by various
animals, especially by monkeys, in Egypt for instance, among the Gauls, and in India.
Hanuman, the Indian monkey-god, once became as resplendent as the sun and moved whole
mountains. The planet is suspected of having played a major role in the destruction of
the Tower of Babel; there in Babylon it was called Nebo and emperors carried his name in
theirs. A Jewish legend says that the survivors of the disaster and fire were turned
into monkeys. The recollection may have arisen from a gibberish, the confounding of
tongues, following upon mass electroshock; it may also have pertained to many
physiognomic changes by mutations or congenital defects  [2] .

As a god, Hermes has more than a touch of the Moon's irresponsibility. He is fleet,
perhaps because his solar orbit is shortest of the planets. He is the lucky god of
gamblers, the messenger, the robber, the friendly night. He leads downwards into Styx
and upwards into heaven (as a planet rises and sets). He guides the flocks. He is a
helper, a healer; he is - writes Otto - Priapus, Tychon, and Perseus. He may have
inspired Moses as scientist and electrician. He caries a snake-entwined rod, nowadays
the symbol of healing medicine. He is younger than Apollo, older than Athena.

He can laugh. His responsibility here is as spectator, apparition, and "extra" brought
in to reinforce the climax of the story with more bodies. But he not only laughs. He
speaks several significant lines. Asked by his older brother "would you really be
willing, despite being tightly netted, to couch yourself alongside golden Aphrodite?"
Hermes replies that he would gladly be witnessed by the gods and goddesses and suffer
twice as many fetters for the pleasure of Aphrodite's love.

Perhaps, then, he is reminiscing; perhaps once upon a time he, too, had enjoyed the
devastating experience.

"Again the laughter arose among the immortal gods." Unless Mercury was laughing at his
own joke, Apollo must have been laughing alone. In two places, the poet has more gods
laughing that appear to be present and in a laughing mood. It is possible that several
dancers are emulating unidentified minor gods or the idea of collective divine laughter.



{S : APOLLO}
APOLLO 

Apollo, himself, is always a character of ambiguity and mystery. We have an abundant
mythology about Apollo, from several cultures, but he has never been placed among the
heavenly bodies, except that, for lack of better, and because he is "shining", he is
commonly identified with the Sun  [3] . But most, if not all, of his Sun-identity comes
later in the history of mythology, and much of this ascription is readily traceable to
an effort to clear the skies of gods.

Apollo earlier commanded greater respect and fear than did the Sun. He was the god of
prophecies, of music, the archer-god, the source and also healer of plagues. He showers
rocks and poisonous airs as well as arrows upon humans who have incurred his enmity. He
has an aloof, judicious temperament. He does not interfere in the Love Affair but plays
the minimal role of lending his presence and posing a question to his younger brother.
In the Iliad, at one point, he disdained a challenge to personal combat.

If Hermes is a subconscious memory of an apparition which itself is the subconscious
memory of an earlier celestial appearance, Apollo may be the same. But he may be even
more so, as I explain in Chaos and Creation. Unlike Hermes, who existed in the sky as
the planet Mercury, Apollo most probably did not then exist in the sky at all. He may
represent a lost planet, a destroyed planetary body of an earlier age. He may be the
belt of asteroids between mars and Jupiter, whose existence has from time to time been
premised upon a previously existing body that disintegrated upon the approach of Jupiter
or another intersecting mass  [4] .

Apollo's traits befit vanishing and disintegrated behavior. Plague, arrows and
prophecies have in common a widespread incidence of discrete events upon individuals. In
addition, Apollo acts from a distance. Murray, in one of his few interpellations,
explains his translation of an Apollonian ephitet as "the archer god" by adding "or,
possibly, 'the averter of ills. ' The word means literally, 'he who works afar. '"  [5] 
Apollo is a retired and disoccupied god, Deus Otiosus; he is a god who works as a ghost
presence.

Apollo has been moved in myth closer to the events of which we speak, for he is the
slayer of the monster serpent Python. Python, says Graves, is none other than Typhon
[6] , hence to us a form of Hephaestus. But Graves is probably mistaken, for the Python
incident seems to have been an earlier analog, following the death of Saturn (Osiris).
So we use it here to explain further how the presence of Apollo at the Love Affair
climax was subconsciously prompted. The closeness of the names strengthened the
suggestibility of Apollo's presence, and originally Typhon may have been named out of a
wordplay with echo of the more ancient Python case.

There is yet another hint of Apollo's presence. If he does represent the asteroids, if
he does pelt the earth with various small missiles and gases, then the disintegration of
the cometary tail of Venus-Hephaestus, not to mention the material exchanges occurring
among other bodies, would prompt the subconscious memories of Apollo and bring him into
the climactic scene of the opera.



{S : POSEIDON}
POSEIDON 

Poseidon is present, "yet did not laugh." He is disturbed, impatient, persistent. He
wants Hephaestus to set Ares free. He offers to guarantee Ares' just debts as an
adulterer.

Hephaestus at first refuses: "Don't ask this of me, Poseidon, You're sure to be sorry if
you give bond for a miserable rascal. And how would it be among the gods, if Ares should
escape both his fetters and his debt and I should have to bind you instead?"

Poseidon is etymologically "master of the earth." He is the sea and the mover of Earth.
Here now, he insists. "Even should he avoid his debt and flee, I shall pay for him."
Hephaestus cannot refuse. "It is not permitted me to say 'no', nor would it be proper."

Why? Is this mere politeness, to move the plot along? But a plot in literature is as
determined by psychology as falling rock by gravity. Is it respect for a feared uncle,
brother of Zeus? Hephaestus once sympathized with a rebellion against Zeus; he is
clamorously angry at his parents now. No; the end is foreseen because that is the way it
happened in nature. Hephaestus cannot command the planetary gods. They move ultimately
in freedom according to their natures.

So the fetters were loosed and the freed pair sprang up and off. Poseidon has reason to
feel relieved, although he is still in bondage to Hephaestus.

Poseidon is here a representation of Earth. He is the masculine of the Earth-Goddess.
Before the Olympians came the Earth-gods. The Earth Gods were female, as Erinyes in
Aeschylus' Orestes. In Sophocle's Antigone, the chorus chants of Gaia, "the eldest of
the gods, the eternal and inexhaustible earth".

Poseidon, says Graves, is lord of the seas and the Earth-shaker, but is always greedy to
possess himself of land, if by no other way, then by loosing floods upon it.

The "Love Affair" threatens turbulence for both land and seas. Poseidon is the only god
to fit the role, and the plot might have had to be completely redesigned if the role
were absent. Besides, the evidence of the ancient accounts and of the calendrists and
geologists lend confidence in the designation of Poseidon and Earth.

Michael G. Reade, in a brilliant study of perplexing perturbations registered in the
famous "Ramesside Star Tables" of Egypt, has fixed the critical year to which they refer
as around -700, about the time of our Love Affair. It would be the time of the Trojan
War, too, when Homer says, as Lattimore translates the line (p. 405), Poseidon
"shuddered all illimitable Earth, the sheer heads of mountains." We quote Reade's
conclusions.

"... the axis of the earth was forced out of its hitherto normal alignment with the
stars at a season shortly after the summer solstice... the displacing force was a
sustained one rather than a shock... it was associated with an acceleration in the spin
rate of the earth... the effects of the disturbance were in many respects only
temporary... the axis of the earth did eventually drift back in the same attitude with
respect to the fixed stars (subject to a minor discontinuity in the precession of the
equinoxes)..." (IV S. I. S. R. 213 1979-80, 49.)

Any such disturbance in the motion of the Earth would have caused earthquakes,
volcanism, tidal movements, and atmospheric turbulence.

Poseidon has reason to feel surly and "put upon." It is Earth that has suffered
devastation in these sky-battles. This is no laughing matter. Earth has had to change
its calendars. Its cities have been battered, its plains flooded, its skies filled with
poisons and ashes, its magnetic field has been reversed  [7] . Earth will chance future
disaster at the hands of cometary Venus if Venus will only deliver it from Mars.
Besides, the Moon is with Earth. If Hephaestus-Venus lays claim to Moon, that is one
thing, a claim long experienced. If Mars now claims Moon, that is another thing, a
serious conflict indeed. Already, the Moon may have been drawn away from Earth. It would
be noticeably smaller.

Earth-Poseidon is put in the sky, as a sky-god. This should not cause surprise. he was
born brother of Zeus and son of Chronos (Saturn), and assigned Earth, when Zeus received
Heaven and Hades the underground. Earth was immemorially conceived as an entity, a
unity, a being. Further, even the idea of Earth as a space-ship, like the other gods,
had been developed in a number of pre-Homeric cultures. The sense of the instability,
the changeability, the restlessness of Earth affected Homeric and pre-Homeric humanity
much more profoundly than it affected mankind more recently.

To the Greeks, as expressed in Plato's writing, the Earth was an organism, alive, as the
planets and stars were alive. In conceiving of this state of affairs, modern man might
not simply imagine that it was alive simply because it was covered with live plants and
animals but that it was full of gods (as Thales said), alive as a whole, breathing and
moving as the Mother Earth Goddess. Poseidon, her counterpart, was masculine, but so was
the god-earth of Egypt, Geb. This conviction was a sensual impression, not a metaphor
and was born out of thrashings, twistings and turnings, and from transformations for
which people have today only the barest of sensitivity.

So the song has the Earth siding with the lesser of two evils to retain the Moon, to
settle peace upon the Moon-path and thence to tranquillize its own way through the
skies.



{S : HELIOS}
HELIOS 

Helios is not present among the laughing gods and there is no reason why he must be.
There are so many differences between the Sun and the sky gods that one must continually
suspect mythological claims that assimilate their identities to him.

Helios is an everyday herald, a routine chariot-driver of the sunlight. Whatever
importance late historical man may ascribe to his life-giving powers, he did not
contribute significantly to the development of the human mind and soul in the Homeric
age. A Homeric hymn begins "tireless Helios who is like the deathless gods," and ends,
"now that I have begun with you, I will celebrate the race of mortal men, half-divine." 
[8]

Something of the passive incapacity of the Sun is revealed in another place in the
Odyssey. Helios, when his cattle are stolen and eaten by the sailors of Odysseus,
exclaims: "Father Zeus and you other happy and eternal gods, I call on you to punish the
followers of Odysseus, son of Laertes. They have had the insolence to kill my cattle,
the cattle that gave me such joy every day as I climbed the sky to put the stars to
flight and as I dropped from heaven and sank once more to earth. If they do not repay me
in full for my slaughtered cows, I will go down to Hades and shine among the dead."

"Sun," the Cloud-gatherer answered him, "Shine on for the immortals and for mortal men
on the fruitful earth. As for the culprits, I will soon strike their ship with a
blinding bolt out of the dark-wine sea and break it to bits." That is, the Sun must keep
to his course. Only the great gods fly freely. Helios must use the gods for his needs.
Graves reminds us that "Helios was not even an Olympian, but a mere Titan's son; and,
although Zeus later borrowed certain solar characteristics from the Hittite and
Corinthian god Tesup and other oriental sungods, these were unimportant compared with
his command of thunder and lightning."

Further, Graves tells us, "The Sun's subordination to the Moon, until Apollo usurped
Helius's place and made an intellectual deity of him, is a remarkable feature of early
Greek myth  [9] . It appears that the herds of Helios are numbered by lunar multiples,
that "cattle are lunar rather than solar animals in early European myth", and that
"Helius's mother, the coweyed Euryphaessa, is the Moon-goddess herself."  [10]
"Thessalian witches used to threaten the Sun, in the Moon's name, with being engulfed by
perpetual night."  [11]



{S : A DIVINE SENSE OF HUMOR}
A DIVINE SENSE OF HUMOR 

When the gods are no longer near enough to be recognized as dwellers in their celestial
homes, the age of philosophy begins. They are assigned to a mundane abode or relegated
to astrology and denigrated. A Mount Olympus is provided, together with such local
vacation places, you might say, that they favor for rest, recreation, rehabilitation,
and retreat. The gods must be kept nearby. It is well enough for astrologers to watch
remote planets and to bank their fears and hope thereupon, but for most people,
displacement of the gods upon more familiar grounds is preferable.

For humanity can suffer great fear, but it is an animal with a formidable physiology for
converting fear into intelligence and power. Much of the complexity of theology is the
rationalization of how the powerless, the misbehaving and the ashamed can nevertheless
infiltrate their will into the almighty and the all-knowing, living a successful
perennial paradox. By the time of Homer, men are beginning to strut, to smile grimly, to
mutter innuendoes. Hybris?

This laughter of the gods has puzzled ages of scholars and schoolboys. However, the gods
jest with each other. They do not laugh at pathetic, troubled, insubordinate, vicious or
the occasionally happy human beings. Nor do humans indirectly laugh at the gods. The
sight of the gods in good humor is still a sacred sight. One of the means that enable
the plot of the Love Affair to come off so well is the absence of humans in the cast.
This precludes a dangerous conflict of interests; one need not fear the overstepping of
bounds.

Which is not to say that the audience is not laughing at the gods. It is, but by the
completely safe psychological technique of displacement and projection. The Greek sense
of humor, itself derived from the way its theomachy is constructed, writes into the
gods' behavior what they would laugh at in themselves and at the same time feels
dissociated from that behavior by its imputation to sacred character. Therefore, the
audience may have laughed as the dancers and singer spun out the humor; more likely they
marveled, were fascinated, and thought of themselves as receiving moral instruction from
the gods.

The humor itself - the laughing at the discomfiture of Ares and Aphrodite, at the
insulted dignity of the insultable Hephaestus, and at the desirability of committing the
same crime if one could (spoken in the very presence of the injured party) - this falls
readily into the category of sadistic and savage humor. Except that we do not understand
the genesis of humor very well yet.

Two major contributors to the theory of humor are Sigmund Freud and Arthur Koestler.
Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious explains a joke as the subconscious
prevention of a wish from completing its natural aim. For that aim is tabooed or
aggressively hostile or tragic. Hence the mind switches onto a parallel track that
unexpectedly carries it to a conclusion of minimal threat.

In Act of Creation, Koestler insists, besides, that both humor and creativity rest upon
hidden associations. These associations are inharmonious. They are wrestled into contact
with one another in a double frame of meanings that resolve into a synthesized single
frame with a new more acceptable meaning.

Since the whole of the Love Affair proceeds on a double level of meanings, two sets of
mental events that lead to humorous resolutions may occur, or six in all, because there
are three mentions of laughter.

For the Love Affair, Hephaestus is first to confess the laughable. It is that he should
be victimized for his born disabilities. On the overt level, the threat is that he will
prove false assurances of fidelity had been given him when he married Aphrodite. The
expected and feared result is that he will prove these false assurances and gain an
undeserved right. The situation is to be resolved humorously, laughably, as Hephaestus
himself confesses in advance, because other people actually will see that he has been
denied his rights despite his assurances.

Covertly, Hephaestus is threatening to possess the Moon himself, though rather
impotently. The danger is nevertheless that the Moon will go beyond all bounds in losing
its free and irrepressible spirit. However, all will gather to see that the assurances
are denied of their validity.

There was probably also amusement, though not named as laughter, in calling upon all the
gods to appear. Nothing would be less funny in the play or more tragic in reality than
the coming of Zeus, the father of gods. Fortunately "everyone knows" that Zeus is not
likely to intervene in such a ridiculous affair. Hence, humor. In fact, Zeus does not
appear. Again, comic relief.

Next, the gods laugh as they see how "swiftness," speeding to its rendezvous, is
unexpectedly and ignominiously trapped by "craft." Here the overt thrust of the action
is that Ares is bound to steal a love. It is expected that he will succeed. But he is in
fact trapped. Covertly, Mars is moving towards the ravaging of Moon and Earth. The fear
is that he will succeed. The comic release follows when he is trapped and exposed to
view by the public of gods.

Then the gods laugh because Hermes gives an unexpected and amoral answer to a question
about himself. Apollo asks whether he would agree to such fetters if he might lie with
Aphrodite and Hermes answers that he would accept thrice as many bonds for the pleasure
it would give him. Here the thrust is towards repeating the adultery. The expectation is
that he will falsely deny it. Instead he affirms it, but does so "harmlessly." The
covert parallels are that Mercury too now (as once) is invited to ravage Moon and Earth.
The result expected is that the disasters will continue; instead the memory is affirmed
while the future possibility is dismissed. There are here, in effect, four types of
joke. But in all there are four overt thrusts leading to expected disappointments; four
covert thrusts leading to subconsciously feared disasters; and eight triumphs of evasion
leading to laughter.

So then a conclusion is manifest, in general, regarding laughter: that the formula of
laughter is ipso facto satisfied when laughter occurs, but an audience will laugh only
when a threshold of anxiety has been reached. Also, laughability (and its companion, the
plotting of laughability by a jester) is moral one in which criteria of savagery,
vulgarity, virtuosity, and sophistication enter. To know when to joke is to know when to
harm; to know how to joke is to know how to dodge the larger harm - which is to say that
high wit and laughter become a property of morals and genius.




{S : Notes (Chapter 12: The Laughing Gods)}
Notes (Chapter 12: The Laughing Gods) 

1. E. A. W. Budge: Osiris, The Egyptian Religion of Resurrection, (Univ. Books, 1961),
pp. 81-3; J. Bonwick: Egyptian Belief and Modern Thought, (Falcon's Wing Press, 1956),
pp. 101-2; R. T. R. Clark: Myth & Symbol in Ancient Egypt, (Thames & Hudson, 1959), pp.
124-6; D. B. Redford: "The Sun-Disc in Akneton's Program: Its Worship & Antecedents I",
Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, Vol. 13 (1976), p. 57; Cambridge
Ancient History, Third Edition, Vol. 1, Part 2 Early History of the Middle East, p. 53.

2. Hugh Eggleton, "Mercury and the Tower of Babel," V Society for Interdisciplinary
Studies Workshop 2 (1982-3) 10-1; and see the present author's God's Fire, Chaos and
Creation, and The Lately Tortured Earth.

3. See discussion by R. A. Herring and others in 2 Society Interdisc. Stud. Workshop 4
(april, 1980) and subsequent issues.

4. Cf. Fritz Heide, Meteorites, 1957, trans. by E. Anders and E. Dufrense. (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1946), p. 130, and Solaria Binaria.

5. Op. Cit., p. 281.

6. Op. cit., Apollo used a bow and arrows fabricated by Hephaestus, ibid., 21. a. We
must suppose this is an incidental mythical reversal of time. for Hephaestus, we reason,
is active later than, unless he earlier participated in, the events of Apollo's life and
death.

7. Science News (Penguin Publications, July 1949). Manley discusses the reversal of the
Earth's magnetic field as evidenced in Attic and Etruscan pottery of the eight century.
The reversals, cited in Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval (1955) p. 283, seem to have been a
temporary phenomenon resulting from "The Battle of the Space Sheaths;" See below pages
265ff.

8. "Homeric Hymns," no. XXXI, contained in the Loeb edition of Hesiod, p. 459.

