CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It is no longer fashionable to believe that Venus and Mars are beautiful bodies, with some congenital blemishes. Like Moon and Mercury, like Earth itself, they shriek of more recent disasters. The major question now is " How recent is 'recent'?" We address the question to their peculiarities of motion, position, composition, and behavior.
Myth and legend (in its deliberate attempts at science) afford voluminous material about both planets, their transactions with each other, and their encounters with Moon and Earth. Research of the past generation has evidenced that the planet Venus dominated the human cosmogonical mind in the years between 3 500 and 2 000 BP and that the planet Mars entered upon the competition to catastrophize the human mind in the latter 800 years of this period. Venus had hundreds of names and identities, many of them secret, sacred, and obfuscated. For example, the Hebrew word "shakris" means the Evening Star, Morning Star, to sacrifice, to kill something, to make sacred.
Logically, one initially seeks information about the first appearance of these celestial bodies; when were they born? In the case of Venus, legends of the Near East, Greece, Rome, the Teutons, the Hindus, and the Meso-Americans seem to speak of a special time of birth of a deity with a homologous syndrome of traits (Velikovsky, 1950).
Although the name "Venus" may not originate directly from "venire" (" to come"), as Cicero would have it (Lowery, Grant), it may well emerge even more significantly from Venus, which Bloch translates as "blooming nature", hence, as we see it, something new-born and rapidly expanding. The lotus and lily, two life forms suggestive of blooming cometary images, are employed in widely separated cultures as Venusian symbols [106] .
Clearly conformable to an astronomical operation is the birth of Greek goddess Athene, who sprang fully armed with a shout from the brow of Zeus (Hesiod b). The Hindu Devi is remarkably similar in the commotion that she causes when born (Isenberg, p90). Various studies analyzed by de Grazia (1981, 1982a) set the time of her birth near 3,450 BP, in accordance with older studies by Velikovsky (1952, pp1-53, 98-101). The time coincides with the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt under Moses, an event so fraught with catastrophe that it remains the substratum of the Judaic, Christian and Islamic religions.
If Venus was erupted from Jupiter, it conceivably burst from the disturbed area of the Great Red Spot. Although not demonstrable, this is hypothetically feasible. It was Jupiter's greatest discharge, its last attempt to rid itself of ions and gain electrons. It succeeded; it retired; and its offspring was unleashed into the inner Solar System, where all massive fragments had gone hitherto.
Unlike Uranus Minor, Neptune, and possibly Pluto, Venus was of low electrical density and fell victim to encounters with Earth, then Mars, and remained within the inner circle of planets. Both the Earth and Mars took electrical charge from Venus, not without extensive physical "damage" to themselves; they both moved away from the Sun after their encounters with Venus (Ransom and Hoffee, Table 1).
Venus was not rich enough in electrons to be coveted by the Sun. By the legendary and historical evidence, it took hundreds of years to achieve a "safe" orbit from where it would not venture close enough to Earth to endanger it and cause electrical damage. Until then, it may have threatened the Earth about every 52 years. During a seven hundred year period both the Jews and the Meso-Americans observed a great "Jubilee year" on those occasions; the inference from the holiday is that the proto-planet, still behaving as a comet and undergoing continuous electrical transaction, was due to arrive in the vicinity of Earth but prayerfully would design not to destroy the world. It is significant, as one of numerous details in the Venus mosaic, that the American Pawnee Indians until a century ago celebrated a Venus festival on each occasion of the reappearance of Venus, sacrificing a virgin to the star. But many another celebration of Venus could be cited.