9. Graves, I. 156.

10. Ibid., 156-7.

11. Ibid., I, 13 citing Apuleius, Metamorphoses iii, 16.




{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS}
{P PART 2: }
{Q GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS }
{C Chapter 13: }
{T HOW THE GODS FLY}
{S - }




THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART TWO:
GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

HOW THE GODS FLY

My readers, who thus far have been kind enough to loose me on a long tether, have
probably been conducting their own more restrained examination of the events being
discussed. I suppose that I can rely upon their achieving a certain respect for the
connections shown between gods, skies, Earth, and the audience of Demodocus. Reviewing
their own information, they will have recalled that a great part of human activity,
especially in earlier times, has gone into watching the skies, relating the movements
and events there to human affairs and celebrating the connections by religious
observances, astronomical observations, fairy tales, song, and dance. They would readily
acknowledge the occasional episodes of conjunctions of planets, earthquakes, clouds of
volcanic dust, lightning storms, and cometary apparitions; these they might think are
adequate to explain the celestial imitations occurring in the Love Affair. More than
this may be in their opinion unnecessary and probably untrue. Indeed, the reader may
feel that every step that I take to tighten the correspondence between a sky episode and
dramatic poem and dance becomes less believable until finally every step become false.
"Let well enough alone !" would be their advice.

I grant that this liberal view may be correct, and that I should be thankful for it and
that in pursuing my radical exercise I am constructing a model of the absurd.
Nevertheless, I shall proceed, on and on, until if I fail to validate the relationship
between the scenarios of drama and disaster, I shall have opened up new lines of thought
about ancient history, dramaturgy, religion, human memory, and the psychology of the
unconscious. Whereupon, since the cast of characters in the "Love Affair" is composed of
celestial bodies, it needs to be explained how they can move about in the skies as they
moved in the opera theater of ancient Phaeacia. The movements of the scenario should be
translated into astrophysics. One will encounter three major problems. The first, which
has been dealt with in Part One and will be treated again later on, is to discover and
justify the movements of the plot as being the movements to be traced in the sky. How
strictly must one be able to follow the scenario in the sky in order to accept its
general validity? Up to a point, it is excusable to perceive a physically impossible
movement; myth and dream, in the interest of censoring content and creating an aesthetic
experience, may have Hephaestus-Venus, for example, doubling back on the "celestial
bedroom" too quickly for any conceivable physics to account for. On the other hand,
suppose that Ares-Mars had flown off to Cyprus with Aphrodite there to be reunited with
her. This would present an obstacle to credulity, although there are some twenty-eight
movements, and "one swallow doesn't make a summer." The whole set of movements must be
nevertheless both necessary and possible leaving only an occasional screening anomaly to
be justified by causes outside of astrophysics and astronomy.

Secondly, there is the problem of apparent movements of celestial bodies. The
Phaeacians, proud of their navigational skills, will nevertheless have set the story on
a flat stage, a platform of the celestial map of the vault of heaven emplaced upon the
platform Poseidon-Earth. They will have been perceiving apparent speeds, flattened
orbits when the bodies were close-in, apparent sizes that would not make allowances for
distances in space. How great a problem is presented by the semblances, as opposed to
the reality, of vision of bodies in outer space, remains to be seen. Although the best
of ancient astronomers struggled to actuate the apparent frame in their observations and
calculations, still the Phaeacians may have carried an astronomical sense from extremely
ancient times. That the Earth is round has been discovered and forgotten several times.
The measured circle of the dance and the Coda Dance of the Purple Ball are suggestive of
many early theories of the vault and dome of heaven.

The problem is that of translating apparent motion into acceptable and probable real
motions. If one cannot offer an explanation of the movement of the scenario that is
respectable, even if controversial, as a working hypothesis in astrophysics, then the
credibility of the structure here established will slump. Accordingly, after discussing
the movements of the scenario, we shall consider in the section on "Electro-mechanics of
the Gods" certain theories of astrophysics under development today, and use them to
explain the events of the Love Affair.

Another indulgence is besought. Consider, for a moment, that there are five bodies plus
considerable debris whose matter, motions, and positions are to be accounted for. Each
body has orbital and rotational motions that provide its angular momentum; it has
orbital distances from the sun and the other bodies, orbital speed, and mass. It has
volume. It has rotational speed. It possesses an angle to the ecliptical plane, and an
axis of rotation at an angle to that plane. It has a magnetic field. These still do not
include "minor" eccentricities, such as the fact that the shape of the moon reveals
three "remnant" asymmetries, or that the earth is swollen at its equator and flattened
at its poles. More ominously, the other planets, notably Jupiter, are excluded from the
scenario.

Consider, too, that each property of a body may have an effect, provided it changes,
upon all these other properties of its own body and upon any one or all of the
properties of the remaining four bodies. The number of possible combinations of changed
motions - taken in the bare qualitative sense of change, not as a quantitative set of
relations that would give us azimuth readings or particle counts - will be (pardoning
the metaphor) astronomical.

From one moment of time to another, one state of affairs may transform into another. It
is as if one had come upon a round billiard table with five balls already struck and in
motion at each its own speed. Each is of different size, each is capable of a change in
its volume; each is spinning at a different rate and angle to the board; each possesses
a magnetic field of different size and intensity that is capable of change, plus a
changeable electric charge; each is drawn invisibly and is electrically related to the
center of the board (the Sun).

If commanded to describe the scene, one might pray to God to restore order immediately
by sending the bodies into non-intersecting circle moving around the center of the board
according to a single law of gravity and with unchangeable speeds. Failing this, one
might invoke the most skillful mathematicians and latest computers to tell us what is
happening. But they would be distressed by the lack of data. "Give us some benchmarks,"
they would plead, "Give us parameters." At which point one would have to offer some
fuzzy archaic snapshots with their double and triple exposures saying; "Here you are. We
must do the best we can with them."

Thirdly, concerning how the gods may fly, is the problem of power to change all the
motions involved in the scenario. Briefly, the gods fly by electrically assisted
inertial power, gravitationally maintained. This, too, requires explanation, much more
than what can be supplied here.



{S : THE MOVEMENTS OF THE SCENARIO}
THE MOVEMENTS OF THE SCENARIO 

The group's dance in the measured circle that precedes the song is intended to indicate
the celestial and sacred nature of the story. It is not counted here as a spatial event.
Nor is the Dance of the Purple Ball that follows the story. In general, the scenes are
brilliantly lit, 'Phaeacia, ' 'Hephaestus, ' 'brazen, ' 'copper, ' 'golden, ' 'sparks, '
'bronze, ' and 'blazing' are among the metaphorical suggestions of light; brilliance is
carried as the 28th movement or change.

The "Love Affair" proper gives the following spatial changes. They are listed in the
order in which they occur.

1. Secret copulation of Ares and Aphrodite in the house and bed of Hephaestus.
2. Ares gives gifts to Aphrodite 3. Helios moves past their bed.
4. Helios passes and reports to Hephaestus
5. Hephaestus goes to his smithy.
6. Hephaestus places his anvil on the block and hammers out fetters in his smithy.
7. Hephaestus goes to his house and bed.
8. Hephaestus spreads the net from ceiling and bed posts.
9. Hephaestus moves towards Lemnos.
10. Ares is moving towards house and bed.
11. Aphrodite goes from Zeus presence to house.
12. Ares arrives at house after Aphrodite does, and speaks to her. He reaches out for
her hands.
13. Ares and Aphrodite copulate in the bed.
14. Ares and Aphrodite are paralyzed.
15. Helios passes by their bed.
16. Helios approaches Hephaestus and reports to him.
17. Hephaestus moves to the doorway of the house and stops.
18. Hephaestus shouts terribly to the gods.
19. Poseidon arrives at doorway and pauses, disturbed.
20. Hermes arrives at doorway and pauses.
21. Apollo arrives at doorway and pauses.
22. Hermes and Apollo laugh, jest and draw conclusions.
23. Poseidon argues with Hephaestus and gives guarantees.
24. Hephaestus strikes off the fetters.
25. Ares flies to Thrace.
26. Aphrodite flies to Cyprus.
27. Aphrodite is bathed and anointed.
28. Overall and repeated brilliance.

Let us classify these movements, following their temporal sequence in the scenario and
retaining their given numbers. When a movement is appropriate to more than one category,
it is carried more than once. At this point we shall also change to astronomical names.
1. 	The first category of movement includes all passages of bodies through space. In
astronomical terms, we are speaking of the relative motions of these bodies in the
terrestrial sky. The left-hand numbers correspond to the list of spatial changes above.
3 	Sun passes Mars and Moon
4 	Sun moves and passes Venus 	FIRST
5 	Venus moves to a false setting 	DAY
7 	Venus moves to Moon and Mars apparent orbital rendezvous location
9 	Venus moves to a second false setting
11 	Moon moves to rendezvous location 	NIGHT
10 / 12 	Mars moves to rendezvous location
15 	Sun passes Mars and Moon
16 	Sun (approaches) passes Venus
17 	Venus moves to apparent rendezvous point slower than Mars 	SECOND
19 	Earth moves to rendezvous point 	DAY
20 	Mercury moves to rendezvous point
21 	Apollo moves to rendezvous point
25 	Mars moves from rendezvous point
26 	Moon moves from rendezvous point

From these movements comes confirmation that the action takes place in the sky. The Sun
gives an orientation by pursuing its regular rounds. Although Demodocus does not say so,
the elapsed time may be two days; the Sun makes two rounds; better say two days and
their intervening night, but the climax (catastrophe) of the scene probably occurs after
sunset of the second day. Moon appears generally to hold its course. Venus moves
erratically and may not have set during the period. Mars appears to be moving on a near
collision course parallel to the Moon-and-Earth solar orbit (the persistent lover) until
sprung into a farther orbital track by Venus.

II. The second category of movement includes all decelerating and accelerating events,
including pauses, that is, what would be referred to astronomically as changes in
orbital and rotational speed.
1 	Erratic, jostling movements of Moon and Mars in close proximity
6 	Venus apparently pauses for discharges remotely
8 	Venus apparently pauses for discharges near at hand
12 	Mars stops at Moon's house (apparent rendezvous point)
13 	Erratic, jostling movements of Moon and Mars in close proximity
14 	Longer pause and slowed movements of Mars and Moon as Venus approaches
17 	Venus apparently pauses at apparent rendezvous point
19 	Earth apparently pauses at apparent rendezvous point
20 	Mercury apparently pauses at apparent rendezvous point
21 	Apollo apparently pauses at apparent rendezvous point
25/ 26 	Mars and Moon move at opposing adjacent angles for rendezvous point

From this collection of movements, it may be inferred that marked changes in the orbital
speed of Mars, Moon and Venus occur. The two sets of encounters tend to confirm the two-
day calendar. Earth's rotation is slowed to give a strong impression of the whole action
being frozen during the dramatic crisis, when Mars, Moon, Venus (and Earth) are all
lined up (in perilous conjunction). Mercury and Apollo, with Earth, join the scene at
this point, as archetypical memories from earlier crises being forced upon the scene of
the present crisis. If it is objected that the convocation is simply a literary device
invented to stress the literary catastrophe, one should recollect the theory that
experience calls forth devices of literature.

III. The third category of movement involves motions, sounds, and colors that connote
exchanges of energy and/ or mass.
1	 Erratic responsive jostling of Moon and Mars in close proximity
2	 Material leaves Mars for Moon
4	 Venus increases in size, darkening as Sun passes behind
6	Venus thunders and discharges streams of electrified clouds
8	 Venus discharges streams of electrified clouds all over sky andaffecting Earth
12	 Noises from Mars/ Moon as Mars approaches rendezvous. Electrical belts stretch out
	 between the two as they near each other.
13	 Erratic responsive jostling of Moon and Mars in close proximity
14	 Venus' relative movement halts or slows jostling
16	 Sun passes behind Venus, darkening it apparently
18	 Giant cacophony apparently from Venus, which also explodes materialagainst Mars
22	 General noise
23	 Quakes on Earth promised
24	 Venus approach suddenly propels Mars and Earth-Moon to resume movement
27	 Moon returns to serenity with new face
28	 All major bodies (Venus, Mars, Moon) and their atmospheres achieve some
incandescence during the experiences The events of the third category include Mars
disturbing Moon and Earth disturbing Mars with discharges of electricity and material.
Earth slows Mars' rotation causing heating and jostling. Venus showers Moon with the
sparks of Hephaestus' smithy. The intervention of Venus behind Mars and Moon causes
heightened disturbances.

Terrible noises are heard - electrical, atmospheric and/ or meteoric in origin.
Incandescences of Mars, the Moon, and Venus (already incandescent for over 700 years)
are noted, from which great heat is inferred caused by electrical discharges, crustal
frictions from altered motions, vulcanism, and atmospheric turbulence, especially on
Venus.

The appearance of the Moon is altered. Its rocks seem new, contain remanent magnetism,
and are freshly glazed. For the Earth to magnetize the rocks of the Moon would require
that the Earth approach its satellite to at least three and possibly two earth-radii
distances, there to heat up and magnetize its surface [1] . This is unlikely to occur in
any event because Moon might disintegrate at about that distance from the electro-
gravitational force pulling at it. Since in the period of the Love Affair the Moon
appears to have been drawn for a time away from Earth, and Mars came between the two
bodies, it is likely that while Earth beat upon the one face of Mars, Mars beat upon the
Earth face of Moon.

The perspective of the scenario is probably that of an observer in the southeast corner
of Asia Minor. Then, as evening came and Earth rotated eastwards, and the bodies were
accelerated, they would see Mars-Ares fly northwest to Thrace; Sun-Helios would fly
west; and Moon-Aphrodite would spring southwest to Cyprus. Venus-Hephaestus is
presumably left in charge of the moonpath from a great distance and follows the setting
sun.

Phaeacia was discovered to be a Utopia, but positioned in Homer's mind in the west. Some
have assigned it to Corfu. Patroni insists upon Malta. Pocock opts for Trapani. Etc.
Notwithstanding this doubt, Phaeacia was recently founded, by Nausithous, the father of
King Alcinous, who hosts Odysseus. He took his people on a long journey to the
deliberately preferred isolation of Scheria because they had been persecuted by
neighbouring giants (more likely, the meteorites of Mars). But Phaeacia is now doomed.
Two days after the recital of the Love Affair, as the boat that carried Odysseus home
was returning to its harbor, it is turned to stone; a circle of mountains erupts and
girdles the town, land-locking it forever.

We can surmise, therefore, that the Phaeacians had witnessed the Love Affair in
Southeast Anatolia and had played the drama later on in the West, without realizing that
the actions in the sky would have followed a different terrestrial mapping if witnessed
from their new home.



{S : ELECTRO-MECHANICS OF THE GODS}
ELECTRO-MECHANICS OF THE GODS 

Isaac Newton cleared the skies so tidily, and his laws imparted such regularity and
tranquillity to the solar system, that, amazed at his results, he imagined that only a
God could create the heavenly order. There was born in those times a new deus ex
machina, a mechanical god, from the laws of gravity, inertia, and angular momentum. But
the real historical gods are created out of catastrophes, not from order. And the
heavens are as prone to disorder as to order.

Attention is called to two additional facets of Newton's mind, one naturalistic, the
other religious. He could not believe that gravitational attraction between two bodies
could exist without a medium for transmitting the gravitational force. And, putting
aside his deux ex machina, he went searching for his real God, the Old Testament God,
who brought the Deluge down upon mankind, even seeming to agree with Whiston, his
disciple, that a cometary force might have provoked the Deluge  [2] .

The latter is an irony that needs no elaboration here. But the former sets one to
wondering. That all things are "falling" towards other things with measurable momenta is
apparent; also that motion and matter are communicable, intra se and inter se, seems
indubitable; further both seem to be inextinguishable. One must be wary, however, in
using general laws of physics and astronomy when questioning the validity of observed
events and historical-mythical accounts. The task of reconciling the two kinds of data
is so difficult and frustrating, that many a good mind ends up in some dogmatic or
empirical monomania. All this is a prelude to saying that the Love Affair portrays
cosmic events that require extraordinary explanations. Yet one can take heart from the
direction in which the current revolution in astrophysics is moving.
Much of the new astrophysics is based on non-equilibrium - even explosive - phenomena,
rather than the steady state thermal phenomena which have been the primary concerns of
astrophysics in the past. It is the violence of the phenomena discovered in the
astrophysics of the past fifteen years that has changed dramatically our current views
of the universe  [3] .

That some physicists are moving closer to a determination that gravitation may be
transmitted by waves, and that others are pushing ahead rapidly in electromagnetism and
plasma studies likewise enhances the plausibility of the events of the Love Affair.

For the Love Affair appears to have the planets moving in an essentially electric
environment, with gravitational movements largely subsumable under the law of the
conservation of momentum (inertia), which in turn may remotely have originated as a
product of electrical laws. The imagery of the story is conveyed in motions that appear
arbitrary, reversible, and erratic - qualities more characteristic of electrical than of
gravitational forces. The examination of Moon and Mars has already shown features, such
as rilles, that electrical theory can explain.

Ralph Juergens, who has made a special effort to reconcile the much-neglected science of
gaseous electrical discharges with the theory of cosmic catastrophism, has recently
proposed an electrical concept of the solar system that appears to fit the scenario of
the Love Affair  [4] . He suggests that the Sun's corona and the surfaces of the planets
carry a heavy electric charge of negative value. Interplanetary space, on the other
hand, is a plasma, a gas of dissociated positive ions and electrons. This highly
conducting medium isolates the electric field of the planetary body; it shields itself
from it. The shield is called a space-charge sheath.

"In the space-charge sheath, positive and negative charges collect and arrange
themselves in such a way that the electric field of a body with alien potential is
contained within a limited region surrounding the body."  [5]  The electrical
composition of the sheath is a function of the need to segregate itself from the
interplanetary plasma and thus the plasma from the charged planet.

The electrified body, however, has to continually receive a current of like charge from
the outer environment in order to maintain its charge. This the planets do from solar
and galactic sources, Juergens theorizes. Thereupon "when no orbital conflict exists,
the system operates serenely under the direction of forces accounted for in conventional
celestial mechanics."

However, he continues,
... Let us imagine what might occur should two electrically charged major bodies in this
system find themselves on intersecting orbit... The stage would be set eventually for a
rendezvous at one or another point of orbital contact. Since the space charge sheaths of
the bodies would occupy greater volume than the bodies themselves, a collision between
sheaths would actually be more likely to take place than a direct, bodily collision.

When the moment arrived for the inevitable encounter, sheaths would make contact.
Unleashed electric fields would clash. Almost instantly, forces immeasurably greater
than gravitation would be brought to bear on the charged bodies. Cosmic thunderbolts
would flash between the bodies in an effort to equalize their electric potentials  [6] .

In the present case, Mars, according to Velikovsky's reconstruction of the events of 776
B. C. or thereabouts, was caused to shift its orbit by the planet Venus, that had
previously caused periods of cataclysm on Earth. The orbit of Venus grew more round,
while that of Mars enlarged. The new orbit carried Mars on a collision course with
Earth. In due time, the encounter occurred.

The encounter witnessed in the Love Affair was one in a series that agitated the world
in the period between -776 and -687. The first encounter between Venus and Mars may have
taken place at a great distance, with a largely visual impression being created on
Earth, an impression that the terrible and eccentric proto-planet Venus was following a
new course and that Mars too had changed its orbital movement to an eccentric one that
brought it periodically - every fifteen years by Velikovsky's reckoning - racing on an
elliptical orbit almost tangent to that of Earth. There were six such near-misses in the
period between 776 and 687 B. C., until a final encounter among Venus, Mars, and Earth
brought about the present planetary system by expelling Mars into a new orbit. That
Earth may have had the last word may be the inference to be drawn from the coincidences
between the rotational period of Mars (approximately 24 hours) and its inclination to
the ecliptic (approximately 24§) and those of Earth. For these qualities, "swift Ares"
may have exchanged orbital speed and an outside position on the racetrack around the
Sun.

Let it be supposed now that the Earth and Moon compose a type of binary system bearing
negative charges on their surfaces: the two bodies tend to revolve around each other;
but the only sign of this is the perturbation of the Moon, because Earth is so massive
relative to the Moon. The same electric sheath, however, (which may coincide with the
magnetosphere of the Earth) keeps them in electric balance with the plasma. The sheath
is elongated to embrace the Moon as the Moon, pulling the earth around it,
ineffectually, because of the great inertial orbital momentum of the Earth, revolves
around the Earth. When the sun shines upon Earth, the Earth's magnetosphere streams away
from the sun-side to a perceived distance at least sixty times the distance from Earth
to Moon.

The approach of Mars, on a generally parallel course to Earth, disturbs the Earth-Moon
system. Repelled by both bodies from a direct encounter, it passes between the two. (One
argues this midpassage because of the recent searing of the Earthward face of the Moon
and the one-sided searing of Mars, also recent.) Its orbital momentum is also great and
there is no question, under these conditions, of its becoming a part of the binary
system.

Nevertheless, it introduces a new negatively charged body into the sheath and the sheath
undergoes violent adjustment. All three bodies intrinsically repel one another, bringing
about bodily vibrations of considerable amplitude (the "sex bout"). The electrical
repulsions overcome the gravitational attractions. Earth pushes Mars; Mars pushes Moon,
and pushes back at Earth; the Earth's orbit expands slightly. The two sheaths
temporarily strive for electric assimilation and equilibrium, although this is doomed
from the start by the differential in inertial momentum (including factors of speed and
angle). The space sheaths expand enormously into the plasma to acquire the electrical
charges they need on their peripheries. They probably invade and excite the electrical
sheaths of Venus.

As the sheaths move to assimilation, they invade the negative fields of the body
surfaces and cause physical conversions of several types - chunks of matter are
exchanged between the bodies (in a sense, "gravity falls apart" as opposite charges
momentarily prevail); thunderbolts strike the surface of all three bodies, with immense
violence.

Some of these are not typical thunderbolts. They are the weapon of the sky gods, at
least of Jupiter, Athena and Hephaestus. Thyestes, a hero of the period, is portrayed by
Seneca as asking Jupiter to still his anguish by bringing disaster upon Earth, "not with
the hand that seeks out houses and undeserving homes, using your lesser bolts, but with
that hand by which the threefold mass of mountains fell... These arms let loose and hurl
your fires."  [7]  Juergens refers to them as of the species of plasmoid, explosive
projectiles of electricity consisting of equal numbers of electrons and positive ions,
rare examples of which have been duplicated in the laboratory by Winston Bostick. They
carry immense electric and magnetic energy at the speed of solar flares  [8] .

A simple principle might explain which body will receive the greater damage. Since the
electric charge of a sheath is proportional to the surface size of the spacebody, the
destructive potential of the sheath in reference to a second sheath is proportionate to
the surface size of the body contained by the second sheath. This would account for
devastation of the side of the Moon facing Mars and Earth and of the side of Mars that
locked its face upon Earth. Nor should we neglect the protective capacity of the Earth's
atmosphere against all types of bombardment.

The Earth's rotation brought repetition of the incident the next day. Now, however,
Venus is much closer than it was on the day before and Mars is greatly retarded. It is
said that today Mars rotates at less than half its expected speed. Such may be an effect
of one or more of the encounters. Here Venus actually seems to catch up, watch, and then
passes by. It is possible that at this point, Mars was driven back by Earth and Venus,
and moved into its present outer orbit. That Mars is locked in on Earth in its
rotational speed and axial tilt may indicate that its final pass by Earth came after
Venus had sprung loose the "loving couple."

Also, when Venus "loosed" them, it perhaps added a push to the Moon that reduced its
orbit, restoring the lunar month to very much what it had been before the series of
incursions by Mars began, and to its present length of approximately 29 1/ 2 days. Thus
the electromechanical scenario may be synchronized with the year -687, with calendar
adjustments that began all over the world after -687, and with the physical description
of the Moon following her devastating Love Affair. Concerning the last of these, we
recall that Aphrodite emerged more beautiful than ever - bathed, anointed, and
astonishingly clothed. That would mean with "new beauty marks" and an aura caused by
heat and dust clouds.

In effect, both the destruction and the preservation of the bodies in the encounter are
due to the electric environment which lets only a limited collision of spheres take
place. At the same time, the electrical theory permits one to explain how planetary
surfaces can be torn, exploded, and heated - including in all cases the dissolution of
the chemical bonds of matter - without carrying the bodies implausibly close enough to
call upon gravitational pull alone.

The primary effects of encounter are the penetration of the atmosphere and surface of
the bodies by attracted oppositely charged ions. A secondary effect is the retarded
movement (rotational and orbital speed), displacement (oscillations), and orbital shift
of all bodies.

The gravitational force, which, if the bodies were nearing in a non-electric vacuum,
would draw them together in inverse proportion to the square of their distance, is
canceled out by the repellent negative charges on the surface of the bodies which
operate with quite opposite effect and force. (They are repelled in proportion to charge
and the square of the distance.) The "Battle of the Gods" resolves into a battle of the
space-charge sheaths.

The tertiary effects are heating of the bodies and their atmospheres, resulting both
from electric particle bombardment and from atmospheric, hydrospheric, and lithospheric
shearing friction. New levels of surface crust are developed on all of the bodies, new
"scar tissue," new stratigraphy.

The effects upon the biosphere are grave. They have been described time and time again
by the ancient observers, by early students of the Deluge such as Whiston, Newton, and
Boulanger, by modern catastrophists such as Cuvier, Donnelly and Beaumont, by
contemporaries such as Patton and by Kelly and Dachille  [9] , Lane  [10] , Schaeffer,
and, in especially systematic form, by Velikovsky.

There emerge, in the perspective of the human race, disasters without number. The
gaseous composition of the atmosphere changes (a noticeable thinning and occasional mass
poisonings). Large-scale destruction of herds and crops, and of wild-life and forests
occurs. Basins are emptied or filled with water. Tidal waves wipe out nearly all coastal
settlements (where perhaps 80% of the Greek-speaking population was contained in 800 B.
C.). Chasms are opened; volcanoes are created and activated. Surface soils are ripped
off by winds traveling at hundreds of miles per hour. Communities are obliterated or
disrupted by showers of ash and debris, winds, water, fire, and famine. The apocalyptic
vision, historically founded, is renewed.

The stupefaction and manias of the survivors are understandable. Older, similar
experiences are reinforced in the memories of the group. That every aspect of human
feeling, thought, culture and creativity should be affected is to be expected. To the
explanation of these psychological and cultural transformations, the next chapters turn.
They continue, at the same time and to the degree possible, with the exegesis of the
torrid Love Affair of Moon and Mars.




{S : Notes (Chapter 13: How the Gods Fly)}
Notes (Chapter 13: How the Gods Fly) 

1. R. Treash, Pens‚e, May 1972, p. 22.

2. Stecchini, op. cit., pp. 89-105.

3. John A. Simpson, "Journey to Jupiter," The Univ. of Chicago Magazine (Nov.-Dec.,
1973), 6-11.

4. "Reconciling Celestial mechanics and Velikovskian Catastrophism," II Pens‚e (Fall,
1972), 6-12. The concept is full developed by Early R. Milton and the present author in
Solaria Binaria.

5. Ibid., p. 6.

6. Ibid., p. 7. Recently, what are believed to be electrical discharges have been
observed between Jupiter and one of its satellites, Io, whose distance is many thousands
of miles. The heavens have settle since 687 B. C., but the same natural phenomena may
continue in a subdued form.

7. Atreus and Thyestes (Miller, trans., 1917), quoted in W in C, 217: and cf. p. 272.

8. Ralph Juergens, Pens‚e, Jan., 1974, pp. 2-4, citing Bostick, 16 Scientific American
(oct. 1957), 87-94.

9. The scenario of geological effects is well-delineated in their book. Target Earth,
The Role of Large Meteors in Earth Science (Carlsbad Calif.; Box 225, Target Earth
press, 1953). See also this author's The Lately Tortured Earth (1983).

10. Frank W. Lane, The Elements Rage (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1965).





{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS}
{P PART 3: }
{Q THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR}
{C Chapter 14: }
{T THE USES OF LANGUAGE}
{S - }




THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART THREE:
THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE USES OF LANGUAGE

The Love Affair is not a double entendre and was not viewed as such in its ancient
production. It is not an opera with two levels of conscious meaning. If it were, it
would have arrived in our hands in a different version. But the Love Affair does not
permit a conscious second level. In order for the drama to have been born at all, it
had to become the mask of a historical reality. It had to speak and sound and mean a
love story, first and finally.

Nevertheless, upon being created, the story still had to develop in two contradictory
directions. It had to retain its hidden meaning, and it had to shed more and more of
its hidden meaning. It had to tell the truth and in the same breath deny it. This
formidable task of the unconscious was doomed from the start, but yet it is perennially
successful.

Such "success through failure" is achieved not only in the Love Affair but in all myth.
It is granted to few minds to comprehend the mechanism. Even philosophers build
defenses against its comprehension. Some are rigidly obsessed with the attachment of
words to objects (nominalists), or with words to operations (operationalists). Others,
their opposites, insist upon the correspondence of words to ideal images (idealists,
Platonists); to them the contradiction is anathema. It is intolerable, unphilosophical,
confusing, meaningless. To the anthropologist, psychoanalyst, and psychological
linguist, however, it is the veriest grist for the mill.



{S : METER AND METAPHOR}
METER AND METAPHOR 

Homer's 28,000 lines were six-footed, the hexameter, which Paul Maas  [1]  renders
schematically and typically as:

Each of the six long, stress syllables is followed by two short ones except at the end
of the line, where a stressed sound prevails. Besides the stress, there runs a pitch
that rises on some of the short syllables. The fifth and sixth syllables present a more
variable combination than the other feet; they often embrace a "caesura," a pause or
rhythmic division of the melody of the line. "All methods of imposing an order upon
discourse by means of rhythm... are on a lower level, from the point of view of metric,
than the oldest type of Greek verse, the Homeric hexameter."  [2]  Unfortunately,
little is known about the rhythmic feeling of these measures or how dynamic and tonal
accents were introduced as well. Furthermore, "we have no means of reading, reciting,
or hearing Greek poetry as it actually sounded,"  [3]  and can only form a shadowy
notion of it. And, to make matters worse, nearly everyone believes that it is
practically impossible to render English acceptable into epic (dactylic) hexameter, a
judgement with which we do not agree. The reader may address the question by means of
the author's working carried in Chapter Two above or search out a now rare translation
by H. B. Cotterill done in 1911.

The rewards of metric and phonetic analysis of the Love Affair may appear slender. One
can listen time after time to tapes of it recorded by a trained actor without the
rhythms registering more than the serious, singsong, long-drawn tread of the epic
narrative. The sophistication of the rhythm finds itself in the length of the line and
the large variety of subordinate rhythms that emerge from the counterpoint of whole-
word against metric division, producing a harmonic unity and disunity at the same time.
No doubt it was this last that induced Aristotle and others to affirm that the basis of
poetry was the syllable; but the syllabic structure, taken alone, would collapse unless
coordinated with the word structure, phonetic structure, and meaning structure. These
all confirm the belief that Homer's

1 € € 3 € € 5 €€ 7 €€ 9 ___ 11 ___ Ô Ô Ô Ô Ô ÔÔ ÔÔ form is "advanced," technically, as
Maas asserts, in consistency with the total state of his culture, regardless of the
remanent social chaos of his times.

A little more is to be learned by investigating the technique of metaphor. One might
expect that, if there is a second level of meaning to the passages of the Love Affair,
it would crop up in the guise of metaphor. W. B. Stanford writes that Homer generally
engages heavily in metaphor but that his metaphors are ordinary and uninspired; "with a
very few exceptions, Homer seems always stilted and even deliberately archaistic
[liturgical] in his use of metaphors."  [4]  In the Love Affair, we find only three
"genuine" metaphors among the hundred lines: "fine as a Spider's web" refers to
Hephaestus' net; Aphrodite "bridles not her passion" is an expression that may well
have had the ordinary meaning of "restrain" and therefore not be metaphorical; and
Poseidon speaks "winged words," a favorite hackneyed Homericism.

Hephaestus goes home "with a heavy heart," but one may regard this as literal,
especially given Homeric physiological theory. And the lovers "shamed the bed" of
Hephaestus, which illustrates a displaced object rather than a metaphor. Also there are
epithets that refer to the gods - Poseidon, "the earth-enfolder," among others - but
these we again see as literal adjectives and part of the divine names; the gods are
described "as they are."

Moreover, only the single simile is to be found in the passage. Yet it would have been
easy to conceal catastrophe in one of Homers' famous similes. He might have chanted,
"and as the gods laughed, it was as when great thunderclaps and bursts of light came
from the blue skies, shaking the trees and setting the rocks to trembling, alarming the
shepherd to gather his flock into the shelter of the cave."

Instead, the Love Affair is completely matter-of-fact. Hence one may consider the
opposite hypothesis: there must be reason for the passage to be barren of metaphor and
simile. The reason is not slow to suggest itself. Since the parallelism between what is
said in the lines and what is happening in the sky and on earth is so close, and,
furthermore, so well-kept a secret, the need for metaphor and simile is negligible.
Indeed, the whole passage is a single great simile ! And similes upon similes don't go.

A second clue is intriguing. Stanford was cited to have praised Homer's similes and
depreciated his metaphors. "Why," one asks, "would Homer be apt to this criticism?" A
statement of Stanford deserves repetition:
The essence of effective metaphor is a clear and definite understanding of the two
constituent ideas incorporated in the metaphorical term, together with an appreciation
of the new concept integrated from those constituent ideas... In order to insure that a
reader or hearer will thus fully appreciate his metaphors, a poet must be certain that
his audience understands clearly and precisely the meanings of words as he uses them
[5] .

Then comes his thesis: "Because words lacked precise definition in Homer's time, Homer
could not, even if he had wished, have used daring metaphors."  [6]

Since Stanford is unaware of catastrophic theory and of this book's alternative short-
term theory of the Dark Ages of Greece, he pursues his arguments in the typical manner.
Homer was building a primitive language and savage customs into the dawn of Greek
civilization. So again, Stanford's evidence support unwittingly the 'Crazed Survivors'
theory.

Stanford quotes C. M. Bowra who holds that Homer's language is clearly not primitive
but "in other ways he employs a speech which has not settled to fixed forms and uses...
This inexactness of function is natural in speech which is still finding itself."
Stanford agrees and adds, "This is the common experience of all readers of Homer. In
his dialects, grammar, prosody, and syntax, everything points to the growth of
conciliatory order out of chaos and not to deliberate variation of an existing
uniformity."  [7]  Demetrius long ago had written, "Homer impresses his hearers greatly
by the employment of words descriptive of inarticulate sounds, and by their novelty
above all." Homer had to make the meaning of many words - "to combine," as Stanford
puts it, "with his poetic gifts the work of a pioneer grammarian, semiologist, and
rhetorician." Another facet of the greatly and eternally confused "Homeric question,"
it appears, is resolved by our theory. Homer is too sophisticated to be a primitive
minstrel, yet he is first and foremost of the Greek poets, and nobody feels that he
stood upon the shoulders of great predecessors. Many contradictions, both technical and
sociological, characterize his work, his subjects, his times. These are largely
resolved if Homer is regarded to be part of his times, at one with his subjects and
their fathers and grandfathers, and working in a new alphabet upon a polyglot,
untutored Hellenic population surviving from a set of recent natural and social
disasters.



{S : HOMER: EDITOR AND PUBLISHER}
HOMER: EDITOR AND PUBLISHER 

Scholars have arrived at a fair concert of opinions about Homer. "The prevalent theory
today" is that the Odyssey is not the full creation of one person  [8] . Since it would
be senseless for Homer to have put on a somewhat different vocabulary for each story,
this evidence is weighty.

The Odyssey's language is more consistent than the Iliad's, hence it is considered to
be the later work. Its concepts are more abstract, another sign of its being written
later. However, both these facts would also jibe with the two-author theory.

Page makes the telling point that the Iliad and the Odyssey do not refer to each other.
He repeated Monro's claim that the Odyssey "never repeats or refers to any incident
related to the Iliad."  [9]  They neither boost nor knock each other. Yet they are
consistent; there is no discrepancy between them. Some of the characters overlap, of
course, and some of the statements correspond.

Further, both epics are written from the same perspective of time. Their parallelism
with regards to the events described extends beyond coincidental probability, whether
these events were 400 years or 30 years before Homer.

Both poems carry a style that is agreed to be oral. That is, they were intended for
oral recitation, in parts and as wholes, extending over some days of recitation, if
needs be. The major internal evidence of this rests in the great number of formular
phrases that are employed time after time. "If the poet wishes to begin his verse with
the thought 'But when they arrived... ', he has one way, and one only, of expressing
this..." He has to deny himself all other ways  [10] . In a sense unappreciated by
modern writers, who search unendingly for an expanded, particularistic vocabulary and a
way of avoiding cliches, the Greek epics were built upon collections of phrases, not
words. The conclusion is that "the creation of the vast number of formulas, adaptable
to almost all possible emergencies, must have been the work of many generations of
poets... This is the memory technique of verse-making." But many formulas might be
adapted to any long poem; ancient formulas would be the bricks that a mason could use
quickly to erect a house; more closely similar is the practice of popular musical
composers of folk, rock, fox trot and blues music in America who turn out great numbers
of songs from a certain number of stock romantic lines and musical phrases.

A number of elements of both poems were explicitly Mycenaean. They are idiomatic, even
identical, They are so tightly linked with the Mycenaean culture that they could not
all have been carried orally over 500 or 400 devastated, savage years. But they could
represent what was destroyed one or a couple of generations before and still obtruded
in the culture of the Homeric people. Further, it is agreed that many elements of the
poems were non-Mycenaean, meaning contemporary or Near Eastern or Western
Mediterranean.

Here, our explanation is that the shocked society of Homer carried various cultures
within itself, having no control over their incongruities. The oral technique would
have been a continuation of centuries of recitation from memory that can prosper
alongside any bureaucratic society, such as the Mycenaean, in which scribes could
write, but the people could not.

C. M. Bowra believes of Homer "that since he himself was alive when the wonderful art
of writing returned to the Greeks in the form of the Phoenician alphabet, he dictated
his poems to someone who knew it and the written texts were guarded by professional
bards who recited them to later generations."  [11]

Page puts the Odyssey not later than -700. We would guess its composition at about -
650, its transcription soon thereafter. He mentions the possibility that the poet of
the Odyssey may have been a contemporary of Archilochus, Callinus, and Alcman, two
generations or more later  [12] . He says there may in fact not have been any written
version of the Odyssey before the sixth century  [13] . The Iliad would have preceded
this event by several generations. We suggest that just as the Iliad preceded the
wanderings of Odysseus, the Iliad preceded the story of them. One then arrives at dates
for the composition of the Iliad in several stages between -700 and -670.