Granted that history and legend impart an aura of youth to the planet Venus, one can search for and find confirmation of youthfulness in the present state and observable behavior of the planet. We cannot do more than summarize here the debate upon the question, which has involved leading figures in Astronomy and Physics (see de Grazia et al. 1963; Talbott et al., eds., 1976; Ransom, 1976; Goldsmith, 1977; Greenberg et al., 1977, 1978; and many others referred to in de Grazia 1984d). We let the reader appraise the arguments dispassionately with the caution that theory must always bow to the demands of direct observation. We advance the following points in respect of the anomalous nature of Venus when viewed from the standard cosmogonical model, but implying the recency of Venus and its electrical nature in consonance with the thesis of this work. The 925 K surface temperature measured by landed space probes has not been explained satisfactorily (see for example. Firsoff; Velikovsky, 1978b; Forshufvud; Greenberg, L. M., 1979; Morrison) by any theory other than recent and continuing electrical transaction. The observation that the lowest thirteen kilometers of the atmosphere are glowing (Panagakos and Waller, 1979, p3) and that lightning occurs in the Venusian atmosphere (Taylor et al. ) encourage us in our view that electrical currents flow between Venus and surrounding space. The two localities which were photographed show evidence of recent surface devastation. Seemingly the surface of Venus is similar to those of its neighbors even though the latter lack atmospheres (Ksanformaliti et al.; Florensky et al.).
One of the major surprises greeting the explorers of Venus and the theorists who welcomed their data was the demonstration of the slow retrograde rotation of the planet. Several non-electrical explanations have been offered to explain how Venus might have reversed its original forward rotation (Singer, 1970; Ingersoll and Dobrovolskis; Kundt). In a two-planet encounter involving electrical polarization (which induces aspherical shapes onto both bodies) strong "tidal forces" act and can alter spins, or flip planets over, as Warlow shows. The five bodies of the inner Solar System exhibit a spectrum of spins and orientation, running from fast-direct (Mars and Earth) to slow-retrograde (Venus), with Mercury and the Moon in between, Given a number of encounters among these five bodies over the past several millennia, many combinations of rotational alteration must be expected: it is probable that none of the spins are virginal.
The atmosphere of Venus presents another type of problem. Its carbon dioxide composition is like that of Mars, unstable over a long time due to photolysis by ultraviolet radiation. That most of it has not reacted with the exposed surface rocks is termed "surprising" [107] , possibly Venus' atmospheric gases have recently been modified.
The chemistry of the deep and dense Venus clouds has been inferred only by indirect evidence despite the passage of several spacecraft through them. Above the clouds, which seemingly insulate the planet, temperatures resemble those found at comparable altitudes above the Earth. Insolation and heat radiation from the clouds do not betray the hellish heat that was discovered below. Even at the base of the cloud layer (which is twenty kilometers thick), temperature, pressures and winds remain Earth-like (Burgess). It is the descent through the remaining forty-nine kilometers that confounds expectations and confuses the instruments of the descending space probes (making some of them inoperative and the data from others uninterpretable): here Venus does not resemble any environment yet penetrated by instruments. We find a murky and stagnant inferno under crushing pressures many times greater than those on Earth. There, lightning occurs frequently (Taylor et al.), indicating an electrical instability in excess of that found on Earth, and an electrical glow, noted above, permeates to the bottom of the murk.
Even the edge of Venus' sphere of influence has produced the unexpected. Venus is only trivially magnetic; yet its interaction with the solar wind produces 80 percent of the effect generated by the three-thousand-times more strongly magnetized Earth (Russell, C. T. et al., 1979). Since Mercury, whose magnetism is similarly miniscule, also interacts strongly with the solar wind (Ness et al., p480) we are drawn to conclude that the interface between planets and solar wind is electric, rather than magnetic. The bow wave in front of the planet and the long tail in the wake of the planet represent the junction of two electrospheres: the solar wind flows on one side of the junction and the planet driven ions and electrons flow on the other side. Electrons traversing this junction behave differently at Venus (and Mars), for there they are slowed, rather than accelerated as happens with Earth, Mercury and Jupiter (Simpson et al: Wolfe et al). Electron-deficient solar wind atoms seemingly penetrate and are absorbed by Venus' upper atmosphere (and Mars' surface). The magnitude of the effect indicates that Venus is farther from equilibrium with its surroundings than are the other planets. This finding may be the "Rosetta Stone," telling us why near Venus' surface the heat is infernal. Any unequivocal evidence of disequilibrium tells us that Venus is indeed young (Van Flandern) [108] .