The great literary historian, Aristarchus, places Homer some sixty years after the
return of the Heraclids, whom we have assigned to the late Eighth Century. Arie
Dirkwager, in an unpublished manuscript lent to this author, has reasonably calculated
that Homer "lived somewhere between 715 and, let us say, 640;" he connects Homer with
Archilochus, whose grandfather Odysseus is supposed to have encountered when he visited
Hades, and with Lycurgus, the "Spartan lawgiver, who we think owes his fame to his work
in social reconstruction following upon natural disaster."

Despite the ancient's insistence upon the single identity of Homer, Page considers
finally "the relation between the two poems to be that of father and son: is it not
much more probable that they are elder and younger brother, living in different places
and developing in different ways? I suggest that this is so, and that it can be proved
to be so."

Of course he does nothing of the kind, but the concept of a family shop is congenial.
It reminds one of Robert Graves' effort, possibly heuristic only, to place the
authorship of the Odyssey in the hands of a daughter of Odysseus, named Nausicaa! The
opinion of the present study is that Homer was unique. This is maintained not so as to
ride free on the wagon of the traditionalists but because of what has already been said
in this section and in this book.

Homer was a trained Greek bard living in the seventh century in Asia Minor. The skies
were settled and society was coming out of a century of shocks. Like Shakespeare, not
only could he act but he could also invent poetry. His age was not like ours, an age of
personalized authorship and copyrights. His inheritance of poetry was both his and non-
his; it mattered little. Homer was alert to the future. Thus he succeeded well in
binding up the past. Moreover, he witnessed the new alphabetization of Greek  [14] .
Excitedly he seized upon its practice and went to work. Like an editor of today, he
brought into the shop what he regarded as the most vendable story in Greek culture -
"Achilles and The Siege of Troy." It was an epic that he himself could recite, checking
now and then its lines with another bard, discovering frequent inconsistencies and
correcting as many as he could, losing patience often perhaps with the scribes of the
new alphabet who must have had to make hundred of linguistic decisions in collaboration
with him.

The epic in writing was an instant success. In the beginning, he who writes things down
is the author, with all due regard to the gods and muses. So Homer was the author. He
was more the creative editor and publisher. Probably no sooner had the original version
been produced than it was copied - under his supervision for he would not have let out
his treasure.

If the Iliad was such a success, would there be a second epic of like proportions to
transcribe? There would be. Homer, Editor and Publisher, would be sought after by other
bards who lacked his editorial genius and workmanship in the new literary genre. Would
he help them - at a price, of course? The work would be in his name, but his patronage
would be valuable. So one may conjecture that after he had created the Iliad in written
form, he sought out and selected a second epic coming from another part of the Greek
world, singing of Odysseus, a character whom he favored beyond all others.

The signs of a common editorial hand in the two works exist; they have encouraged the
belief in a unique "author" over the whole time. There is evidence of deliberate
tampering with the two poems to make them consistent and related, but never
duplicative. Thus Nestor's story of his early life in Pylos, found in the Iliad, is
"remarkably Odyssean in style."  [15]  The Odyssey, coming from another bard or
geographical area than the Iliad, would not be so familiar to Homer and a number of
inconsistencies would escape his editorial scrutiny. Or perhaps he was anxious to
complete its transcription and get it out on the market. The major inconsistencies of
plot and dialogue are found in the meshing of the Telemachus story into Odysseus'
return, although Professor Page adds analyses of other contradictions and lapses  [16]
.

Inconsistencies of general outlook, ethics, theology, and philosophy scarcely exist.
Homer may have made his greatest contributions here. He would have been not only copy-
editor, but also moralist, bent upon securing the larger Greek cultural community to
its ultimate values in human relations and the human in relation to the divine. It is
for reasons like these, and because the terrors of continuous disaster stretch their
penumbra over the actors, that Mircea Eliade diverges from his contemplation of the
remotest antiquities and calls the Iliad a kind of creation epic. It is a new age whose
story Homer reorders and edits for publication, one that begins a century before he
deals with it.



{S : TRADUTTORE TRADITTORE}
TRADUTTORE TRADITTORE 

By the time the first Greek grammarians went to work, the language of Homer was quaint.
The language changes. The references of words change. Associations are formed and join
in the same word. Words expand their meanings and simultaneously contract them. Words
are invented by new combinations of sounds, relating to the events referred to, and to
familiar sounds of nature, and previously exciting words of like character.

Take the word "brazen." It connotes 'bronze. ' It also means 'hot. ' This is easy
enough.

Examine the epithet "golden-bridled Ares." It means to Murray, "Ares of the golden
rein." Both are "correct." Why, as the authoritative translator (Murray) would have it,
does it mean the latter, when a translation bearing in mind the hidden construction
could picture Ares as a darkly ruddy planet with electric flashes and belts playing
across its face, bridling it like the head of a warhorse  [17] ? Alexander Pope,
puzzled, finds it, "He glows, he burns," (with love, of course). Fitzgerald gives
simply "golden Ares."

Graves discovered that Hephaestus can be rendered as "He who Shines by Day." Phaethon,
of the same root, means "shining, the shining one, radiant" and was the name of the
mythical son of Helios who, paralyzed by fright, let the chariot of the Sun scorch the
Earth and plunged to a fiery death, an occasion that quite probably corresponded to an
earlier catastrophe, associated with the planet Venus. One should also note that
Phaeacia is the Shining Land, land of Fire, the Phaeacians being "Phaecixikos." The
words of "shining" and "fire" are dear to Homer. He uses them on hundreds of occasions
in his epics, perhaps ninety percent of the time in symbolism of passion, heroism, and
death  [18] . He calls Hephaestus "the fire of the world."

The early Greek philosophers, reports Burnet, called the planet Saturn "Phaenon," the
planet Jupiter "Phaethon," Mercury "Stilvon" (Brilliant), Venus "Phosphoros" (light-
bearer), and Mars "Pyroeis" (Fiery one)  [19] . Perhaps someday a scholar will go back
to the symbol and root of the j and find there only "fire, feuer, fuoco, feu, phaeton,
etc." with perhaps an astral significance in the birth of the language and perhaps even
search out the origins of other root sounds in the same vein. We should know, however,
that j seems to have had phallic associations as a letter of the Greek alphabet  [20] .
And fusiz means creativity, talents, and the penis. At Lemnos, in probable reference to
Hephaestus, there was found a medal with the inscription, "kabeireia pythia phi," or
"the strong one, python, phi."  [21]

Moreover, the (j) of Hephaestus is close to the modern symbol of the planet Venus. But
this is also close to the apparition of a comet,

with its tail; a planet could better be a circle or a star. Many ancients designated
the planet Venus by the same symbol. And Aphrodite contains in her name the same
letter, and, generally, is described by a number of words conveying brilliance and
light.

The symbol is a hieroglyph of Egypt but is also found around the globe, in ancient
Mexico, for example. In Egypt it may also be rendered

or And as it was ascribed phallic meaning in Greece, so it was in Egypt. The statue of
Horus at Coptos has a phallus in his hands which is said to have been taken from Typhon
(the monster, the part of Venus-Hephaestus, that crashed into Earth).

Isis-Athena and Typhon-Hephaestus are recalled unconsciously in the symbol of the ankh,

both as comets and as dismembered comets. It then recalls terror and can join with the
castration fear, so that the phallic symbol and the astronomical symbol unite in a
syllable that is both pornographic and anxiety-causing. But, with typical ambivalence,
the ankh comes down to us in a long procession led by the Christian church, where the
ankh is the symbol of "life." Still, the Egyptian 'Ankh', the symbol of life, is a
combination of male and female.

Moving to line 273, one finds a complicated sentence; Hephaestus fashions a device to
capture the secret lovers in flagrante delictu. No translator feels the need to
indicate that the original meaning of akinon is thunderbolt, not anvil (from which
sparks fly). It also means a meteoritic stone. The mundane word derives from the
astral; the significant aspect here is not the precedence, but the insistent astral
atmosphere of the passages. Hephaestus, after all, might have woven a net of cord, or
dug a collapsing pit; or "bummed a ride" on Helios' chariot: he is a versatile genius,
not only a blacksmith. The device is of copper, again not of fibre, as fishing nets
are.

A slightly different sentence emerges than the other translators, who are in rough
consensus, give. Murray studiously emerges with "But straightaway one came to him with
tidings, even Helius, who had marked them as they lay together in love. And when
Hephaestus heard the grievous tale, he went his way to his smithy, pondering evil in
the deep of his heart, and set on the anvil block the great anvil and forged bonds
which might not be broken or loosed, that the lovers might bide fast where they were."

And we read: Straightaway then went with the news, of course, Helios, who'd spotted
them loving, Shocked and dismayed was Hephaestus to hear of the painful story. Deep
down below the depths of his forge he proceeded; there, placing a thunderbolt stone on
the block of the anvil, he struck and struck off unbreakable fetters that no one could
hope to dissolve, for fixing the lovers in bondage, right where they loved, was his
fierce aim.

Little can be done with the most common verb of the passage; Ercomai meaning simply "to
go and come," and Homer uses almost no other word of movement. "Why not 'fly'?" one
asks, for, in general, Homer is fond of metaphors of birds and flight. Or even
"rushed." Alexander Pope translates the word into airy and flighty language, indeed
gives the whole play a fully heavenly treatment. Still, although the language openly
describes events in the skies, the word "go and come" is just that and one has to be
resigned to the correct perception that these heavenly bodies did not fly; they came,
moved, stood, departed. The personages were huge masses, not birds or "shooting stars."

To conclude, a slight tendency exists for the translators to reduce the instances when
the words and phrases of the original might have suggested hidden parallels of an
astral and catastrophic character. To this they are driven not only by their own
preoccupation with the evident and conventional, but by lexicons that are a product of
the establishment, in effect, a guarantee that when in doubt they will follow the
consensus.

It is of little use to appeal to "The Original," dismissing all translations. A
thoroughly versed classicist would be similarly tempted to "read" or "explain" in
classical Greek the meanings of the words in their singular romantic sense. One can
imagine Homer himself, half composing, half reporting the story; even he must have
contributed to its integrity as romance at the cost of greater ambiguity as history.

For basically all words describing events are a translation abinitio (See above, page
29). Even the most rigorous scientific language begins to wash out meanings through
metaphors. Only in the subconscious minds of the earliest singers of the song and their
audience would there exist openly sensible connections between the event and the signs,
and between the denotating signs and the connotating signs. And soon only these latter
were permitted to bubble up into awareness.



{S : THE THROES OF ORIGINAL PLOT}
THE THROES OF ORIGINAL PLOT 

Thrusting at these arguments from another point, a critic may offer the reasonable
observation that the Love Affair is only an instance of the ever popular plot of the
love triangle. Two people owe each other love. A third in fact captures the love of one
of the pair. The third is outraged at being excluded from the prior love. And,
naturally, preceding this plot came many familiar personal histories from time
immemorial.

At the risk of offering a theory of literary creativity that cannot be amply defended
here, I would say that we are treating of time immemorial and even of the rise of
language and literary forms. Long before the Love Affair could be composed, there had
to be a language; that language, to be invented, had to be preceded by and based upon a
ritualized culture fascinated by repetitions and order.

The "obvious plot" had not only to be experienced, but had also to be perceived as
important in two regards: to be certified by higher authority (i. e. the behavior of
the gods); and to be translated from common occurrence into Symbolic form. (More will
be said of this later.)

The Oedipus story, from which the important psychiatric complex derived its name, had
occurred innumerable times in the dawn of humanity. But it took a particular episode of
Egyptian history, involving a God-Pharaoh, which I. Velikovsky has brilliantly detected
in Oedipus and Akhnaton, to sponsor the translation and elevate into literature, first
spoken and then written, the general human experience and anxiety over the sexual love
between mother and son.

Among the several facets of Homer's genius is that he carried wars, sex and feasting
into the humanly experienced life of the gods so that divine behavior could be at least
partly understood, though full of contradictions that themselves created, including a
contemporary practical wisdom and a later "rational" philosophy. Too late after the
events, in the third century, A. D., Quintillus wrote a sequel to the Iliad. It is
insipid, uninspiring. It affords no sense of the presence and reality of the gods when
compared with the Wrath of Achilles or the "Return of the Heroes" sung to Odysseus
before he hears of the Love Affair. It is as if our primeval myth-maker knew the crude
principle of stardom in Hollywood. "If they can't remember the story, they'll remember
who starred in the movie."

Hence one speculates that the enduring plots and themes of the arts, including history,
were invented with great effort and through a real-perceived event, sparking a
combustible mixture of instruments and institutions - linguistic, behavioral, and
technical.



{S : HUMAN STRESS AND LANGUAGE}
HUMAN STRESS AND LANGUAGE 

A child likes to repeat words, phrases, and sentences. One will chant the same line
indefatigably. It may be newly invented or a thousand years old. It may or may not
"make sense". A relief of anxiety occurs in the repetition. The speech of the old and
dying often becomes repetitive, and an old person who has spoken an acquired language
will often revert to the sole use of the language he first learned. When pinned down by
enemy fire, a soldier will often chant words incoherently, or if he had instruction,
say, in the Catholic Church, will repeat the "Hail, Mary" prayer times without end. Sad
folk ballads and neurotic "rock-and-roll" songs are obsessively simple in word and beat
and prolong themselves to the agony of anyone not afflicted who must endure them. The
language of sudden grief and disaster is often "No! No! No!..." or "She can't be dead!
She can't be dead..." The sacred dream recital and liturgy, plus many institutional
offshoots, are a repetition of events that once occurred. That the original event was a
terrible event followed by great anxiety is evidenced in many ways, as in the
punitiveness with which unbelievers are regarded, for the unbeliever is saying that
"the tragedy that once happened to you is insignificant." In the realm of rhetoric and
linguistic pragmatics, the sacred expression is using symbols as a way of regressing to
stress, reenacting it, rememorizing the events, and ultimately releasing tensions.

Insistence upon correctness in detail prolongs the generation of memory and at the same
time insures that the gods realize how faithfully these humans have remembered their
lesson. The repetitiveness, another aspect of obsession, and another means of insuring
memorization, progressively fixates the ritual participant upon the root of his
ailment. "She can't stop scratching her mosquito bite," "He wallows in his misery;"
these are trivial obsessive actions. The original recital of the Love Affair would have
taken hours; Homer cut it and shaped it to a new form of art, but note well that he
lets one know that it is far form the original version; he did not steal, abridge it,
and present it as original.

The sacred originates in a stressful and tragic condition. In the process of
sublimation, the tragic stress gives way to liturgical language, promoting the
development of language itself, in both "hieratic" (priestly) and popular (" demotic" )
forms. Tragedy is never lost. Its final triumph is to give birth to comedy.



{S : THE RULES OF MYTHICAL LANGUAGE}
THE RULES OF MYTHICAL LANGUAGE 

The rules of scientific language are well-known. They should actually be called
"ideals," since they cover far less of science than they "should," and necessarily so,
because scientific language cannot generate its highest flights unless it resort to
philosophic language. To the scientist, the rule is: "one event should receive one
signification." Further: "the signification should be the same for anyone to whom it is
communicated." Moreover, "the signification should be testable, by repetition of the
event sequence in experiment, etc." Finally, "events should be described and combined
in forms of signification that do not add external meanings;" that is, no extraneous
feelings or meanings should slip in by design or surreptitiously to spoil the purity of
the generalization. All of this began with Aristotle's nominalism (words are distinct
from, and refer to, objects) and has arrived at Whitehead's operationism (the meanings
of words can only lie in the events they describe).

Aristotle had another side, also. He understood rhetoric and pragmatics. While
developing a rational grammar of science, he was preparing a science of influencing.
Given a particular audience, what symbols should be chosen and manipulated to produce a
desired effect? Here words are signs of mental affections, not exclusively of the
dualities of things. Once pursued, this line of thought has ever more fearful
implications. Not until the latest stage of the modern scientific outlook has a body of
scientific work been permitted to arise that would inquire into the reasons for
reasoning, the meaning of meaning, the ideology behind every body of action, including
the activities of science itself.

When science has come this far, it is capable of analyzing the language of myth
scientifically. The first rule for the interpretation of myth is that symbols in their
content will have a determined and possibly determinable meaning. The second is that
"what the symbols mean" contains, besides other things, "the psychological effects
produced by them." Thirdly, there is an "unconscious science of myth," as well as
certain principles of the "conscious" science of myth that we have dug out and can
apply with predictable effects. Just as the athlete, poet, orator, and composer may not
know the scientific rules of their successful performances, so the myth-teller and
myth-hearer will not usually understand what rules of linguistics and psychology he is
applying.

The most important of these unconscious rules, all of them practiced and evident in the
Love Affair, are perhaps the following:

1. Make a myth of any collectively experienced event that had tragic consequences in
order to give symptomatic relief to the perpetual illness. (The myth of the Love Affair
exemplifies this rule.)

2. Remain steadfastly true to the event. As the consensus that perceived the event then
and there defined it, so relate it. (As a result of this rule, many generations later,
we can behave as cryptographic detectives in relation to the historical character of
the myth. We are trying to replay this rule as it guided the producers of the Love
Affair.)

3. Conceal the truth of the event insofar as it is disturbing. (We are seeking the
truth of the Love Affair in many areas, not the least of which is in the language,
where we observed a number of techniques of concealing the truth while telling it.)

4. Use methods of concealment that contribute symptomatic relief. (We find in the Love
Affair a thoroughly satisfactory plot that amuses, a suggestive language, reiteration,
ritual, collective reassurance.)

5. The therapy should last for the duration of the pain. (Over a span of forty memorial
generations and eighty reproductive generations some portion of humanity has obtained
symptomatic relief from the Love Affair. However, the myth has lost impact steadily
from the settling of heaven, and from more philosophical methods of coping with the
symptoms. The doctrines of the eternal constancy of the heavens, the practical
timelessness of earthly change, and the gradual evolution of humans - sometimes
referred to altogether as the ideology of uniformitarianism - have proven a more
effective repressor and a partial therapy in the long run. They have made the Love
Affair mainly a salacious tale, told in a thousand forms, whose insistent threats and
memories linger only vaguely.

As for adults, so for babies.
So turkey-lurkey turned back, and walked with gander-lander, goose-loose, drake-lake,
duck-luck, cock-lock, hen-len, and chicken-licken. And as they were going along, they
met fox-lox. And fox-lox said "Where are you going, my pretty maids?" And they said,
"Chicken-Licken went to the wood, and the sky fell upon her poor bald pate, and we are
going to tell the king." And fox-lox said, "Come along with me, and I will show you the
way." But fox-lox took them into the fox's hole, and he and his young ones soon ate up
poor chicken-licken, hen-len, cock-lock, duck-luck, drake-lake, goose-loose, gander-
lander, and turkey-lurkey, and they never saw the king to tell him that the sky had
fallen! [22]

The story is much longer, of course, because one after another of the little animals is
added to the fearful procession following chicken-licken, and the list is repeated
liturgically. The sky is beginning to fall; the people are frightened; they seek the
religio-secular authority to ease their fears or perhaps to do something about it.

But they encounter the fox who, ancient myths relate, "nibbles continuously at the
thong of the yoke which holds together heaven and earth" (Proclus) and "German folklore
adds that when the fox succeeds, the world will come to its end." This same fox can
also be a wolf, and a dog. It is a star. It is also called "Electra, mother of
Dardanus, who left her station among the Pleiades, desperate because of Ilion's
(Troy's) fall, and retired above the second star of the beam... others call this star
'fox. '" So write Santillana and von Dechend, from their sources, calling finally upon
the great expert on ancient astronomy, F. X. Kugler who had said: "The star at the beam
of the wagon is the fox star: Era, the powerful among the gods. In astrological usage,
it represents above all the planet Mars/ Nergal."  [23]

The same story, whose origins disappear into the immemorial (read "memorial") past, has
been altered over the last century of time. Today, people may read to their three-year
olds in a new version  [24]  that the little animals encounter, not a fox, but a wise
owl, and that the owl skeptically asks to be shown the fallen piece of sky: heaven
cannot fall; it turns out that it was only an apple that had fallen. They found the
apple and Chicken-Licken ate it and was happy.

Alas, they are back to the owl, which happens to have been a paramount symbol of "owl-
eyed" Athena  [25] , and they are eating the forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden.
Once more, "success through failure."




{S : Notes (Chapter 14: The Uses of Language)}
Notes (Chapter 14: The Uses of Language) 

1. Greek Metre (trans. from German ed;, 1927 and addenda, by H. Lloyd-Jones, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 59.

2. Ibid., pp 1-2.

3. Ibid, pp. 3-4.

4. Greek Metaphor (1936, reprinted New York: Johnson reprint. Corp., 1972), p. 120.

5. Ibid., p. 121.

6. Ibid., p. 121.

7. Ibid., p. 65.

8. D. page, The Homeric Odyssey pp. 52, 72 et passim. The Iliad and the Odyssey do not
seem to have written by the same person either. The two epics have divergent
vocabularies. Ibid.. pp. 149-57.

9. Ibid., p. 158.

10. Page, Ibid., p. 139.

11. "Problems Concerned with Homer and the Epics," in Thomas, op. cit.. pp. 16. 18. 42.

12. Op. cit., pp. m147-8.

13. Ibid., p. 97.

14. A. J. B. Wace writes in the Foreword to M. Ventris and J. Chadwick's Documents in
Mycenean Greek (Cambride, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press. 1959), XXViii. that Linear B
probably carried over until driven out by the more efficient Phoenician alphabet. We
Would agree that both alphabets were concurrently used, and, moreover, the success of
the new alphabet was precipitated by the natural disasters and social destruction.

15. Page, Ibid., p. 161, fin. 8.

16. Summarized, Ibid., p. 159, 53 ff.

17. This construction is supported as conceivable in an electric encounter in the study
by Franz Xavier Kugler of the Sibylline oracles, Stecchini, op. cit., p. 143. "The
Battle of the stars began with the appearance in the eastern sky of a body as bright as
the sun and similar in apparent diameter to the sun and the moon. The light of the sun
was replaced by long streams of flame crossing each other."

18. Cedric H. Whitman, "Fire and Other Elements; "in Steiner and Fagles, op. cit., pp.
40 ff. Cf. also D. page, The Homeric Odyssey, 152-3.

19. J. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophers (London, 1920), 3rd ed., p. 23; Plato's
Epinomis (Harvard edition, Oxford: Clarendon press, 1928, lines 986a-987d) first gives
the planets their Greek Present names.

20. W. B. Stanford, Greek Metaphor (Oxford, Eng.: Blackwell, 1936), 67, 81, citing
Franz Dornsieff, Pindars Stil (1921). Cf. supra, p. 175.

21. Isaac N. Vail citing Eckhel, p. 45, of Mythic Mountain (Santa Barbara, Calif.:
Annular publications. 1972). see also above. p. 160.

22. This last part of the typically repetitious (liturgical) story for tiny children
called "Chicken-Licken," is quoted from James O. Halliwell-Phillips, Popular Rhymes and
Nursery Tales (London: J. R. Smith, 1849), p. 31. The story is found in Africa, India,
all over Europe. Cf. my own note in The Burning of Troy.

23. G. de Santillana and II. van Dechend, Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame
of Time.( Boston: Gambit, 1969), p. 385.

24. Chicken Little (Racine, Wisc.: Whitman Publ. co., 1958).

25. The owl is a marvelous tranfiguration of a blazing-eyed twin comet that may have
been one source of the duality of Athena-Hephaestus and the many twin serpent symbols
of antiquity.




{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS}
{P PART 3: }
{Q THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR}
{C Chapter 15: }
{T THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF MEMORY}
{S - }




THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART THREE:
THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF MEMORY
In Pieria, Memoria, ruler of the hills of Eleuther, gave birth to the Muses out of union
with Zeus, son of Chronos, and thus of the forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow.

So writes Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer in his Genealogy of the Gods. The Theogony was
composed after 730 B. C., that is, during or after the era of troubled skies; but it was
a mythical work, "reporting" on events that had occurred hundreds and thousands of year
before. "The ordered pantheon of Hesiod ended in supplanting the anarchic society of the
Homeric Gods."  [1]

A functional psychology rests in the quoted passage. "Remembering" was no mere
scratching of experience upon a tabula rasa of the mind. Memoria or Mnemosyne or
"Recollector," is the mother of history (Clio). She has as her progeny the means of
controlling herself, for Zeus is the ordering paternal force. There are nine (some said
three or five) muses governing the arts and sciences - dancing, music, and singing, but
also history and astronomy. They will lend human memory its possibilities of selective
attention, delusion, illusion, abatement, extension, a shadowing and heightening - all
that is necessary to achieve that combination of remembering and forgetting which makes
social life possible on a level that is higher than the level of non-remembering or
total amnesia. Significantly, Memoria is the daughter of Uranus, who was the grandfather
of Zeus; she is no mere sprite. Her Eleutherian Hills are the realm of freedom, so she
governs freedom.

Without further ado, we may assert that the muses were created "by Zeus" to control the
human memory so that humans should forget their catastrophes, and in so doing get
surcease from sorrows. The word "muse" by itself has a meaning of happiness. And that
the Muses will achieve this by transforming events through art and song, through myth.
The memory of disasters is doctored "by Zeus" ultimately to brainwash humanity and to
present the new order of heaven as proper, lawful, and beautiful. Hesiod, reciting this
profound truth, goes on to describe how the muses work, reminding us of a combined team
for domestic propaganda and psychological warfare.

As a result, all the arts and sciences have been manipulated by the muses. What we know
of the catastrophes must come from a "natural history" - geology, biology, physics and
astronomy - and a politics, philosophy, and theology that have been censored by the
Muses. Additionally, we must obtain our historical material from myth, song, dances, and
drama that are similarly screened. It is well to insist upon this premise, whether we
come to the problem from an acquaintanceship with the natural sciences or the social
sciences. The gods and especially Zeus, who seems under various names to have developed
the patterns of anthropological psychology among most cultures, have required this
premise of us.

The science of remembering and forgetting - what shall it be called - mnemonology? Its
scope ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime; from the "psychopathology of everyday
life," as Freud put it, to the "collective amnesia" that Velikovsky asserts of ancient
catastrophes and that German educators observe as they try to teach the history of
Nazism. It must deal with the Love Affair of Ares and Aphrodite that masks a world
disaster, and with nursery songs that mask the murder of kings.

We may quote what Katherine Elwes Thomas found when she explored The Real Personages of
Mother Goose:
The lines of Little Bo-Peep and Little Boy Blue, which to childish minds have only
quaint charm of meaning, which suggest but the gayest of blue skies and rapturous-
hearted creatures disporting in daisy-pied meadows, hold in reality grim import. Across
all this nursery lore there falls at times the black shadow of the headman's block and
in their seeming lightness are portrayed the tragedies of kings and queens, the
corruptions of opposing political parties, and stories of fanatical religious strife
that have gone to make world history.

For instance, the child sings of "four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie." And "when
the pie was opened the birds began to sing," now, "wasn't that a tasty dish to put
before the King?" The child is singing of actual history that was never heard or
learned, of an incident in the grim struggle between the English Crown and the Church,
during which, to appease the greed and hostility of the King, twenty-four deeds of
church land were sealed into a pouch of dough and delivered to his castle. In old slang,
the dough was handed over; in new slang, the "bread." The elapsed time from event to
amnesiac song might have been less than a century.

The Oedipus myth, to take another instance, is capable of providing an accurate account
of an episode in the history of Egypt. Its central figure was the Pharaoh Akhnaton. The
story survived its original obliteration at the hands of the theocracy of Egyptian
Thebes. It held intact as it was transferred across cultures, probably via Ugarit whose
King Nikomedes may have founded Grecian Thebes, as Cadmus. By the time of Sophocles'
tragedy, Oedipus Rex, seven mnemonic or fourteen reproductive generations had passed,
that is, about four hundred years. [2] .

Heavy trauma, it is here proposed, is at the source of many features of the higher
intellectual operations and "advanced" social institutions of humankind.
An experience which we call traumatic is one which within a very short space of time
subjects the mind to such a very high increase of stimulation that assimilation or
elaboration of it can no longer be effected by normal means, so that lasting
disturbances must result in the distribution of the available energy of the mind  [3] .



{S : TRAUMATIC ORIGIN OF MEMORY}
TRAUMATIC ORIGIN OF MEMORY 

In a prescient passage Friedrich Nietzsche (Genealogy of Morals, 1887) stabs into the
heart of the matter. He asks, "How can one create a memory for the human animal? How can
one impress something upon this partly obtuse, partly flighty mind, attuned only to the
passing moment, in such a way that it will stay there?"  [4]

And he continues,
"One can well believe that the answers and methods for solving this primeval problem
were not precisely gentle; perhaps indeed there was nothing more fearful and uncanny in
the whole prehistory of man than his mnenotechnics. If something is to stay in the
memory it must be burned in; only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory -
this is a main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on
earth. One might even say that wherever on earth solemnity, seriousness, mystery, and
gloomy coloring still distinguish the life of man and a people, something of the terror
that formerly attended all promises, pledges, and vows on earth is still effective: the
past, the longest, deepest and sternest past, breathes upon us and rises up in us
whenever we become 'serious. ' Man could never do without blood, torture and sacrifices
when he felt the need to create a memory for himself; the most repulsive mutilations
(castration, for example), the cruelest rites of all the religious cults (and all
religions are at the deepest level systems of cruelties) - all this has its origin in
the instinct that realized pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics."  [5]

Unfortunately, after this amazing passage, Nietzsche's genesis collapses. Although he
immediately goes hunting for the acts that provoked such mnemotechnics, he shoots a
little rabbit: the primitive forms of contract between buyers and sellers. In order to
trade, men had to keep promises; in order to ensure obligations, the failure to repay
had to be punished severely: thus the genealogy of morals.

One is reminded of Sigmund Freud's alternate route to fundamental error in Totem and
Taboo: that in the oedipal conflict and the slaying of the father, man achieved a (bad)
conscience and the need to justify and to punish. The Oedipus myth, as was said above,
has much breadth and staying power, but a still greater and universal fear had to be
imposed to support its recollection, and this was the fear of (devotion to) the god of
Akhnaton. And it is difficult to conceive of anything more grand and durable than the
catastrophes attendant upon encounters between Earth and other heavenly forces.

It is significant that Freud, perceiving an inadequacy of general sexual theory, moved
Beyond the Pleasure Principle  [6] , searching out a deeper fear that he termed the
death instinct and observed to be present especially in veterans suffering from "shell-
shock," whose nightmares and hallucinations found them continuously repeating what,
after all, could hardly be called a pleasurable wish. Nor did such "symptoms vanish when
their unconscious antecedents have been made conscious," as Freud remarks concerning
obsessive fixations, following his earlier theory  [7] . He and many others would have
done well to stick with Nietzsche's brilliant premise and continue the search for
historical psychological experiences of great stress befalling humankind when it had
arrived at a complex state of organic potential.

The Love Affair involves both a disgraced contract and a disgraced sexuality. But these
are cover-ups for a disaster too great to talk about. Indeed, by the time that the Love
Affair occurred, only sexual imagery and violence were sufficiently eloquent to use as
disguises, at least in literature; beyond that, one would have to resort for the
patterning and recapitulation of such traumas to religious and political institutions -
hierarchic, obsessed with the symbolism of violence, compulsively repetitive. The Love
Affair, one must bear in mind, was only the latest in a series of catastrophes over
thousands of years, from which human nature as we have known it was born and which
shaped the physical world in which we live today.

Man's memory itself, the prototypical remembering, is a consequence of catastrophe more
than of any other incidental or habitual interest of humanity. The Love Affair, in
reflecting a catastrophe, reflects a late event in a series of catastrophes that created
memory. It was perhaps the last of the qualitatively distinct mass events on the basis
of which memory was institutionalized, routinized, and socialized. Humans now remember
(and forget) according to rules in which social forces play a continuous role, but this
role evolved from catastrophes.



{S : THE RULES OF MEMORY}
THE RULES OF MEMORY 

All memory occurs under conditions that guarantee its imperfection. Given its mode of
creation, remembering must function compatibly. No datum will enter the mind
photographically. Rather the inputs will be screened not only by the senses, which
themselves, in large part, perceive because of their prior social conditioning, but by
the willingness to admit only censored data. This holds true, as many careful studies
have shown, for the most noncontroversial and trivial kinds of experiences. Who says
remember says select, who says memory, says forgetting. By the time of Homer, numerous
natural disasters had befallen humanity; the perfect ease of the whole Phaeacian
episode, including the Love Affair, attests to the approaching achievement of "perfect
imperfection": nothing of the original truth need be omitted, so well under control are
the conditions creating imperfections. We are on our way to the climax of artistic
sublimation.

The concept of "perfect memory" is a useful fiction. One is compelled to say that it is
a theocratic fiction. For the content of what is remembered is in the broadest sense
religiously and politically determined. The ideal canons of registering and remembering,
set by modern science, are evidence in themselves that "you cannot trust your memory"
and "independent observers have to confirm the same facts." But also the establishment
of scientists as a social system lays down the rules of what is to be watched for, what
is to be ignored, and what is to be distorted. The Homerids were the practitioners and
teachers of "accurate memory" as defined to protect society against its anxieties.

The intensity of remembering is directly proportional to the gravity of a trauma. By
intensity is meant sharpness, detail, and durability in conscious and unconscious form.
By gravity is meant how deeply and adversely one is affected in the major regions of his
life: his physical being, his cherished ones, his group, his wealth, his control, his
beliefs about good and the true. Machiavelli said to the rules: it is better to be
feared by the people than to be loved, if you cannot be both. Fear and anxiety drove
primeval humanity to invent and to organize. Fear mixed itself early with love, and
produced the continuous ambivalence towards sexuality that is exhibited in the Love
Affair.

The most intense memories are likely to occur without "willing" them. This is
understandable once we consider that no one will willingly subject himself to the
conditions that produce intense memories. But one will try to will a pleasant memory.
How many times do people think: "I shall never forget this beautiful sunset... I shall
always remember this kindness... I shall never forget this orgasm," only to lose their
grasp of the memory shortly thereafter. If a person remembers "a kind act" done to him
long ago, it is in the context of a generally unkind and fearful environment of acts.
The most that can be done to "will" the memory is to tie it consciously and
unconsciously to disasters and especially institutionalize the disasters so that the
group will continuously reenact them. All great historical religions are based upon
these psychological operations.

The most intense memories are most likely to be unavailable to the conscious mind, and
to be buried in dreams and myths. These latter act to suppress and control anxiety. The
dream and myth language is likely to approach as close as possible to the ultimate
universal, traumatic experiences, without becoming unbearable. It rides on the tracks of
birth throes, the fearful side of sexual copulation, death scenes, violence and
conflict, including all the conventional transformations of these materials into
religious and social activities, routines and institutions. This "step-down" principle
works on the descent into the depths of the unconscious; it works, that is, on the depth
of burial, and it brings about the selection of the next less traumatic kind of material
as the screen for the more traumatizing type.

The speed of remembering is proportionate to the intensity of the trauma. "The
experience burned itself indelibly upon my mind," one says. A single experience is
enough to cause remembering, if it is grave enough. If it is too grave, physical
collapse occurs and no further memorization is possible. At the other extreme, in the
absence of fear, interest or even recognition - as in most classrooms, an abundance of
knowledge moves, as they say, "from the notes of the teacher to the notes of the student
without passing through the minds of either." If our physical analysis is correct, the
astral Love Affair occupied a few hours among many years of experiencing all sorts of
things.

The phenotypes of the myth are functions of the archetypes of the cultural personality,
which is merely to say that the kind of story told, together with its details, are
characteristic of the culture. Some more ancient pre-Greek and proto-Greek cultures
practicing group marriage would have had to find a different plot and details to screen
the reiteration of the Moon and Mars encounter. It is characteristic of "Western man's"
partially Greek-born culture, and a proof of his cultural ancestry, that the adulterous
love triangle, descended from the Greeks, is still a favorite artistic theme.



{S : FORGETTING}
FORGETTING 

Forgetting is subject to the same rules as remembering. We remember to forget. That is,
amnesia is activated in the same way as memory. Glancing at the list of rules of
remembering, one can substitute forgetting for remembering and get the following rules
of forgetting.

Like remembering, forgetting is guaranteed to occur under all conditions, and to be
imperfect, never complete. Nor is forgetting accurate: it is ragged, affected by many
particular causes. If the popular metaphor speaks of the stream of memory, one can speak
as well of the stream of forgetting. Forgetting occurs proportionate to the gravity of a
trauma, and forgetting occurs without willing to forget.

The most intense forgetfulness is most likely to be available to the conscious mind; one
must admit "we cannot recall what it is that we have forgotten," when the thing
forgotten is a matter of grave threat to the mind.

Forgetting, too, speeds up with the intensity of the trauma. For this reason one can
believe that events that occurred perhaps only a generation before Homer, or even in his
lifetime, might achieve a complete aesthetic screen at his hands. Of course, a multitude
of local scenarios are possible; but let us imagine what may have happened in a typical
disaster of the "Age of Mars" that is, in the eighth and seventh centuries  [8] .

An ordinary person is alerted and examines the sky with a foreboding of evil. A
brilliant speck grows larger from day to day. He is told that it has done so before,
with terrible consequences. The memory is already excited. Calendars are studied and
worked over. Oracles are consulted. All group efforts are mobilized to control the
menace: rituals of subservience and devotion; the stricter punishment of any suspected
deviants in all areas of law and conduct; the destruction of enemies if they can be
promptly engaged; the sacrifice of more and more valuable properties and persons.

Relentlessly the menace approaches. The sky is full of lights, shapes and turbulence.
The Earth begins to respond - to live, to move, to smoke, to blow up strong winds, to
shriek, to take fire. Thunderbolts strike on all sides. Our hero watches, bemused. He is
exceedingly frightened, as are his family and neighbors. There may be a pandemonium in
which he faints or is struck dumb; he may scramble into a temple or house or cave; he
will cover his head. The young will observe more than the old. "The disaster occurs in
successive kinds of turbulence, in all the various destructive forms of earth, air,
fire, and water, the primordial elements. Animals, both tame and wild, crowd in upon
people, terrified, unaggressive, unhungry. Eardrums are blown in or sucked out by abrupt
pressure changes. Some are struck blind, others gassed. Strange objects and lifeforms
drop from the sky. The sky reels. The waters gyrate madly and rush to and fro."