Earth's history of the period around 3 500 BP, so far as it is known, provides proof of extraterrestrial damage. In this respect, the following propositions have garnered enough probative support to be acceptable as leading hypotheses [109] .
1. Astrosphere:
the skies were disturbed and celestial motions were reportedly irregular. Astronomical alignments of before this age are out of line with references of the period following. No temple can be adduced whose orientations have remained the same through this time.For instance, the second rupestral temple at Wadi es Seboua( s) in Upper Egypt was originally orientated before 1 500 BC from its rear, through its portal, via a faraway mountain saddle to the winter solstice bearing 30° 9' 0" South of East. It was destroyed by fire. Much later it was excavated and rebuilt. Again it was orientated to the winter solstice, this time, however, to 35° 49' 12" South of East (Roussel).
Possibly a block of the Earth shifted northward or else the axis of the Earth tilted; both are possible, and each may have contributed to the need for realignment.
2. Atmosphere:
There were radical disturbances and some lasting changes in atmospheric electricity, radioactivity, temperature, winds, climate, and solar radiance. The Book of Exodus can be read as a meteorological journal - one encounters electrostatic phenomena, gales, dense clouds, a unique darkness, falls of manna (compound manufacture in the atmosphere), dense rains of stones, fire (often apparently electric), a mass of dead quail (driven down by electrical storm and hurricane winds and said to be poisonous to eat), and radioactivity (see de Grazia, 1983a).A sharp rise in C-14 levels occurs about now (and at the time of the Mars incursions 700 years later) (see de Grazia, 1981). It is doubtful that C-14 is a valid and reliable clock, since its formation and absorption rates are so easily altered by changed environmental conditions, and so evidence of this nature, though favorable to the hypothesis, must be discounted.
3. Geosphere:
Every geophysical process gives evidence of quantavolutionary stress. Widespread earthquakes are part of the destruction of towns to be referred to below. There occurred "a major westward shift in the Euphrates system of channels as a whole during Kassite times" (Paterson) (of this age, we believe). A set of natural disasters plunged the Harappan culture of India into a fatal decline now too.4. Biosphere:
Unusual biological behavior occasioned by habitat disturbance and environmental stress is evidenced. The behavior of animals during the Plagues of Egypt is well known and not to be dismissed as a myth: it is typical of well-observed disaster behavior (Galanopoulos and Bacon, p192-9; Lane). In the Black Sea, a large belt of coccoliths at the bottom returns a 35- century-old Carbon-14 date at a level below the sea floor [110] .5. Ekosphere:
All human settlements suffered destruction or damage from natural causes. In one study, we read, "In the middle of the second millennium BC the ancient cities of Southern Turkomenia declined and were abandoned by the inhabitants. The South Turkomenian civilization perished at about the same time as the Proto-Indian ... and the reasons are still unknown." (Kondratov, p164) Schaeffer's survey of some 40 most important archaeological sites in the Near East arrived at the same conclusion for the same time [111] .6. Historiasphere:
All contemporary accounts or chronologically assignable legends dealing with the period mention a general natural disaster. The prime case is the Bible. The Pallas Athene instance is also referred to. The Ipuwer papyrus has strong support now as an eyewitness account of the catastrophe ending the Middle Bronze Age in Egypt (Velikovsky, 1952, pp22-9; Greenberg, 1973; Sieff, 1976, p14; Bimson).7. Anthroposphere:
Every culture-complex changed markedly. We have mentioned several major civilizations which declined sharply or fell - Egyptian, Indian, Kassite, Turkomenian, and others of the Near East. One might add the Minoan of Crete and the Chinese. Social organizations, religions and modes of life were altered. A corollary is that no god of before 3500 BP remained without change of status or serious accident, citing the advent of Athene and the Mosaic renewal of Yahweh as examples.8. Holosphere:
In summation of the foregoing seven propositions, we may assert that all spheres of existence quantavoluted about 35 centuries ago. Nor does any sphere change independently of quantavolutions in other spheres. Since all spheres are changing, a general cause must be sought. There can be only one necessary and sufficient cause of the set of quantavolutions, which must be a very large body encountering the Earth. By observation and later commentaries, cometary behavior is indicated. Nothing but a god-like comet could have produced the phenomena of 3500 years ago.It follows, finally, that every institution, behavioral pattern and natural setting that exists today, if its history is complete, will reveal an inheritance of effects from the (Venus) quantavolution. The de-traumatizing of the human mind by designing and propagating new models of natural and human history would appear to be a necessary preliminary to peace and progress. For the later time, about twenty-six centuries ago, the Mars case offers a similar set of propositions, although the evidence argues for a level of destruction appreciably lower than that obtained form he earlier Venus-Earth encounter [112] .