The vista is one of unmitigated disaster. There is nowhere to go. The survivors regroup
after each incident. They are partially paralyzed with fear and despair, partly striving
for survival and control.

"What god is angry?" they wonder, if they don't already know. What other gods can they
appeal to and how? What trait of a god should they address themselves to? The most
important religious and political decisions of their lifetimes are made; the most sacred
instruments and skills of the immemorial past are called upon in the crisis. Nothing,
nobody, will ever persuade him to behave differently, or his children or, if they can
help it, their descendants into the eternal future.

When the disasters subside, the survivors are crazed. They must regroup, recollect their
thoughts, and do something about the memory. This is not a task for an astronomer
sitting in the air-conditioned hall of a giant telescope in Arizona. Nor for a sober
historian. It is a task for any surviving priest rulers: "We have been visited by the
gods. The figures they strike in the sky are their various apparitions when destructive
and punitive... Good gods and spirits fight evil ones. Our conduct displeases them: we
must strengthen our observance of rituals: purify ourselves; expiate our sins; sacrifice
ever more precious possessions; kill more enemies; control the libertarian; guard the
names by which we call a god; and remind ourselves forevermore of the events of these
days while we watch for their eventual recurrence."

Again history is quickly subverted: indeed, it has never existed. Instead memorial
activities are planned by the community that will register whatever intensity on the
memorial-screen is sufficient to suppress the pain of the memory of the original
experience plus all the preceding related and similar traumatic experiences.

It is well to be quite explicit: No sooner is a disaster experienced than it is
remembered: no sooner remembered than it is forgotten. All the rules of remembering are
rules of forgetting.

What? Is memory a forgetting while to forget is to remember? One seems to be approaching
this paradox; if it is not indeed an absurdity. Yet, if we resolve this paradox we shall
better understand the great mystery of myth, which bids us remember ferociously in order
the more firmly and securely to forget.

The paradox disappears with one fact, well appreciated. The fact is that a memory can
enter the mind, but can rarely leave it. Except by organic lesion, there is little
forgetting. The biological system can scarcely throw off a memory; it can readily
manipulate it.

What is called "forgetting" is the eternal bookkeeping system of memory. From conception
to dissolution and death, the system will always show a net profit. But, like many a
bookkeeping system in commerce, memorial bookkeeping has numerous ways of casting the
balance so as to conceal the surplus. It is with the forgotten material that the mind
works to create myth, art, and hypothesis. The concept of forgetting is needed to
describe the handling of the transactions of memory that permit consciousness,
instrumentally rational conduct, and normal behavior.

Where is the balance cast that makes these two opposites indeed opposite? In the
functional machinery of the mind, where opposites are coined according to the needs of
the moment. Whatever stabilizes the organism's "normalcy" is chosen; and the organism
remembers or forgets conveniently.



{S : AMNESIAC PHILOSOPHERS}
AMNESIAC PHILOSOPHERS 

Whatever the finesse with which memory and forgetfulness may be explained, there must
remain some incredulity in the modern mind. Scientists believe proudly that they can
read any evidence unflinchingly. If the human mind that experienced catastrophe should
not remember consciously, and discourse liberally and frankly upon it, what then of
those tough intellectuals of ancient times who conducted inquiries afterwards? Why have
they not handed down frank evidence of catastrophes? The disbelief of the theory of the
Love Affair that was based upon archeological, geological and astronomical grounds may
have changed to acceptance. But what of the silences of ancient history?

Though certain biases of languages and philosophy that formed after the catastrophes
have already been noted - several additional suggestions may be offered as to why
Hesiod, Homer, Thales, Pythagoras, Plato and other illustrious ancient Greeks do not
frankly tell their curious descendants of the true deeds of Mars and the Moon.

In the first place, natural disasters and sudden change did occupy the minds of ancient
thinkers (sticking still to the Greek-speaking area). Homer's Iliad is replete with
accounts of god-enacted and god-caused disaster. In Aristophanes' comedy, "The Clouds,"
the gods reprove the Moon for having brought disasters to the calendar and their cult.
Plato begs us to take him seriously when he relates the story of the destruction of
Atlantis. (One may infer that there were a great many spoofers of old myth in Athens.)
In The Laws, he asserts that mankind has been reduced to marginal survivors on numerous
occasions owing to natural disasters. Conversely, he is angry at the "immorality" of
Homer, which he takes at face value, and in the same dialogue he proclaims the god-given
harmony and regularity of the heavenly spheres and would punish severely offenders who
claim disasters have come or will come from the skies. Plato's self-contradictions in
respect to catastrophism are serious. They reveal great doubts in his mind, and what in
an ordinary person would be called "typical neurotic aggressiveness to resolve the
tensions provoked by his doubts."

In the Epinomis, Plato is again exhibiting his anxieties, in a form that has not been
generally appreciated. As mentioned in an earlier place, he gave the present Greek names
of the planets for the first time. He offers the lame excuse that the fiery terms used
for the heavenly bodies were so similar because the Greeks did not know the planets and
did not want unfairly to give names to some but not to others.

Perhaps the whole matter of naming was controversial, involving as it did ancient
psychological associations, theological theories, and intercultural contacts with
Egyptians, Syrians, and others.

In any event, attention should be called to Plato's statement that the heavenly bodies
are gods without souls. He distinguishes these from the Olympian gods, whom he dislikes,
precisely because of their reputation for immorality and uncontrollability. He is, in
effect, trying to rid the mundane scene of these gods, by exiling them in the eternal
immutable astral regions. He would then fix the calendar of festivals to their periods.
This would seem to be a major unconscious philosophical step towards controlling the
gods and paving the way for a lawful universe. Thus it happened that Plato usurped the
Olympian gods.

Aristotle, over three hundred years after the Love Affair, was still conscientious, if
serene, in his study of the skies: heaven and the planets are self-moved movers
executing perfectly regular motions; they are substances immune to change and far more
perfect than man. He is nevertheless impelled to write of planets:
Our forefathers in the most remote ages have handed down to us, their posterity, a
tradition, in the form of a myth, that these substances are Gods and that the divine
encloses the whole of nature. The rest of the tradition has been added later in mythical
form with a view to the persuasion of the multitude and to its legal and utilitarian
expedience; they say these Gods are in the form of men or like some of the other
animals, and they say other things consequent on and similar to these which we have
mentioned. But if we were to separate the first point from these additions and take it
alone - that they thought the first substances to be Gods, we must regard this as an
inspired utterance, and reflect that, while probably each art and science has often been
developed as far as possible and has again perished, these opinions have been preserved
until the present, like relics of the ancient treasure. Only thus, then, is the opinion
of our ancestors and our earliest predecessors clear to us  [9] .

Moreover, the ancients were habituated to a level of natural disaster that would
astonish moderns. Earthquakes, erupting volcanoes, and "rushing stars" (meteorites and
comets) were much more common in the era following the settling of heaven. Earthquakes
were ordinary in Rome, for instance, even five centuries later. The Greeks did not
develop a tradition of geological and astronomical reporting until the scientific period
began, over a century after Homer sang (seventh century). Herodotus carries remarks
about disaster in his Histories (fifth century); Thucydides, who could describe plagues
in acceptable modern medical style, flourished 250 years after the Love Affair. He
reported no astral phenomena of consequence during the Peloponnesian Wars.

Third, the number of survivors was small. Many storage and retrieval systems of memory
were blasted or drowned out. If the many dutiful clerks of Pylos, Mycenae, Knossos,
Troy, and other centers had continued their bureaucracies, the records might be ample.

Furthermore, astral encounters and an earthly turbulence would provoke dense or
brilliant atmospheric conditions that would render stable observations rare. Encounters
would often be obscured and only partly visible in the areas where there would be
potentially competent observers. One would always expect disputation as to what occurred
when the celestial armies clashed.

The printing press was unknown and only the bark of the papyrus, clay tablets, stone,
and several types of leaf were the media for the inscription and transmission of
messages nonorally. Although more durable than modern books and film, they lacked the
widespread dissemination that can be achieved with the printed word. Records were always
few and a great burden was placed upon accurate memorization and repetition to the
young, to an extent quite unappreciated today.

Oral accounts, like writing to be sure, have intrinsic mnemonic techniques, which, to
the discredit of our scientific age, have not been adequately analyzed, and which lend,
therefore, a greater semblance of error that actually exists in the accounts told.
Personification of events, for example, is a technique of illiterate memorization, as
well as a psychological process that is pervasive of mental operations in nearly all
cultures.

There has been an almost total destruction of records, both from the time of the
catastrophes and later. Only several thousands of the clay tablets from several
locations carrying the language "Linear B" have been rescued from the ruins of Mycenaean
culture. These tablets, by their paucity and scorched condition offer mute testimony
that a well-administered civilization became a shambles of fire, destruction and death
perhaps in a few hours, and a few events.

The classical period produced thousands of volumes by scientists on most subjects.
Almost all of these have been lost owing to carelessness, barbarian depredations, and
political and religious fanaticism  [10] . Of 150 known Greek authors of tragic drama,
we have full plays by only three of them and only thirty-three of the 297 creations of
these three men remain. From this ancient treasure would have come a number of plays
such as Seneca's Thyestes, which could only be a pale later replay of Sophocles' lost
Atreus, both concerned with the devastating commotions of the globe in the period of the
Love Affair.

Owing to the rules of memory and forgetting, one should not expect an elaborate
literature of catastrophe to have existed in scientific form, but the writings of
Pythagoras, Eudoxos, Alcmaion, Eratosthenes and many another author would have
established ample foundations for a set of modern sciences that would admit of
catastrophism in their theories.

When the great modern astronomer, Schiaparelli, reconstructed the planetary theory of
Eudoxos (408-355), the colleague of Plato (427?-347) and Aristotle, he had this to say:
For Jupiter and Saturn, and to some extent for Mercury also, the system was capable of
giving on the whole a satisfactory explanation of their motion in longitude, their
stationary points, and their retrograde motions; for Venus it was unsatisfactory, and it
failed altogether in the case of Mars. The limits of motion in latitude represented by
the various hippopedes were in tolerable agreement with observed facts, although the
periods of the deviations and their places in the cycle were quite wrong."  [11]

We would surmise that Eudoxos' problem arose from an absence of data concerning the
classical and present celestial order. For the other planets, he may have had access to
several centuries of observations from Egypt or Mesopotamia. For Venus, and even more
for Mars, there may have been fewer ancient sources and less lengthy series of
observations available to him. These planets, too, in their present motions, are more
difficult to plot than the others. Perhaps the problem of theory was even more important
than the problem of data; he might have had to disencumber himself of a theory of
motions and cycles that was more adequate for an earlier sky than for a classical sky.

If this speculation about Eudoxos is tenable, one may dissever in him the factors of
amnesiac relief through abstraction, a lack of fundamental data from the past and
puzzlement owing to incorrect theory. Eudoxos was striving to order the cleared skies;
he would in any event have found ancient evidence of erratic skies a nuisance and
impediment.

These several reasons why direct scientific observations of ancient catastrophes have
rarely reached us complement the primary and most striking reason that has already been
discussed: massive instantaneous amnesia in direct proportion to the pain and horror of
disaster, followed by heavy ritualistic, aggressive, and expressive displacement of the
fear and avoidance involved. Nichomachus of Gerasa and Lucian agreed; the divine Orpheus
was the founder of astronomy and the inventor of the harp. "The harp, that had seven
chords, discoursed the harmony of the errant spheres."  [12]

The "errant spheres;" the disasters; the memory and the forgetting; the muses; the harp
for the sublimation of memory; and the "holy dreamtime songs" like the Love Affair.




{S : Notes (Chapter 15: The Birth and Death of Memory)}
Notes (Chapter 15: The Birth and Death of Memory) 

1. Mireaux, op. cit., p. 429, who acutely perceives that Hesiod is a "futurist," not a"
reactionary," and that his book on farming and farm life, Works and Days, was a treatise
searching for justice and orderly existence.

2. Cf. I Velikovsky, Oedipus and Akhnaton (New York: Doubleday. 1960); Cyrus Gordon,
"Oedipus and Akhnaton," II Pens‚e, no. 2( 1972), p. 30: also notes in the same issue. We
are using Velikovsky's revised chronology; John Holbrook, Jr. interprets this in III
Pensee, no. 2( 1973). I use term "mnemonic generation" to denote a sixty-year "memorial
generation" in which the oldest members of a group can convey information to young
children.

3. Sigmund Freud, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1916-7: Eng. trans. 1929), New
York: Washington Square press, 1935), p. 286.

4. p. 496 of the Kaufman edition.

5. Ibid., p. 497. Cf. Carl J. Jung, "Approaching the Unconscious," in Man and His
Symbols (New York: Dell, 968), 1-94, for related material on fear, and on memory, pp.
34, 52-3.

6. 1920, published in English, 195-, rev. ed. 1961, New York: Liveright; Psycho-Analysis
and the War Neuroses( 1919), Stand. Ed:, XVII, 207;

7. General Introduction, op. cit., p. 291, 287.

8. Frank W. Lane's book, The Elements Rage (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1965), Can be
used as a kind of reference manual for all that happens when the forces of nature
intensify into their disastrous forms.

9. Metaphysics (W. D. Ross trans.) Vol. II, L. 1074b.

10. Cf. H. Bellamy, Moon, Myths and Man (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), pp. 44-7, for
details of the destruction of ancient records.

11. Quoted in Ross, op. cit., II, P. 390. Cf. Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in
Ancient Pythagoreanism, trans. by E. L. Miner (Cambridge Harvard U. Press, 1972), part
IV, regarding, inter alia, Eudoxus' influence on Plato.

12. Lucian (second century, A. D.), "Astrology," in Works, Vol. V, A. M. Harmon, trans.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ, Press, 1936), p. 355. Nichomachus (first century A. D.)
was famous for his mathematical accuracy.



{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS}
{P PART 3: }
{Q THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR}
{C Chapter 16: }
{T THE TRANSFIGURATION OF TRAUMA}
{S - }




THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART THREE:
THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE TRANSFIGURATION OF TRAUMA

One thunderstorm does not make a great god, nor does one volcano. Further, ordinary
nature does not make a great god, neither its abundances nor its famines. The struggles
of old bulls with young bulls over cows do not make a great god. A great god dwells in
heaven, but can be everywhere. A people will recognize another people's great god as
kindred but, too, the god is often hostile. Every great god emerges out of an apparently
universal disaster in which the skies are involved, not excepting the great Mother -
Earth Goddess, oldest of all, who cast off from her heaving body the oppressive Heaven,
Uranus.

The gods of the Love Affair are great gods. And to the skeptic who deplores the deceit,
adultery, an generally libertine and human deportment of these "stars," one might
remark: "You cannot imagine how really badly these gods behaved; it was inutterably
worse... Anyhow, no one is saying that these are your gods, and we had better not get
onto that subject."

The gods of Demodocus opera theater behave as they do to cover up their real behavior
which is infinitely more destructive, indiscriminate, and punitive. The next problem of
this stage is to show how their more intolerable behavior works itself out as a bedroom
farce. How was the traumatic disaster transformed?



{S : DREAMWORK}
DREAMWORK 

The best available model for the interpretation of a myth is the dream. As was shown in
an early chapter, the staging of the telling of myth creates a collective Holy
Dreamtime. The audience is prepared to dream, to engage in dreamwork themselves, and to
emerge with a sense of heightened reality. For reality is the unreality that enable
people to compose their anxieties. In The Interpretation of Dreams, his admitted
masterwork  [1] , Sigmund Freud told how dream functions to keep one asleep, and one can
only stay asleep so long as the unconscious problems that bother him most are censored
and reworked into a form, which, while often disgusting and disturbing upon
recollection, is nevertheless better than the unconscious reality.

To discover the latent wish whose fulfillment keeps one asleep is not always easy, as
many a psychiatrist will attest. Homer tried his hand at it, in an astonishing
scientific leap over two millennia:

It is dark. Odysseus has returned to his palace. He presents himself to Penelope, his
wife, in the disguise of an old beggar who has some knowledge of her husband, the long-
wandering king of Ithaca. He wins her confidence. Penelope speaks to him (in disguise as
an old beggar):

Let me ask you to interpret a dream of mine which I shall now describe. I keep a flock
of twenty geese in the place. They come in from the pond to pick up their grain and I
delight in watching them. In my dream I saw a great eagle swoop down from the hills and
break their neck with his crooked beak, killing them all, There they lay in a heap on
the floor while he vanished in the open sky. I wept and cried aloud, though it was only
a dream, and the Achaean ladies, gathering around me, found me sobbing my heart out
because the eagle had slaughtered my geese. But the bird came back. He perched on a
jutting timber of the roof, and breaking into human speech he checked my tears. "Take
heart," he said, 'daughter of the noble Icarius. This is not a dream but a happy reality
which you shall see fulfilled. The geese were your lovers, and I that played the eagle's
part am now your husband, home again and ready to deal out grim punishment to every man
among them. ' At this point I awoke. I looked around me and there I saw the geese in the
yard pecking their grain at the trough in their accustomed place.

"Lady," replied the subtle Odysseus, "nobody could force any other meaning on this
dream; You have learnt from Odysseus himself how he will translate it into fact. Clearly
the suitors are all of them doomed: There is not one who will get away alive." [2] The
cunning and cautious Odysseus agrees quickly, in an uncharacteristic way. (Or can one
believe that Homer was so extremely subtle as to make him here super-cunning?)

A psychiatrist does well to avoid counsel where his own private involvement is deep.
Penelope's wish may not have been that her husband return and the suitors be slain, but
quite the contrary, that her legendary patriarchal husband not return so that her
beautiful geese could continue to play about her and eat from her board. This latent and
ambivalent wish has been bothering her and making her sleep badly, we hear. Perhaps the
best that the dream could contrive for her was to act out what she feared, followed by a
hysterical awakening; and then came the half-asleep explanation, with which Odysseus
emphatically agreed  [3] .

It is perhaps one of the signal achievements of humanity to have discovered and applied
the principles of collective dreamwork. The sacred conscious dreamers of ancient Phaecia
do stay asleep and it is an amusing dream. They are awakened gently by the boys leaping
into the air after a ball. Odysseus, one might think, should have been upset by the Love
Affair dream. It would not stretch the imagination to put himself in Hephaestus' place,
long absent, with his wife rumored to be consorting with various suitors, enjoying his
bed as they were his board. Instead he was "glad at heart, following the Song of
Demodocus." There was fundamentally more at stake in the dream than his Penelope and
possessions.

The reduction of the gods to human terms in the Love Affair myth under examination is
basically a way of coping with them. It is universal in religion, as annoying as it may
be to rational philosophers. All religion is a dream; the actions here analyzed are a
mere flicker played upon a universal human screen.

Within itself, however, the present myth has an external logic that most dreams do not
possess. Freud speaks of the occasional reorganization that occurs in dreams so as to
reassemble the transmuted pieces into an acceptable form that fools one with its facade
of "really the way things happen." The myth has been worked upon consciously. It is not
Kafka-esque or Ionescu-esque; it does not double back upon itself like the theater of
the absurd. Homer had gone far, but not that far. His myth is classical, "rational,"
"normal."

His handling of the material gives a clue as to how the Greek and Western mind will work
from then on in transmuting its unconscious material into its fictional components:
"realism," romanticism (in the vulgar sense), explicit motivation, clarity of plot. At
least, this has been the leading thrust of western literature, especially of popular
literature, until now.

Freud mentions also the reversal of cause and effect in dreams. One is uncertain, for
example, exactly "how the gods flew." The astrophysical uncertainty leaves one uncertain
whether such a reversal may have affected the myth. Since destruction was mutual among
the parties, the myth-work could have enjoyed some leeway in deciding "who did what to
whom" and thereby ease its task.

Other features of dreamwork that Freud analyzed have already been treated. He says that
the dreamer is always present in his dream, although somewhat apart as a kind of third
person, and our myth contains its dreamers as well, from Athena and Odysseus, down to
the ordinary household retainer crowding at the periphery of the audience, the ordinary
man beset by the disastrous conduct of the gods.

Freud says, too, that the dreamer commands symbolic language which he has never been
aware of learning. And George English has neatly stated that "a dream is a tool for
rubbing information against information." So, although the ordinary Phaeacian was not a
master of the ceremonies, he was, as a community member, entitled to identify himself
with the action; the symbolism of the myth may have meant as much to him or her as it
did to Odysseus, or more.

Freud discovered that when the wakened dreamer recites the dream, he is prone to deny
most vociferously those elements that are exercising the dreamwork censorship.
Everything may be made clear except that which is most obvious - the purpose of the
dream. What might have been going on in the unconscious mental operations of the
Phaeacian dreamers was described in the pages on "The Love Affair as the Mask of
Tragedy." But if Odysseus or any Phaeacian were to be questioned about the myth, his
most assured remark would be that it was comedy, not a tragedy; that disaster was not
his concern, that the gods had everything under control and didn't mean what they were
doing anyhow - in short, a total contradiction of the covert meaning of the myth.

Elsewhere in these pages, other Freudian injunctions as to the components of dreamwork
were considered: the transmutation of catastrophic symbolism into the symbols of the
smithy and the bedroom; the matching of plot with reality, and reality with wish; the
uncovering of the levels of meaning.

Freud can help on at least one more perplexing point, because it bedeviled him too. One
cannot help but wonder at the sanguine piling up of levels of different meaning upon
single words, phrases and symbolic deeds; this author must seem like a table waiter
setting upon his arm an alarmingly tall stack of plates. Freud talks in The
Interpretation of Dreams of the genius of dreamwork.
It is, indeed, not easy to form any conception of the abundance of the unconscious
trains of thought, all striving to find expression, which are active in our minds. Nor
is it easy to credit the skill shown by the dream-work in always hitting upon forms of
expression that can bear several meanings; My readers will always be inclined to accuse
me of introducing an unnecessary amount of ingenuity into my interpretations; but actual
experience would teach them better  [4] .

Even when the mind is carefully trained to perceive and understand by one sign only a
single referent, it does so under duress. For such perception and cognition is not only
inhuman; it is false to "reality." And when freed from the bonds of an everyday meaning,
the mind exhibits an astonishing genius for combinations and patterns of "unreal
reality." Hephaestus' lameness means all that we have said it means, and perhaps even
more. The movements of the plot of the Love Affair are of the number and variety of the
movements of great bodies in the sky, a double-tracked reality that scarcely strains the
myth-making mind.

Given that Ninevah and Sparta were designed by their rulers to imitate various celestial
archetypes, can one still be amazed that the same archetypes will have been working
within the unconscious mind to produce many other manifestations, concealed as well as
overt?

Where Freud cannot help one, or rather, where one would not want his help, given his
theories, is in the interpretation of the larger framework of sexualism and catastrophe.
For here, as mentioned before, Freud, like every other authority except the rare
predecessors of, and those of the circle of, Velikovsky has not known or been willing to
acknowledge the priority of catastrophes over other drives and behaviors in the creation
of human nature and institutions as found today. Freud may have postulated an instinct
for "ego-survival," but he did not conceive how catastrophically the ego had been
threatened.



{S : SEXUALITY AND DISASTER}
SEXUALITY AND DISASTER 

The Love Affair is especially appropriate for the analysis of the causal forces in human
history because it seems on its face to show that sex is so important that even
disasters are translated into sexual terms. This is true only in a quantitative sense;
sexuality is a step down from catastrophe in the mental turmoil associated with it, and,
as such, is a logical deflator of catastrophic anxiety. The Love Affair, paradoxically,
reveals sexuality to be secondary in the definition of human nature.

At the beginning one must of course grant the obvious: the Love Affair is saturated with
sexuality. It would be difficult to conceive, furthermore, of any area of behavior that
would provide such a complete analogy to the latent action and at the same time one that
would communicate so readily with the audience of ancient Greeks. We have already
remarked on the Grecian fascination with the struggle between the sexes.

Sexuality is primeval, familiar, a continuous source of conflict. It is both marvelous
and understandable, surrounded with mishap, steady, dangerous and humorous. It lends
itself to moods, to sharing and exclusiveness, to love and hate. It is endlessly
diverting and suggestive with respect to ordinary nature. In its reproductive aspects,
it is profoundly meaningful to short-lived and disease-prone people. But, one should not
forget, sexuality points "downward," to the animal kingdom, further to the plants. What
has sex to do with the astral gods? No. The philosophers are right in their way, Sex is
tossed by man onto the laps of gods. It is an expiative and control mechanism. "You
shall have all we have, and, (cunningly) you will be controlled by it, too."

One must not go too far afield. This ground should be left for a later ploughing. One is
faced in the Love Affair with a sexuality thousands of years beyond its first
ramifications into human nature. Here it is necessary only to throw up a barrier against
interpreting the Love Affair as a love affair because sexuality is deemed to be the
fountainhead of myth.

Sexuality can also be a cloak of disaster. It stands here with all of its traditional
and well-developed imagery in place of the true story. There is reason for its use.
Catastrophe can be buried well beneath sexual imagery; there are enough intimations of
fright, noise, violence, love, hate, strangeness, explosiveness, conflict and damage in
the "primal scene," the "birth trauma," the lust to mate, and the competition for mates
to inspire the most profound analogies. Still, they are partial analogies, not "the
whole real thing."

And when the direction of causation is reversed, there is additional reason to believe
that the catastrophes of the gods are the teachers of sexual conduct, as they are the
teachers of religion, of politics, of war, of the arts and crafts. Catastrophe
reinforces sexuality, provides taboos, devises perversions, excites sexual orgies, and
poisons relations between the sexes even while it exalts them. That the often repeated
song of Demodocus must have taught the audience something about sex, marriage and
justice is quite likely. The "calloused attitude" toward such affairs may have been
Dorian Greek but where did the Dorians get it from?

The sexual psychoses, which Sigmund Freud and every doctor from the shaman to the Park
Avenue psychiatrist have treated, are aggravated by the uncontrolled amnesia of disaster
and by many of the transfigured forms of behavior that man invented to ameliorate the
symptoms of disaster. Not having yet uncovered the source of the infernal angst that
crouches ready to produce psychotic behavior, therapists, whether specialized in
sexually oriented crises, or religiously inspired, or war-peace directed, or of any
other inclination - alienation, materialism, etc. - can go on in endless circles, curing
when easing of symptoms will occur in any event, curing through authority, or passing
along through symptomatic relief a psychosis from one object-fixation to another  [5] .
Withal one should not deny that a skillful cutting of the brain and drugging of the
glands may someday excise the primeval angst; it may be that the stoneage men of many
areas were up to treating a catastrophically-induced psychosis with their frequent
resort to trephination of the skull.



{S : IN ILLO TEMPORE}
IN ILLO TEMPORE 

It is common for persons who have suffered a personal disaster to have a recurrent dream
respecting it. The same dream or one like it may repeat itself for years, disappear for
years, and recur. Similarly, every known human group has developed in its prehistoric
period various myths that have to be retold and rituals that have to be repeated. All of
them go back to the great times of destruction and creation, illud tempus, a phrase that
Mircea Eliade finds useful as a pivotal point in his far ranging studies of comparative
religion.

Writing of the activities of archaic man, which would include Homeric man, he declares
that "their meaning, their value, are not connected with their crude physical datum but
with their property of reproducing a primordial act, of repeating a mythical example.
Nutrition is not a simple physiological operation; it renews a communion. Marriage and
the collective orgy echo mythical prototypes; they are repeated because they were
consecrated in the beginning (in those days in illo tempore, ab origine) by gods,
ancestors, or heroes."  [6]

"We must do as the gods did in the beginning."  [7]  Time must be regenerated
periodically, in endless cycles; in accord with the temporal period, many things are
renewed: fires are put out and rekindled, the dead return to visit, the original combats
between gods and devils are reenacted, and orgies commemorating the destruction of all
values are held to precede the new year. The year in illo tempore ended in a catastrophe
of earth, air, fire, and/ or water. "In fact, among many primitive people, an essential
element of any cure is the recitation of the cosmogonic myth." Also, it is recited on
the occasions of birth, marriage, and death, indeed for practically every occasion when
a person needs to build up morale  [8] .

Yet this same "archaic man" dreads history. He wishes only to recapitulate his
beginnings, the sacred events, not the profane events that have happened since. He is
not simply a conservative, a traditionalist; he is superconservative, obsessed with what
happened in illo tempore. For there was a dreadful thing then, beyond all historical
measure and until it is controlled, nothing else is controllable.

With all his acumen and learning, Eliade himself does not penetrate the iron curtain
illius temporis. Something Big Happened! He writes one work entitled Myth and Reality,
but the "reality" is not what happened; it is the interposed reality of a revisionist
philosopher, not the reality of which the myths speak in deafening language and blinding
imagery. And he entitles another of his works The Myth of the Eternal Return, but here,
too, he confines himself to providing valuable illumination from all quarters of the
globe on the obsessive need to make the great leap backwards to the traumatics events,
not to the actual conditions that mankind returns to.

The terror in illo tempore, the fact that "for archaic men, reality is a function of the
imitation of a celestial archetype," the association of the return with cures that
practically scream out, "If we survived chaos and creation, we can survive anything!"
the fixation upon cycles of disaster and revival and the incompetency of humanity over
millennia to get onto a longitudinal temporal plane - all of these facts and many more
constitute evidence that unspeakable disaster governs the so-called "archaic mind" and
carries through to modernity.

Indeed, one must credit the doctrine of uniformitarianism, and all of its ramifications
in the sciences and philosophy, as being the first successful counterattack of the human
mind against the fetters that catastrophes imposed upon it. It was largely this modern
doctrine in astronomy, geology, biology, and finally religion and politics that smoothed
out the external cycles, made the proven details of history important, claimed millions
of year for human development, and set up the idea of progress - all of these being
achievements that would have been difficult without denying the importance of what
happened in illo tempore.

The myth of the Love Affair is not a basic document to establish the general theory of
the first days because it is not a myth of creation. That it is in direct line with
cosmogony may, however, be asserted. It is a tale told in a newly settled land under
semi-cosmogonic conditions of dream, dance, rhythm, and verse. The gods struggle; the
Moon is renewed.

It is a second-level myth in the last series of catastrophes. Its relationship with the
events in illo tempore is apparent, but it is of the last days of that time. In the next
century and a half, the first group of uniformitarians will have appeared, with the
colossal nerve to say, with Plato, that "the ruler of the universe has ordered all
things with a view to the excellence and preservation of the whole."  [9]



{S : THE KERNELS OF HISTORY}
THE KERNELS OF HISTORY 

Millions of words of myth have been born of the human mind through the ages. Myth is
still being created, not only among the so-called primitive peoples whose numbers are so
rapidly diminishing everywhere, but also in the sophisticated editorial rooms of giant
newspaper and television monopolies and in the halls of law and bureaucracy. The myth
that "the President works with great energy and command of information" is comparable to
the myth that "Hercules cleared the Augean Stables." (Amusingly, Hercules was accused of
a conflict of interest for taking pay from two sources for his work.)

This is so if we take, as the superficial rendering of the word, that myth is a factual
narrative whose aim is to some important degree to stabilize the ever-flowing stream of
anxiety of the organism within itself and in regard to the outer environment. It is like
a dam that commands the flow of water from the rains and streams above in the interest
of the consumers of the water below. By using common symbols, the system operates on
behalf of a community. As a result, a myth will perform little or no functions for a
person who belongs to another community, to a different hydraulic control system. One
should not be put off, therefore, when a scoffer exclaims, "All these myths do nothing
for me."

The greatest sources of trouble and fear are the greatest and most enduring sources of
myth. The doings of the gods (nature), supplemented by the dynamics of sexuality and the
competition for the other scarce values of power, respect, wealth, knowledge and health
provide both the anxieties and the linguistic references used to compose myths. The
combinations and permutations of expression that give rise to particular myths are
infinite, especially when one adds the universal factors of wish fulfillment, already
mentioned, and functional design, by which different types of myths are to be used as
supplications, expiation, lessons to children, augury, dramatic entertainment, and so
on. Myth is adapted, also to create the type of person a society's ideology needs.

That millions of words have been composed for such personal-social reasons over 10,000
years, say, is not at all surprising. and that most myth is untranslatable without
knowledge of its culture, its language, the context in which one myth is employed, and
its typical audience is also understandable. Which is to say that the problem of the
historic message contained in a myth is to be solved only when these features of its
expression are known.

Afterwards, the historic content of the myth can be approached directly. In this sense
all myth contains history about a group; it could only come about as a result of
experiences, whether one or many; and its detail contains empirical and linguistic
references. Ares does not "bridle" in a horseless culture, nor does one smite a rock to
get water in swampland. That Achilles is known by 36 epithets and Odin by fifty names,
gives some idea of the variety of traits of a hero or god in a given culture.

But now to the most difficult problem; the portrayal of an actual event in a myth, as in
the Love Affair. If one has arrived at the historic message contained in the Love
Affair, what is to prevent him from putting all of Greek myth or any other body of myth
through a historiographical sausage-grinder, emerging with thousands of little links of
Greek history? It is conceivable. But much is trivia and repetitive. Or the history
involved has such vague parameters of time, space and references when treated as history
as to be useless.

Also, a great, if unknown proportions of myth consists of references to cultures, sub-
cultures, priesthoods, temples, occupations, and schools that are lost to history. Their
local contexts are missing. Furthermore, many myths are hopelessly successful in their
function of telling about something while at the same time concealing it (the opposite
of scientific communication which aims at telling something and only that something in a
special language designed to communicate it clearly and exactly).

Still, the impression of impenetrable jungle and inescapable labyrinth that the first
sight of the body of myth makes upon one retreats remarkably upon application of the
tools of the sciences and the virtues of patience and imagination to particular
segments.

Then the questions occur: "Who cares?" and "What resources are we willing to devote the
task?" For most people, and experts, too, the use of myth is largely that of symbolic
poetry: the mind reacts to it, is startled, pleased, achieves a phantasmagoria or
pandemonium akin to the effects of various drugs. Enough.

On the other hand, where there exists little of other types of knowledge of important
historical problems, natural or social, resort to myth analysis is necessary and its
techniques will be continuously improved. To the degree that such systematic work is
accompanied by an equally alert and extensive archaeology, considerable advances in a
number of sciences might ensure. As the expert on Babylonian and ancient science, Otto
Neugebauer, once commented to the author in a few moments of smoking of the peace-pipe
between exchanges on the work of Velikovsky, we could dig up the whole ancient world
with a fraction of the funds of the space program, and thus find out what it has to say
to us. The art treasures to be excavated would, of course, be also of value.




{S : Notes (Chapter 16: The Transfiguration of Trauma)}
Notes (Chapter 16: The Transfiguration of Trauma) 

1. (1900). Vols. IV and V of the Standard Edition (London: Hogarth press, 1953; New
York: Basic Books; Avon Books, 1972.

2. Lines 531-590, Murray, op, cit.

3. An alternative reconstruction, more Jungian than Freudian, is that Penelope was
suffering a crisis of Character, in which the eagle (her stronger, more dictatorial,
dogmatic aspect) was moving bloodily to dispose of the geese (her inner weakness), and,
in the course of the resolution, identifying with her absent husband. George English,
who pointed out this interpretation to me, thought as well that the transition was a
bloody bridge that often is crossed at the presumed age of Penelope age of, between 35
and 45.

4. Page 562, 332 fn., 560, 60, 534 ff.

5. Cf. Sebastian de Grazia, Errors of Psychotherapy (New York: Doubleday. 1952).

6. Myth of the Eternal Return, p. 4.

7. Ibid., p. 21.

8. Ibid., pp. 66, 68, 73, 82-3.

9. Plato, The Laws, book X, p. 290, loc. cit.




{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS}
{P PART 3: }
{Q THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR}
{C Chapter 17: }
{T SETTLED SKY AND UNSETTLED MIND}
{S - }




THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART THREE:
THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

SETTLED SKY AND UNSETTLED MIND

Great myths are the stories of human tragedy on a grand scale. If mankind no longer
exists in an age of myth, it is not because of a new intelligence or style but because
of the lack of terrible stimulus. Even so, the ages of myth-making have left a legacy of
serious problems. One does relive the ancient terrors; they have left deep tracks in
minds and glands, regularly revived by a horde of customs and rememorized. Furthermore,
man is a myth-maker and he will always find sufficient personal and social crises to
inspire individual and collective repressions of memory, though not on the original
grand scale.



{S : WHAT HOMER REMEMBERED}
WHAT HOMER REMEMBERED 

Earlier, we decided to place Homer's "publication" of the Odyssey around 630 B. C., two
generations after the end of the Martian catastrophes. We mentioned in another place
that amnesia can set in abruptly following a grave event and the sublimation of the
troublesome subconscious memory could be accomplished quickly as well. We alluded to
nursery rhymes based upon atrocious political acts for an example.

Still, the question gnaws at us: "Did Homer really not known of the disasters of the
century before him?"

The catastrophist reaches, all too easily at times, for the "proof by non-existent
proof," which comes close to begging the question. Thus, physical and biological
destruction, if complete, makes memory non-existent, therefore impossible. Psychic
destruction (total amnesia) also makes proof impossible in the sense that the
remembering mind cannot remember any of the events one is called upon to remember. Total
Psychic Destruction and/ or Total Physical Destruction equals Zero Proof, hence zero
recall of the catastrophic events. We have advanced in these pages and elsewhere many
conditions approaching the Zero Proof formula, but never has history been totally
obstructed. Therefore Homer must have had some means of knowing the catastrophic events
of two generations earlier, even in his childhood.

We now can suppose that he did remember terrific destruction and social turmoil,
directly or through his elders. Why would these memories not enter into his work
directly? Why would he not attach the Greek gods (except Helios, the Sun), to their sky-
bodies?

In the first place, he would not dare to or wish to tie the gods explicitly to their
bodies. The gods were much more than the bodies, much older than the events in which
they acted, and hostile to presumptions (hubris) of humans about them. Homer and other
dramatists might also have agreed to a convention not to portray the gods in this
manner.