Around the solar year 2776 BP, human activities related to celestial disturbances were generated respecting Mars, as well as Venus, and are notable in the Near East and Mediterranean world (Velikovsky, 1950, p265ff). Enough subsequent benchmarks were provided by legends and practices for Velikovsky to surmise that a large heavenly body, apparently Mars, was threatening collision with the Earth at fifteen-year intervals. The Mars encroachments may have been initiated by Venus, which, pursuing an ever-shortening orbit, perhaps encountered and displaced Mars from its earlier orbit between the Earth and the Sun (Rose, 1972).
The Romans were Mars-worshippers par excellence, and the legends, rites and early reports that tie Mars to the history of Rome are not to be disregarded; "archaeological and epigraphic discoveries" continue to demonstrate that "the legendary guise of the traditional material actually masks a real foundation of authentic events" (Bloch, 1085).
By contest with Venus, Mars seems to be an old god. Much less is made of his origins and birth in the Mediterranean world. When he bursts upon the world scene in the eighth century BC he is already well known. Least personable of the Olympian deities, Ares (Mars) is portrayed as a ruthless warrior. Hercules seems to be one of his more interesting identities. New militaristic nations, particularly the Romans, the Assyrians, and the ancestral Aztecs, forged empires under his inspiration. The Roman dedication to Mars is well known. He was believed to be father of Romulus, their founder. In the old calendar they named the first month after him.
The Romans irreconcilably claimed both Aeneas, Prince of Troy, and Romulus as their founder. Aeneas was, and is, placed in the twelfth or thirteenth century BC with the Trojan Wars, by older scholarship. Recently the Wars have been brought into later times, along with Homer, who sang of them (de Grazia, 1984a). This is but one step in a reconstruction of chronology that eliminates the several centuries of a so-called Greek Dark Age and pulls the disastrous collapse of the Mycenaean civilization down to the eighth century as well (Isaacson). Roman legend has Romulus and Remus (abandoned and miraculously suckled by a wolf in their infancy) [113] founding a town called Rome, which Romulus rules until he is lofted into the air, possibly by a cyclone, to join his father, Mars.
It seems to us reasonable that around this time, Aeneas and his band of experienced and cultivated Trojans might have impressed themselves upon, or been welcomed by, the local Latins of the new town, and perhaps even helped by their neighbors to the North, the Etruscans, who themselves were of Anatolian origins.
It is an age of destruction and movement. The powerful nearby Etruscan state was staggered by natural disasters and a decline. According to Pliny, their city of Volsinium, where stands Lake Bolsena today, was destroyed by a thunderbolt. Both Mount Vesuvius and Mount Etna underwent => Plinian eruptions around the same time.
Many peoples were on the march or fleeing -- possibly the Etruscan elite had not preceded Aeneas by long. They were from the general area of Ilium (Troy). Southern Italy and Sicily were being heavily settled by Greeks, in trouble themselves and profiting from natural disasters that were besetting the earlier inhabitants. And at that time the Dorians (Heraclids, sons of Hercules-Mars) were moving in upon the hapless Myceneans.
All of these loose connections and temporal references need a thorough analysis; indeed, we require nothing short of a total review of the most ancient history, legends, and the records of excavations. Even then the human record, like the fossil record, is scanty. One may hope for, but not expect, that the thousand-to- one chance will occur, and that a tablet or papyrus describing clearly the behavior of the planet Mars in these times will be found. The earliest Etruscan, then Roman, calendar was of ten solar months. That the later twelve months alternated at thirty and thirty-one days does not fit the present lunation, which is better suited to the 29-and 30-day alteration used in all surviving lunar calendars. The indication is that Mars disrupted the month in its transaction with the Earth and/ or Moon.
The Aztec Mars was Huitzilopochtli, born of Mother Earth from a ball of humming-bird feathers that fell from the sky. His color was blue, his totem the eagle, and his weapon the blue snake. The interminable human sacrifices of the Aztecs were in his name or to the Sun in his name; the Sun, "the Eagle who rises", was believed to require the hearts of an unending stream of prisoners-of-war if he was to remain constant in behavior. The High Priest of Huitzilopochtli was called Feathered Serpent, priest of Our Lord; but "feathered serpent" is rendered Quetzalcoatl, who at a much earlier time was the ruling deity of Meso-America and was identified unfailingly as the planet Venus by many scholars.
The Assyrians of the eighth and seventh centuries, "like the Romans, those other stepchildren of Mars, and more than the Hittites, its victims, had a lively reverence for the planet Mars: 'Nergal, the almighty among the gods, fear, terror, awe-inspiring splendor', wrote Essarhaddon, son of Sennacherib." Evidence of physical destruction by fire and earthquake is abundant everywhere in these years, and it was "beneath the exploits of Mars ... that Assyria marches to world power", Sieff (1981) declares. Patten et al. argue that the Assyrians timed their major offensives to coincide with cosmic approaches of Mars to profit from the physical disorder and consternation of their enemies.
In general, the same hypotheses that we stipulated earlier for the Venus encounters may be translated for and applied to the Mars encounters seven centuries earlier. That is, we can adduce some evidence from around the world of deep disturbances in the six spheres and of their interconnections in the holosphere.
Ancient astronomers and writers appear to have had no difficulty in considering (or perhaps they were really reflecting upon) historic encounters governing the planets; yet we can observe in their own times the strengthening of three psychological defense mechanisms that made historical reconstruction involving quantavolution difficult: denial and suppression of memory, religious and literary sublimation, and abstract philosophy [114] . Modern cosmogonists, sternly trained in the principles of uniformitarianism and gradualism under a very long whip of time, are loath even to consider large-body departures from presently observed motions. And it is true that the constraints on motions required by strict obedience to such physical laws as the principle of conservation of angular momentum are formidable; immense forces must be invoked from somewhere so as abruptly to alter the motion of bodies. Calling upon gravitational force, as this is presently perceived in science, requires "impossible" conditions even if an encounter seems "reasonable" to expect.
However, if the moving bodies are charged and are transacting electrically, many "surprising" and selectively violent alterations can happen. The observations by the ancients that passing celestial bodies appeared like the objects we, today, classify as comets are understandable. Juergens (1972, p7) has shown how comet-like behavior (and appearance) results when astronomical bodies move quickly from a region with one level of electrification into a remote region differently electrified. Milton (1980/ 81) has generalized Juergens explanation to apply it to other "non-gravitational" celestial motions. Encke and later astronomers have noted with surprise how cometary bodies sometimes alter their angular momentum in seemingly sporadic episodes (Sekanina). By this point in our study of Solaria Binaria, we should not have to digress further in order to establish the capabilities of electrical motions.
We can go further. The Moon has undergone its tribulations whenever the Earth has been engaged. Legends, and myths of Moon encounters with Venus and Mars, are at least as numerous as those involving Earth alone. Documentation has been presented elsewhere.
Juergens (1974, 1974/ 75) has analyzed reports of various disparities between surface features of Moon and Mars, and explained them as effects of anode and cathode behavior that would be excited in close encounters. He has suggested, for instance, that some of the hill ranges of the Moon are so morphologically anomalistic as to represent a job of "electric welding" done by Mars [115] . To extract from these hills and from the canyons of Mars comparable material is presently impracticable, even though we may conceive of chemical tests to apply to the material thus obtained.
Juergens has gone further in the investigation of electrical encounters between Moon and Mars. On the assumption that the ray-surrounded crater Tycho (the most prominent feature on the Moon under high-angle lighting, that is, near Full Moon) could have been blasted out of the lunar highland rock by an electrical
explosion liberating almost 10 17 megajoules of energy and requiring a transfer of 10 11 coulombs of charge between the Moon and Mars, Juergens sought a suitable anode site on Mars' surface which might receive this discharge. He found a likely receptor in the mountainous feature called South Spot (now, Arsia Mons). He writes,
this spot is an enormous pit 140 kilometers across at the crest of an impressive 17 kilometer rise from the floor of the Amazonis basin to the west.
He observes that this volcano-like structure has no known counterparts on the Earth. Tycho also represents a lunar high point: it is some 1.2 kilometers above the hypothetical lunar sphere. The electrical connection between this feature and the Martian South Spot could have resembled Figure 36 just before the discharge occurred.
Figure 36. The Electric Field between Mars and the Moon
During the close passage of Mars and the Moon, circa 27 centuries ago,
devastation was produced on the surface of both bodies, the result of
interplanetary discharges across the gap between the two bodies. Here we
see the electric field lines (arrows) and the lines of equal electric potential
(variously dashed) prior to the breakdown that produced electric
discharges from the Moon (the cathode) to Mars (the anode). The outer
equipotential depicts the sheath boundary between the electrosphere of the
charged bodies and the interplanetary plasma.
-- courtesy of the estate of Ralph Juergens
Juergens' analysis might well serve as a launching platform for decades of detailed studies, using a quantavolutionary electric and recent-time model of each planet's topographical peculiarities.
As with Moon and Mars, so with Venus and Mars. perhaps, in the end, we shall come to regard a famous scene of the Iliad of Homer as an eyewitness account, garbled, to be sure: that is where the goddess Athene, archetype of planetary Venus, engages in awful sky combat with the god Ares, who is recognized as the planet Mars.
Athene drove her chariot towards Ares, bane of mortals, and drove her spear deeply into his belly. Thereupon arose a huge black cloud, and he bellowed like 10 000 warriors and fled into the high heavens.
Some 2700 years later, the United States of America sends Mariner 9 into space and photographs the most prominent feature of Mars, the Coprates Canyon complex. It is a 12 megameter line of seemingly extruded mountains, enormous beyond anything on Earth, leading into a canyon 3,600 kilometers in length, 500 km. wide, and 6,100 meters deep, ending in another string of great volcanic outbursts. Some 8.5 million cubic kilometers of rock have disappeared. The wound stretches across half the circumference of the planet.
Allan Kelly has offered a scenario. The total eruption
is a product of the same event, when some very large comet or other massive intruder from space passed too close to Mars .... This intruder literally sucked the lava from the interior of Mars to form the huge volcanoes .... As it came closer it caused a tremendous bulge, miles high, that burst open along the top and spewed out lava and great chunks of Martian crust; much of this material followed the intruder into space.
There is no evidence of water erosion of the steep stairs of the canyon, no sedimentation, delta fans or stream beds cutting the lengthy lips of the wound. The intruder, be it Athene, Ishtar, or Venus, both repelled and implanted charge onto the defenseless Mars. Leaders of lightning from Venus incised the masses that had assembled in a belt of Mars along half its girth. In the ripping blast that followed, Mars flung them upon the intruder, and, lighter but more heavily charged, withdrew. So the aforesaid "garbling" of history lay partly in not perceiving that Mars laid a mass upon Venus and that the greatest spear thrusts of lightning were exchanged beneath the dense cloud that poured from Mars' wound.
Notes on Chapter 16
108. Van Flandern, in a letter to C. L. Ellenberger.
113. The wolf (cf. Fenris in Norse myth) is often a Mars symbol.
115. Personal communication to A. de Grazia.