On the subconscious level, Homer may have written of the gods in such a way as to
display their natural histories, even knowing of their history in some part and
consciously, without realizing that he was writing the history of the gods. He could
describe Ares as Ares, actually appreciating that he was doing so, protesting (as
writers accused of libel or of autobiography sometimes do), "I am only writing fiction,"
and furthermore they will believe it and so will their hearers.

This is no more than happens with children, who, in their play, will often reenact
disagreeable experiences with cruel attendants or playmates in a comic or brutal
scenario with toys, and, when questioned, will sincerely deny that they were reenacting
the real experiences. I need only mention similar and well known behavior among persons
who are mentally ill. Nor need I discuss again the technology of dreams, whereby the
dreamer translates the experience into a detailed representation, which he may promptly
forget, or he is unable to retranslate into real terms, or which he may refuse in either
event to accept as connected with his experience.

We conclude that, behaving typically, Homer could know both subconsciously and to a
degree consciously of a horrendous history, could rewrite the history as poetry, could
refuse to make explicit connections that would be obviously revealing, and could deny
that his story was historical. "How can you doubt me," we hear Demodocus and Homer
crying, "am I not blind?" There is no end to the self-deception and deceptiveness of the
schizoid human.



{S : THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE}
THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 

Scientific theories are metaphors that, when pursued, place their users into a position
of control and prediction. Scientific theories are also consensuses in as much as they
cannot be communicated or believed, much less worked out and routinized, unless a number
of competent persons accept them as a basis for conducting operations.

Modern science has made great efforts to put aside, first, the primitive metaphoric
systems such as are found in the myth we are studying, second, the mystic metaphorism,
though much more agreeable, of Pythagoreanism and Platonism, and, third, though with
great reluctance, the empirical nominalism of Aristotle and of the Newtonian Laws.

Now it moves uncertainly on a stripped-down linguistic and mathematical basis, purely
operational and denotative, so far as particular small areas are concerned. Ironically ,
the bigger the library and the greater the equipment of a university or research center,
the more likely the scientists in it will be utterly specialized and isolated from each
other's group. Their metaphors will communicate with the smallest number of persons.

Then it happens that many chasms are created which no one dare approach and the bridges
over these chasms become and will remain forever the operational constructions of
metaphor.

Pythagoras and his associates, who flourished early in the sixth century B. C., give us
a crucial lesson in the transformation of "true myth" into "false science". We say that
until the 7th century (687 B. C.), the planets moved erratically from time to time. This
fact was known to "pre-scientific" Greeks. Planos, the root word, means leading astray,
cheating, deceiving; a wandering, roaming, straying; (metaphorically a wandering of
mind), a madness, in uncertain fits (of disease). (These all from Liddell-Scott Greek-
English Lexicon.) Wanderer meant as Odysseus wandered - without knowing what would
happen next. (And, of course, Odysseus, complemented by his mentor, Athena, is the
greatest deceiver, the trickiest of men, "the born trouble-maker.")

The eminent historian of science, George Sarton, says that Pythagoras aimed to prove
that the planets were not "planets". He points out that "as their Greek names implied;
plana• means to cause to wander, to mislead; planŠtŠs is a wandering, erratic,
misleading body."  [1] To Pythagoras, " the planets cannot be 'errant' bodies; they must
have circular and uniform movements of their own.. If one could not but analyze those
complicated motions they would be reduced to uniform circular ones . The whole of Greek
astronomy grew out of that arbitrary conviction." [2]

We begin to perceive what happened. Even though Sarton sees the origins of Pythagorean
astronomy in an id‚e fixe - that heavenly bodies must move regularly and circularly, he
believes that his arbitrary idea had a true result- namely to "discover" that the
planets do have such motions.

Hence, astronomers and public now agree that, as the contemporary popularizer Asimov
puts it, "the Greek astronomers realized that there must be more than one canopy. For
while the 'fixed' stars moved around the Earth in a body apparently without changing
their relative positions; this was not true of the Sun, Moon, and five bright starlike
objects (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn)- in fact, each moved in a separate
path. These seven bodies were called planets (from a Greek word meaning 'wanderer'..."
[3] .

So the word "planet" means "wanderer" but wanderer on a path, a contradiction in terms.
Pythagoras asserted their paths to be regular. We know that they have been so, since
then.

Two events have occurred. The first is that the planets, which were originally named
correctly, have stopped acting so as to deserve their name. Pythagoras denounced the
meaning of the name and postulated their orderly movement. Modern astronomers accepted
his meaning and introduced their order on top of his order.

Pythagoras indeed was far more anxious than they to reduce the planets to order. He was
obsessively concerned with the development of all abstractions in accord with fixed
formulas. Not content with abstraction, he founded a secret society to contain his
truths and avert public examination. Propelled by "the Great Fear," he led the search
for absolutes of order, a search that led Plato less than a century later to propose
imprisonment in a "House of Better Judgement," and even death for those who would deny
the immutability and harmony of the heavens.

Laplace is regarded as the founder of the science of probability. Writing two centuries
ago, he disposed of the providential hand that Newton had postulated to set the solar
system in orderly motion and maintain it. Order there was, declared Laplace, but it may
be explained as originating in natural causes and as preserving itself by regular
motions whose disruption was quite unlikely.

However, he declared, in passages rarely quoted, the probability of a comet striking the
earth in the course of centuries is great and its result could be devastating if the
comet were very large [4] . Besides, he warned that his own calculations, reinforcing
Newton's conception of regularity in the movements of the orbs, did not take into
account "various causes that can be ascertained by careful analysis, but which are
impossible to frame within a calculation;" such would be comets, meteors, and even
electric and magnetic forces. "The sky itself, despite the orderliness of its movements,
is not unalterable." So spoke Laplace.

However, because the heavens have "settled down" in recent millennia, major
displacements and encounters are increasingly unlikely. The celestial encounters of 2700
years ago may have been the last for some time to come.

In 1974, Robert W. Bass went beyond this self-critique of Laplace into a critique of
Laplace's famous calculations of stability for the solar system  [5] . Instead of
confirming the practical immutability of the planetary motions, Bass emerged in
agreement with W. M. Smart's thesis that the theoretical term of assured reliability of
the planetary orbits is in the hundreds or few thousands of years. The fabric of
mathematical "proof" of the orderly skies has been torn to shreds.



{S : A CLAIM OF SUCCESS}
A CLAIM OF SUCCESS 

When the lines of the Love Affair were read, of a summer day on the island of Naxos in
July of 1968, the hypothesis of this book sprang to life. Nowhere, whether in writing or
in conversation, had I come upon a parallel between the song and external events. Nor,
for that matter, had there ever been, to my knowledge, a predecessor to the story itself
in ancient times. Overtime, the means of providing theory occurred in three forms, each
depending upon a number of theories, techniques and facts.

One method would be to draw up all parallelisms (and lacks thereof) between the Love
Affair and the celestial disasters that contemporary quantavolutionists, particularly
Velikovsky, had described as occurring around the time of Homer. This has been done and
a close parallelism discovered.

A second method would be to translate the myth by psychological and linguistic theories
into a set of events that would most closely adhere to the characters, setting, dynamics
(plot), and language of the myth. This has been done and the set of events that was most
satisfying to the myth was the aforesaid catastrophic period of encounters among Mars,
Earth, Venus and Moon.

The third method would be to search for the effects of the events, both upon human
behavior and the cosmic bodies involved. The human avenue led into a stream of effects
that has been accumulating from previous disasters; indications of collective behavior
expected under the circumstances of the Greek disaster were also found. In the geologic
and astrophysical areas, recent explorations of all three extra-terrestrial bodies,
together with revised theories of cataclysmic changes on earth, tended to confirm the
historicity of the Love Affair. As Isaac Newton would say, "To the same natural effects
we must as far as possible assign the same causes."  [6] The probability of the theory
as a whole being correct is enhanced by the concordance of the three results of the
three methods. One should remain critical, however because in each area of method,
theories are being developed and employed that are controversial, and also because in
each methodological area, much less than an "ideal" amount of factual material is
available.

Also this study attempted to do what Laplace avoided doing, to introduce many factors
whose quantification for the purposes of a calculus of probabilities was impossible.
Considering the confusion of theories and the onrush of incompatible facts in every
related area of knowledge, it may appear to have done rather well.

From time to time, in the course of research, a question would return to haunt the
author: suppose that an older version of the Love Affair were to be discovered.

If there were a predecessor to the Love Song of Demodocus, it would be Homer's work, a
work well known to Homer, and/ or a fable known to other contemporary cultures or
preceding ones. Thus far, none has appeared. However, the effects of such a hypothetical
discovery would be considerable. It would undercut my logical insistence that this
particular plot is a screen for historical events of the early seventh century.

Almost certainly "love triangles" were observed and caused trouble for millennia before
Homer. For that matter, walruses and apes snorted and grunted their way through similar
affairs. Adultery found itself condemned under laws that were promulgated before Homeric
times; Deuteronomy bans it, and also Genesis. Depending upon the culture, the emotions
evoked by such triangles might be no less than the outrage of Hephaestus. The
fearfulness of earlier catastrophes may have helped to build up the emotions. So the
preconditions of the particular plot- the triangle and the emotional charge - were known
and diffused.

In order to nullify the theory, however, the structure of the pre-existing plot would
need to be closely parallel, and analogous gods would need to participate in it. An
Egyptian creation myth, much older than "the Love Affair," has a marriage between the
Sun (Re) and the Heaven god (Nut, Roman Uranus) that is disturbed by copulation between
Heaven and Earth (Geb). The Sun forbids Heaven giving birth to children during the year
(360 days), but clever Thoth (Mercury) gambles with the Moon for Time, wins 1/ 72 part
of the day, and hands over to Heaven five extra days (365) in which to give birth,
whereupon Heaven bore Osiris (Saturn), Horus (Jupiter), Set, Isis, and Nephthys (the
last three Venus-connected) on 5 successive days. Many events are incorporated here, but
the major characters are from an earlier age and the plot is not analogous or homologous
with the plot of "The Love Affair".

Respecting divine participation in Genesis, God does intervene against Abimelech to
prevent his consummation of a relationship with Abraham's wife, Sarah, whom he has taken
in god faith and with the consent of Abraham. It is plausible that other plots of
adultery of a historical and fictional character, involving deities, should have
existed.

There is no reason to believe that Homer had written (as Patroni insists) or knew of an
original Opera Ballet of the Love Affair, parallel to the plot found in the Odyssey, and
including the same gods as characters. The details of the story of the song are stuck
off so firmly that a complete version resounds from behind the lines. Assuming that
Homer or another had presented the Opera Ballet before, would this fact preclude a late
dating of the underlying historical catastrophe? I think not, if it is in the same
generation, and especially if it were the work of a younger Homer. Hence, the haunting
question can be answered by a denial: this certain plot probably did not exist before
the celestial events that it represents in disguise took place.



{S : FROM SAVAGERY TO SUBLIMITY}
FROM SAVAGERY TO SUBLIMITY 

If it is true that mankind suffers infinitely from the gods, it has become human because
of them. They are in a sense, then, entitled to do with man what they will. As the old-
fashioned property-owner used to say: "It's my property. I can dispose of it as I
please." Many will assert that man would have been better off without the gods. No. This
is a materialistic, mechanical view of human origins and human nature, more in keeping
with tight suppression of memory and uniformitarian ideology, than with the lessons of
catastrophe. Man was created by catastrophes and made to some degree what he is by them.
This is a point on which pragmatists, phenomenologists, and idealists may agree.

But - it is more doubtful that the species would have become human if it had not
humanized the gods. It is almost impossible to conceive that humans would have become
humanly intelligent if they had been physiologically capable of experiencing the
disasters mechanically, "in cold blood". They could have forgotten the disasters more
easily over the generations. They would not have developed the arts and sciences. That
is, there are few, if any, grounds for believing that they could have become scientific
before they had passed through a stage of being monstrously human.

If people are able now to become "rational" and view ancient catastrophes and natural
history as truly natural, it is only because they did not have the capacity for viewing
events as natural in the first place.

The first humanoid who pointed at an active natural force with a capacity to impress a
whole people and said: "There is our god. He made us and is now sending us a message" -
that humanoid became the first person.

After the dreamtime dance and song of the Love Affair ends, and the dance of the spheres
completes the ceremony, a peaceful and generous mood pervades the audience. King
Alcinous announces that all the nobles must give fine personal gifts to Ulysses. This
they do: cloaks and tunics and bars of gold. Euryalus, who has slandered Ulysses, gave
the best gift of all, a gleaming copper sword with a silver belt in an ivory sheath. All
these are heaped before the visitor. A hot bath is prepared for him and preparations for
dinner are made.

I allude to these lines to stress once more the effects of the dance. The sublimation of
unconscious effect has been well-nigh perfect. The ancients who heard these passages
would imagine the full and blissful original scene, the way in which a sacred song and
dance should ideally be conducted, the effects upon the participants and audience that
should ideally occur.

This no one may deny. All that may be said by way of criticism is that such is the
intent and result of great literature, of music, of dance, of plastic art, of liturgies,
indeed of all constructive crowd behavior whose aim is social internalization. In the
group, an anxiety is present whose specifications are hidden for fear of their
depressive and disruptive effects. A spell must be cast; the symptoms will be displaced,
discussed and alleviated; and everyone will feel better afterwards.

Objectively one can appraise the effect; it is good therapy; people are kinder to each
other; possible alternative means of handling the anxieties are rendered unnecessary.
Amidst the frequent crowd panic and madness of the Iliad and the Odyssey, of the Bible,
of aggressive, ritualized, stupefied, and senseless self-sacrifice and others sacrifice,
the Song of Demodocus in its context, for all that the gods misbehave, is superior
therapy.

It is well that those ancient censors who called the story false and sacrilegious and
would have ripped it out of the Odyssey did not have their way. This is said, not alone
on behalf of many bored and salacious schoolboys, not even for the sake of Truth, but
for the realization it can bring of how ancient cultures, no less than primitive and
modern ones, strove for alternatives to the labyrinthine rites, collective murder and
bloody offerings by which societies sought to extirpate the hidden anxieties of
catastrophe.

The present age is fraught with anxiety; still it has not reached the levels of our
ancestral disasters. Up to this moment, the settled skies have allowed scientists and
poets in free countries to move ever more boldly in exploration of the world within and
the world without. The most radical investigations of nature and human nature have been
permitted. The most radical experiments in the expressive arts have been tolerated. It
is no longer true that the human mind cannot face, at least intermittently and "for the
record," the evidence of ancient catastrophes. On this account one may predict that,
within a few years, much more proof than is presently available will be collected and
advanced in favor of the general theory of quantavolution and catastrophes and that the
theoretical reconstruction will proceed apace.

When Odysseus is about to complete the slaughter of the suitor's relatives, Athena gives
him pause: enough of bloodshed [7] . And when Eurycleia caught sight of the slain
suitors in the palace hall, "she was about to cry out in exultation, beholding so great
a deed. But Odysseus restrained her... 'Rejoice in your heart, old woman, and restrain
yourself and do not cry aloud. It is an unholy thing to glory over slain men. These men
the destiny of the gods and their own merciless deeds have overcome. '"  [8]

The Hero resigns. The Moon is in place. The Goddess Athena is in her heavenly sphere.
And Mars in his. Mercy begins once more.

And 2500 years later, the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, writes: "Two things fill the mind
with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely one's
thoughts are drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me "
[9] .



{S : Notes (Chapter 17: Settled Sky and Unsettled Mind)}
Notes (Chapter 17: Settled Sky and Unsettled Mind) 

1. History of Science, V. I, op. cit., p. 13.

2. Ibid.

3. An Intelligent Man's Guide to Science, p. 17.

4. Stecchini, p. 107.

5. "Did Worlds Collide," and "Proofs of the Stability of the Solar System," IV Pens‚e
(1974), 8-20, and 21-6.

6. Principia, Bk. III, Chap. V.

7. Even if someone later than Homer wrote these last lines of the Odyssey (D. Page, op.
cit.) and they lack poetic merit, their moral function is apparent.

8. Rieu trans., Is. 411-17.

9. Quoted by Stecchini, op. cit., p. 44.






{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS}
{P - }
{Q - }
{C APPENDIX }
{T CHARACTERS OF THE BOOK}
{S - }





THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART THREE:
THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR

APPENDIX

CHARACTERS OF THE BOOK

(Italic-faced ones have a direct part in the plot and action in THE LOVE AFFAIR)

GODS


Athena (also Athene, Pallas Athene):

Greek Goddess of wisdom, war, and the arts and sciences, "officially" declared to be the
same as the Roman goddess, Minerva; identifiable in her planetary aspect with the planet
Venus. In other cultures, she carries many names, including Ishtar (Babylonia),
Quetzalcohuatl (Mexico), Lucifer (Rome), Helel (Judea), Aten (? Egypt), Subari (India).
Protector of Odysseus.

Hephaestus (Hephaistos):

Husband of Aphrodite. Greek god of fire and of the crafts and sciences, comparable to
many smith-gods, also a solar deity; called Vulcan by the Romans and probably is
Tuchulcha of the Etruscans. Identifiable with Athena and planet Venus.

Ares: Lover of Aphrodite.

Greek god of war, called Mars by the Romans, Nergal by the Babylonians. Identifiable
with the planet Mars.

Aphrodite: Lover of Ares.

Greek goddess of the Moon and of love. Also, Greeks called the Moon "Selene" and
partially transferred Aphrodite from the Moon to planet Venus and called the planet
Aphrodite; meanwhile, the later Romans transported the name of the Italian goddess,
Venus, to the Goddess Aphrodite and named the planet Venus. The Roman "Selene" was
"Luna".

Hermes:

Messenger god and god of luck. Identified with the Planet Mercury.

Apollo:

God of Far-Distances and music. Personifies detached Wisdom. May represent a destroyed
planet, now the meteoroid belt. Was later identified with the Sun.

Zeus:

Son of Kronos and called the Father of the Olympian Gods in Homer. Identifiable with the
Planet Jupiter.

Poseidon:

God of the Sea, of Earthquakes, and ultimately of the Earth. Brother of Zeus. Enemy of
Odysseus.

Helios (Helius):

God of the Sun.


HUMANS

Demodocus (Demodokos):

Great singer and harpist of Phaeacia, who recites the story of The Love Affair, and may
be a self-portrait of Homer.

Odysseus:

Hero of Homer's Odyssey. Epic poem of wanderings after the Trojan War. Known in Western
Europe also as Ulysses. Guest of King Alcinous. His name, in American vernacular, would
be "the born trouble-maker."
Penelope:

Wife of Odysseus.


Alcinous (Alkinous):

King of Phaeacia.


Nausicaa:

Daughter of Alcinous.


Halius:

Son of Alcinous. Dancer.


Laodamas:

Son of Alcinous . Dancer.



PLACE AND TIME

The ancient Mediterranean and the ancient skies above, possibly 687 B. C.

Phaeacia:

Realm of King Alcinous, probably based on real places in the Western Mediterranean, but
fictionalized by Homer.

Scheria:

The larger land of which Phaeacia formed part.

Troy:

Fabled site of the Trojan War, identified by most archaeologists and classicists on the
site of the town of Hisarlik in Turkey, near the Dardanelles Straits.

Lemnos:

Island in the upper Aegean Sea where the Sintians lived, favorites of Hephaestus.

End of The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars