Ellenberger Replies to Cochrane and Talbott (1/2)
James J. Lippard
Foreword
On 22 May, Everett Cochrane (C.) replied to the first three points, or
42% of my 19 May reply to him. Although his primary goal was to
discredit me, a careful examination of his remarks shows that he is the
one who should be concerned about his credibility because in trying to
skewer me he gloriously displays Chanticleer-style his own lamentable
ignorance. I regret the delay in this reply to C., who has seen fit to
repost his criticism at least twice, but I have been held up waiting for
replies from several people who have been and are unavailable. While
this reply to C. has been pending, I have posted a comprehensive reply
to Cardona, two replies to Grubaugh and several shorter items on the
physiological effects of strong magnetic fields, etc. I have also been
actively engaged in advancing research by facilitating the interaction
between and/or among A.D. Kilmer, H.A.T. Reiche, H. von Dechend, O.
Gingerich and E.G. McClain. I am grateful to Jim Lippard for posting
the original reply to Godowski and this rejoinder, plus posting my
letter "A Lesson from Velikovsky (_Skep. Inq._, Summer 1986), and
reposting my clarification to "Ignotum per Ignotius" (IpI), rejected at
AEON by C., when C. reposted his 22 May remarks.
In the April 1984 DISCOVER, Carol Tavris observed: "One of the
sturdiest findings in the slushy social sciences is that when a belief
system [e.g., Freud's, or Velikovsky's, or Talbott's] meets contrary
evidence--when faith meets facts--the facts are sacrificed." This was
my disappointing realization in April 1981 when I discovered that
Velikovsky's (V's) use of Douglass's sequoia tree rings was unfounded
and no one at KRONOS with whom I shared this discovery was concerned.
But it took me until 1983 before I had realized that this symptom
applied to all of the support for WORLDS IN COLLISION (WC) and that the
evidence in the Greenland ice cores, which I had been rationalizing
since 1977, in fact refuted V.'s scenario as well as those of other
catastrophists and neo-V'ians. These ice cores are a perfect way to
test Clube & Napier's model of Earth's episodic interaction with the
dense portion of the Taurid-Encke Complex in the Holocene by looking for
certain extraterrestrial chemical and isotopic signatures in the
seasonal layers which can be counted back over 80,000 years by naked eye
in the new Summit cores. Unfortunately, ice core workers do not
routinely look for these exotic low level species; but this is not to sa
they are not present. The following analysis will show that nothing
presented by C. can be given credence and that his behavior fits the
model described by Tavris above.
I make no bones about the fact that most of what C. has posted about
me and the handling of my invited memoir at AEON that he cancelled after
the first installment is manifestly not true. In April when I learned
about the lies (confirmed in posts to t.o by Lippard) posted by C., I
informed him that all future communication would be in writing for the
sake of documentation. Previous unanswered criticisms by C. of my
conduct as a V'ian supporter now a turncoat were addressed in a 5 May
memorandum sent to 14 t.o participants. A copy of it may be obtained by
sending a SASE to Leroy Ellenberger, 3929A Utah St., St. Louis, MO
63116, marked "M", or $1.00 in lieu of SASE for foreign mail (your
money's worth guaranteed). The falsehoods and other chicanery
perpetrated by C. in one paragraph posted 14 Jun are examined in
Appendix A, below.
With this foreword, I hope the main rebuttal to C. will be mercifully
short, presenting C.'s criticism, either by quote or paraphrase,
followed by my reply. I hasten to add, however, that Cardona's 14 line
comment on 20 May took 76 lines to discredit.
If these comments strike the reader as intemperate, keep in mind that
these arguments have been consistently ignored and/or dismissed by
"Saturnists" since 1988 when Talbott invited me to be devil's advocate
at AEON.
Reply to Cochrane
1a. Velikovsky deserves "credit for his singularly novel idea" that
"Venus only recently presented a comet-like appearance" and that
"recent cataclysms involving the respective planets inform ancient
mythology."
WRONG. Here C. disqualifies himself the first time as a competent
commentator. Boucher was correct when he noted on t.o that Venus is too
massive to have a tail, now or ever. Comets have tails because their
gravity field is too weak to hold an atmosphere when their ices sublime.
Bodies as big as Venus hold an atmosphere, even were it molten, and do
not show a tail. Through the miracle of thermodynamics, even today with
a surface hot enough to melt lead, the cloud tops of Venus are about -40
degrees C. No one has even shown that Venus _could_ present a comet-
like appearance, i.e., have a visible tail. Venus's alleged tail is a
red herring that has eluded detection until now; even Sagan missed it.
So, if some body had a tail and was called "Venus" or was associated
with Venus, it must have been an ordinary comet by composition, if not
size. Hint: the giant proto-Encke in Clube & Napier's model.
C. also commits the _petitio principii_ fallacy assuming Venus had a
tail for which V. deserves credit when such a tail has not been
established and, indeed, is impossible, as reasoned above. C. is
mistaken if he believes science gives credit for "novel ideas." Novel
ideas are easy. AEON is chock full of them and most, if not all, are
wildly wrong. As Henry Bauer sagely noted: "Novelty receives a prize
only after it has become part of the conventional wisdom" (2). C. is
quite misguided to think that V's priority on the erroneous notion that
Venus had a tail has any importance.
On the other hand, Radlof (1823), whom C. decries, is germane because
his scenario in HESPERUS AND PHAETHON places Venus in a cometary orbital
scenario quite similar to V's in WC. All of C.'s carping over Radlof's
obscurity is irrelevant. Obscurity never stopped D. Talbott from citing
a source in his book THE SATURN MYTH. Although no U.S. research library
holds it, Clube & Napier's copy was obtained from the Royal Observatory,
Edinburgh.
As for recent cataclysms involving planets, no physical evidence
exists to support this notion and a host of circular, resonant satellite
orbits at Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn flatly contradict such a
naive, simplistic notion. Regarding Venus, as C&N note, any prominent
comet presenting a morning and evening apparition at perihelion would
have been associated with her. C. also ignores the fact that the five
visible planets were named _after_ gods whose stories arose before the
planets were named. Since C. claims to be familiar with van der
Waerden's SCIENCE AWAKENING II, he should know that to the Babylonians,
except for Sun and Moon, the planet was not the god, but only the
visible manifestation of the god (p. 57), e.g., Jupiter was "star of the
god Marduk" (p. 59).
1b. The "bizarre reference to Charles Raspil's phantom statement" does
not exist.
WRONG. C. took the bait of my unspecified reference to Raspil. The
source is HORUS I:2 (1985) 25. C. could have given me the benefit of
the doubt regarding the authenticity, but he chose to treat it as though
I made it up. HORUS was a sister publication to KRONOS, founded by our
deceased colleague at KRONOS, and my friend, Dr. David Griffard, who
published seven issues. On his frequent trips to and through St. Louis
in '83-'84 he told me in no uncertain terms that the "Saturnitis" that
had afflicted KRONOS with many articles by Rose, Cardona, Cochrane and
Talbott was an intellectually irresponsible abomination. As for the
relevance of 17th century Europeans mistaking Venus for a comet, if
they, why not some of the ancients to whom C. ascribes 100% veracity?
2a. Tuman's dating Mul Apin Tablet I to 2048 BC cannot be correct
because this is earlier than recognized by such scholars as Reiner
and van der Waerden and such "astronomical proficiency" was
"unknown and unimaginable in third millenium Mesopotamia."
WRONG. C.'s discussion of Tuman's work and the Venus Tablets of
Ammizaduga is thoroughly corrupt. Van der Waerden does not say the
observations on the Mul Apin tablets are from the Assyrian and Neo-
Babylonian periods; the tablets we have are copies of older tablets made
in these more recent periods.
What irony that someone who blindly accepts V.'s intuition against
the world's scientific and scholarly authorities raises these same
authorities against Tuman's bona fide envelope-pushing insights. Once
again C. demonstrates how disconnected he is from the world of
scholarship. According to A.D. Kilmer, Assyriologist at Berkeley,
scholars at meetings where Tuman presents his methodology and results
have no problem with his pushing dates back, as C. seems to think; they
question instead various steps in his procedures.
The roots of astronomical proficiency extend back farther than C.
even begins to imagine. Peter Huber has dated Enuma Anu Enlil tablers
19-20 to 2302 BC (5). Archie Roy reports that in 1899 Robert Brown
dated Aratus's famous astronomical poem to 2084 BC, that a Sumero-
Akkadian Euphratean Planisphere shows the Sun in Taurus at vernal
equinox, a position that predates 2540 BC, and that the present zodiac
dates from 2000+/-200 BC (9). Willy Hartner concluded that the lion-
bull combat motif originated at Persepolis or Ur about 4000 BC (3).
According to Harald Reiche, the iconography of Iranian vases from 4000
BC is demonstrably unintelligible except in terms of quasi-precessional
phenomena (8). According to Tom Worthen, "With the possible exception
of the designation for Ursa Major, Pleiades is the only name for an
asterism to be represented in several Indo-European daughter languages"
(13). Let the reader decide who possesses a "colossal ignorance in
matters involving archaeoastronomy."
2b. "Indeed, for several years now I have attempted to talk Leroy into
debating Tuman's work within the pages of Aeon...."
WRONG. This is not true because C.'s only knowledge of Tuma's work has
been from Archaeoastronomy X (1987-1988) which, despite its date, was
released April 1993. No useful purpose would be served by debating
Tuman's cutting-edge work with scientifically illiterate zealots in a
pseudo-science publication. I might as well debate the Copernican
system in a Flat Earth Society publication. Tuman's first paper
applying his methodology appeared in 1983 (12).
2c. "The Ammizaduga Tablets support the thesis that Venus once moved
upon a different orbit."
WRONG. Once again C. evidences his lamentable ignorance of a V'ian
issue. As I relate in IpI in AEON III:1, according to Rose & Vaughan,
if the Venus Tablets record accurate observations, they imply ONLY that
Earth's eccentricity has changed. To assume the change is due to Venus
is another instance of _petitio principii_, begging the question.
C. claims my discussion in AEON "is not a reputable source"; and this
would be true were I advancing some cockamamie notion such as Earth
having no tilt between, say, 3400 BP and 2700 BP or Earth acquiring the
Moon in the Holocene (see Appendix B for note 17 from AEON III:1, p.
103); but this is not the case for IpI merely marshalls the collective
wisdom of such "reputable sources" as Peter Huber, Owen Gingerich, Asger
Aaboe, and John Weir to refute the pro-V. interpretation of the Venus
tablets. In fact, IpI was vetted at several stages by Huber, Gingerich,
and Weir. I even sent the second draft to Rose for comment, to no
avail. Furthermore, C. misses the point that, in V'ian scholarship, the
critic is required to evidence awareness of all relevant dscussions, no
matter how derivative.
2d. "That the Babylonians and Maya...both computed Venus' disappearance
interval to be 90 days suggests that Venus only recently moved upon
a different orbit."
WRONG. These intervals were counted, not computed. Huber's point is
that the observations in the Tablets are qualitatively the same as
Babylonian observations from the late first millenium so the null
hypothesis cannot be rejected and the Tablets reflect no change in the
planetary orbits (4). Aveni makes a compelling case that these deviant
allocations of the Venus cycle were an attempt by the Babylonians and
Maya "to fit Venus's motion into the time frame marked by the phases of
the moon" (1). Unfortunately, Aveni's keen insight is marred by his not
knowing that Huber now favors 1702 BC as Ammizaduga's Year 1 and not
distinguishing between historical and astronomical dates, i.e., between
BC and (-). Contrary to C., the similar discrepancies in the Venus
Tablets and Dresden Codex do not mean the orbits have changed because of
the work of Huber and Aveni cited above. Curiously, C. cites Aveni's
1981 book when he was perplexed by the discrepancies instead of his 1992
book when he was not, which C. reviewed in AEON III:2.
3. "The fact is that I am quite familiar with van der Waerden's book
and it thoroughly contradict's Ellenberger's position."
WRONG. Page 70 of SCIENCE AWAKENING II lists the contents of Mul Apin
Tablet I, dated by Tuman to 2048 BC and perforce Sumerian, which
contents include the elements of configurational astronomy.
Technically, C. is correct that van der Waerden does not ascribe the
origin of configurational astronomy to the Sumerians, but this
technicality is overcome by the fact that, according to Hartner (3), the
Babylonians got their astronomical terminology for stars and
constellations from the Sumerians. Thus, C.'s wish that "the Sumerians
had kept such records" is fulfilled! The discussion at pp. 78-79, cited
by C., is irrelevant to the origin of configurational astronomy.
4. Although C. does not address my discussion of the reed bundle Inanna
symbols, which admittedly resemble comet tails (as the proverbial cigar
resembles a phallus), I would point out that in context, not only do
they often appear in pairs, but the constant association is with animals
and birthing huts (11), whose connection with comets is obscure, to say
the least.
The Parthian Shot: C. ends his reply by harking back to our joint
service on the staff of KRONOS and quoting Lynn Rose's opinion of me and
my work in KRONOS XII:1 (1987). This tactic is most unfortunate, for it
puts Rose's credentials into play and they do not survive close
scrutiny.
C. has a penchant for exaggeration, as when he writes "Ellenberger
and I have had a long association." I beg to differ. Merely being on
the same masthead with no personal contact is no meaningful association.
I never had any continuing dealings with C. until May 1991 when he
invited me to contribute to the Velikovsky retrospective project and
promised me that my reply to Rose on the ice cores ("Litmus Tests in the
Ice") would appear in the same issue as Rose's ice core article that
appeared in AEON III:1. C. broke this promise when he made "Litmus
Tests..." the first section of Part 2 which was then cancelled. This
association ended officially in June 1993, but effectively in January
when he left me alone as I revised the final section, "Legacies," as we
agreed was advisable.
I categorically deny C.'s charge about my alleged "carelessness as a
writer." My articles, letters-to-the-editor, and forum items in KRONOS
were highly regarded and I was told (by Greenberg) garnered high levels
of reader response, mostly favorable, e.g., "Heretics and Dogmatists..."
(4 pts), Earth as tippe top (4 pts), "Still Facing Many Problems" (2
pts), and my defense of the catastrophic demise of the mammoth in KRONOS
VII:4 (1982) which I retracted in AEON II:5 (1991).
Quoting Rose against Ellenberger is like asking Cato what he thought
of Hannibal. Rose stopped communicating with me in 1983 when we could
not agree on the materiality of the omissions, misrepresentations and
exaggerations in V.'s STARGAZERS AND GRAVEDIGGERS (see Appendix C:
"Denouement," the penultimate section of my cancelled AEON memoir that
was not type-set and of which C. told me his readers were not interested
in such information; you be the judge.)
If anyone wants a countervailing opinion about Ellenberger, they
might balance C.'s, Rose's, and Greenberg's (AEON III:2) skewed
perspective by contacting such people and Tom Van Flandern, Victor
Slabinski, Harald Reiche, Ernest McClain, Michael Friedlander, Victor
Clube, Henry Bauer, John White, Martin Gardner, Milton Zysman and Frank
Wallace. Before he called me a "jack-ass" in AEON II:4, George Talbott
once write "I admire your tenacity, your ability to write clearly and
forcefully, and your intelligence" (June 4, 1982). When V. inscribed
his RAMSES II AND HIS TIME to me 20-V-78, he wrote "To Leroy who is
almost consumed by the sacred flame of search for Truth." I am that
person still; but smarter and wiser.
On the other hand, as probably the last insider to defend the Mars
events in WC, Rose shows no sign of being smarter and wiser. At the
August 1992 CSIS meeting at Haliburton, Ontario, I was moved to announce
from the floor after a break: "So far as I am concerned, nothing has
been a bigger impediment to a sensible post-Velikovsky research program
among supporters than the obstinacy, mendacity, invincible ignorance,
and corrupt methodology of professor of philosophy L.E. Rose." In my 1
Sept. '92 letter to Clark Whelton, I went on: "His intellectual
pathology has been apparent to objective readers since his article in
PENSEE I in 1972 and confirmed by his correspondence with Michael
Friedlander following PSA 1974 a Notre Dame where Friedlander was
confronted by Velikovsky, Paterson and Rose. In THE NEW AGE: Notes of a
Fringe-Watcher (1988), Martin Gardner observes: 'That KRONOS continues
to be published is a striking tribute to the persistence of irrational
beliefs on the part of humorless acolytes--the outstanding example is
Lynn Rose, professor of (of all things) philosophy at the State
University of New York at Buffalo--whose minds are set in
concrete.'...My attitude towards Rose is no aberration or behavior
without provocation. It may be unorthodox, but it is not
unjustified....Newcomers to Velikovsky with whom I've corresponded are
aghast at Rose's personal attack on me in KRONOS II:1 and many
subscribers considered deplorable Greenberg's treatment of me in KRONOS
XII:3. In July 1991, Greenberg wrote a mutual correspondent saying
Ellenberger is 'a barbarian unfit to be in polite academic society.'
Excuse me, but at the risk of being self-serving, I do appreciate the
difference between 'on stage' and 'off stage' behavior and am one of the
few persons in the Velikovsky literature who has ever retracted an
erroneous position: SISW 5:4 and AEON II:5. Velikovsky did, too, in
June 1951 Harper's, but he did not follow through as he said he would.
On balance, I'd put my record against anyone's in pursuing 'the sacred
flame of the search for truth' which Velikovsky once inscribed for me in
one of his books."
Although Rose is the first to admonish others about _petitio
principii_, the fallacy of affirming the consequent, he is also one of
its biggest perpetrators. Consider the following passage deleted by C.
from IpI:
Claiming that with such problems as energy-disposal we stand
before a door, not a wall, Rose exhibits a naively cavalier
attitude toward the laws of physics. It would be more accurate--
and more honest--to say that Velikovsky's sequence of planetary
orbits does not conserve energy instead of deflecting criticism
by saying it 'conserve[s] total angular momentum and do[es] not
increase total orbital energy' (PENSEE VIII, p. 27). He has more
faith in Velikovsky's intuition than in the laws of physics, as
captured in the following passage from his April 19, 1979 letter
to me:
I don't want to provide anyone with any basis at all for
saying that _I_ regard those unanswered questions as
difficulties. When Vaughan and I wrote 'Sequence', we
freely and frankly discussed various questions and problems.
Then certain critics (whose names I have successfully
repressed) said that _we_ had identified problems and
difficulties that invalidated Velikovsky's scenario. That
is of course a gross distortion (as the ending of 'Sequence'
makes clear)....
The wall/door metaphor for impossibility/opportunity has become
quite popular, having been invoked in KRONOS X:1, p. 92; XI:2,
p. 12; and XII:3, p. 66. It is also simplistic. Before one can
reliably identify a 'door,' or an 'opportunity for discovery,' one
needs to be able to identify both 'doors' and 'walls.' In PENSEE
VIII, Rose & Vaughan contrasted energy conservation with the
parallax problem which some saw as a reason to reject the
Copernican theory while Bruno saw it as an indication that the
stars were very far away. However, the parallax problem is
different in kind from the energy conservation problem. The
parallax problem disappears by a change in scale while the energy
conservation problem does not. There ARE real 'walls.' Some
things really are impossible or wrong, e.g., perpetual motion
machines, the flat earth, phlogiston, N rays, and polywater.....
Rose has not shown that he can identify a 'wall.' Until he does
so, his identification of 'doors' cannot be taken seriously.
Obviously, Rose is unable to admit that WC is wrong--as he also shows in
his approach to the ice cores where he refuses to acknowledge the simple
litmus test they pose: If the debris deposited in Earth's atmosphere by
Venus caused 40 years of darkness at Exodus, where is it since there is
no sign of it in the world's ice caps, ocean bottoms, or even the Sea of
Galilee? Rose has violated one of the most important canons of V'ian
scholarship by ignoring the published versions of this test (see
Appendix D for my first NATURE letter, "Falsifying Velikovsky," 1 August
1985) and by ignoring RGA Dolby who put the ice cores on the table in
1977 in the British Velikovsky journal. Instead, Rose proposes that
during the period between the Venus and Mars events, Earth had no tilt
which somehow produced the brittle sections in the deep polar ice caps.
But the brittle sections do not occur at the same epochs in different
cores and not at all in Tibetan cores. Rose shows his incompetence in
KRONOS XII:2 when he dates an acid signal at 4000 BC (later reported to
be 1645 BC) using linear interpolation on depth for dating a signal at
1200m between endpoints of (50 BC, 800m) and (10,000 BC, 1800m) which
implicitly ignores thinning with depth. All of Rose's malfeasance on
ice cores was exposed by Sean Mewhinney in "Ice Cores and Common Sense"
which was sent to Rose in April 1989 as part of a joint mailing by
Bauer, Ellenberger, and Mewhinney distributed to 110 people and
published in C&AH XII:1 & XII:2 in 1990; yet Rose ignores this
criticism. Rose is not alone in this behavior, for in 1986 George
Talbott declined to answer the question posed above. We know Earth's
axis was tilted during this period because the Chinese left us with
gnomen readings they used to determine the solstices at this time. Such
is the power of true interdisciplinary synthesis to which V'ians barely
pay lip service. Rose's reluctance to confront the ice cores squarely
reminds me of the contrasting attitude displayed by Professor William
Buckland, as related in an amusing anecdote by Ariadne in NEW SCIENTIST
for 13 Feb. 1986: "He was being conducted round a cathedral and the
guide pointed out the stains of a martyr's blood. As usual, they were
ineradicable and always fresh. Buckland got down on the pavement and
tested the stain with the tip of his tongue. 'I can tell you what that
is,' he said. 'It's bat urine.'" Rose's performance in assessing the
ice cores as witness to WC shows that he is not really willing to stick
out his tongue.
That Rose's intellectual pathology is long-standing is obvious from a
critical reading of his "The Censorship of Velikovsky's
Interdisciplinary Synthesis" in PENSEE I, reprinted in VELIKOVSKY
RECONSIDERED (1976). With the help of Sean Mewhinney and Henry Bauer,
Rose's article was annotated in 1990 for distribution at the
"Reconsidering Velikovsky" Symposium in Toronto under the title: "The
Annotated Rose: A Propaganda Piece Analyzed." It is available by
sending a SASE marked "Rose" to Leroy Ellenberger, 3929 Utah St., St.
Louis, MO 63116, or $1.00 in lieu of postage for foreign mail (your
money's worth guaranteed).
Talbott's Shared Delusion
Sunday, 12 Jun, C. posted 183 lines of nonsense by Dave Talbott trying
to lend credence to his naive, literal interpretation of myth. But
Talbott's methodology is irredeemably flawed on several grounds.
1. Their entire enterprise is based on the "Big Lie" that the planets
were the first gods. However, the real truth is that the planets were
named after pre-existing gods whose origin had nothing to do with
planets. The major role of planets in early religion was in astrology,
the product of theological speculation. According to Morris Jastrow,
Jr., in his "famous" and oft-cited article "Sun and Saturn," Saturn was
not given a specific name until after Venus and Jupiter were named,
which is surely strange if Saturn was the primordial deity described by
the "Saturnists." The nature of early religion is discussed in, e.g.,
T. Jacobsen, _The Treasures of Darkness_ (1976), E.O. James, _The
Worship of the Sky-God_ (1963), E. Lyle, _Archaic Cosmos: Polarity,
Space and Time_ (1990), and G.A. Wainwright, _The Sky-Religion in Egypt_
(1938/1971).
2. The association of Sun and Saturn that looms large in the
"Saturnists"' lore is readily accounted for by the law of contrasts:
the linking of the fastest and slowest bodies moving in the ecliptic.
Saturn may well have been specially associated with the Sun because,
according to H.A.T. Reiche, time came to be measured by the Sun's motion
and the number 30 linked their periods: 12 x 30 d = schematic solar
year and 30 x (12 x 30 d) = Saturn's sidereal year. The notion that
"Saturn's immense form encompassed the whole sky" can be explained by
the planet's name applying to both ORB and ORBIT. As the most distant
planet, Saturn's orbit, indeed, can be said to have encompassed the
whole sky. There is no need to have Earth close to Saturn to explain
this image. There is also no need for Kronos-Saturn to reside at the
pole to rule there because in the framework of the _skambha_ he can
affect the pole from his orbit through leverage, using the analogy of a
ship's railing moving in tandem with the top of the mast; see _Hamlet's
Mill_, Ch. XVII, a chapter "Saturnists" such as Cardona and Talbott show
no sign of either having read or understood.
3. Talbott ignores the advice in the April 14, 1972 TLS to the effect
that "it is not possible to understand the relation of myth to reality
without some independent knowledge of the reality." Jerome Lettvin made
the same point in "The Use of Myth" in _Technology Review_ (June 1976)
with "You can't even guess what is meant [in myth] unless you know what
is meant." "Saturnists" make no attempt to support their
interpretations with independent, preferably physical, evidence.
Ironically, this advice in TLS appeared the month before the Talbott
brothers revived PENSEE with the ten issue series "Velikovsky
Reconsidered." Similarly, Talbott is very vague about how long the
polar configuration lasted and when it ended--and event that should have
left unambiguous markers all over the world.
4. Theories can never be proved by successful predictions, whether 120
or 1200, as Wesley Salmon explained in the May 1973 _Scientific
American_, ignored then by Talbott at PENSEE and ever since. As I wrote
Cardona 22 April 1989: "It is axiomatic in set theory that if a set of
symbols, S, has an internally consistent meaning, M, that set can also
be interpreted as another consistent meaning, Q. It is abundantly clear
to me now that Saturnists took their cue from Velikovsky in assuming Q
in the first place and interpreted everything else in terms of Q, logic
and physics, and context be damned. But the Egyptians and Babylonians
and Sumerians (who were anterior to the former two) never heard of Q, or
saw Q. Jastrow makes this quite clear, it seems to me."
5. In interpreting various artistic religious icons and motifs,
"Saturnists" ignore the caveat in a footnote C. deleted from IpI, that
"a picture is the artist's interpretation of the _symbolic significance_
of the subject, not necessarily a 'realistic' representation."
6. Talbott writes nonchalantly about Earth swapping moons as humankind
watched, completely oblivious to the cruel truth that lunar acquisition
implies the destruction of the biosphere (see Appendix B).
7. Talbott consistently conflates archaeological evidence with
historical evidence, failing to appreciate the fact that an artifact
exhumed from a historical site is not historical evidence, but
archaeological evidence. Historical evidence properly is written
testimony with as little room for interpretation as possible.
8. The "Saturnists" have no respect for negative evidence, considering
that since a July 1993 telcon in which I explained the ice core
testimony to Talbott, he and C. and Grubaugh have ignored it. In this
behavior they emulate their exemplar. When I first met V., at his
invitation on Palm Sunday 1978, the survival of the bristlecone pine,
which for some is a sufficient disproof of WC, was on my list of
questions. When the issue came up, V. responded immediately with the
nonchalance of a Borscht Belt comic, "So? They survived." This typifies
the general disregard V'ians have for negative evidence. No single
negative datum is ever taken seriously since real events cannot be
disproved, another instance of assuming the truth of that which needs to
be proven, _petitio principii_.
9. The Saturn myth is not as all-encompassing as Talbott would have us
believe. It fails to account for at least two aspects of early
religion: 1) _dakshina_, the ritual of right running (10, 13) and 2)
the sacred number names assigned to Mesopotamian gods ca. 3000 BC by the
Sumerians that encoded the primary ratios of music which later
influenced the religious mythologies of India, China, Babylon, Greece,
Israel, and Europe. According to E.G. McClain, "All ancient 'theology'
and a vast portion of ancient mythology is straight-forward harmonical
allegory. Deities and heroes encode mathematical functions. Events
encode operations. The most powerful metaphors are appeals to visual
imagination as it encounters the matrix arithmetic for various
alternative perspectives."
10. Finally, as I stated in a footnote deleted by C. from IpI, the
"imperative groundrule of catastrophist research" expressed by D.
Talbott, "that physical models must be tested against the mythical-
historical record" (AEON I:6, p. 123), ignores a crucial qualification,
namely, that the only models worthy of consideration are _feasible_
physical models. Thus, the laws of physics should be used to assess the
feasibility of proposed polar configurations. Those that are deemed
impossible, as Ashton discussed in AEON I:3, should be discarded
regardless of the "historical evidence" to which Talbott alluded
because, in point of fact, there is no proper "historical evidence" for
the polar configuration. For one thing, the polar configuration harks
back to the era of _prehistory_. What evidence exists consists of
_interpretations_ of various literary and religious motifs whose
putative original status as a physical reality is highly dubious....The
"Saturnists"...blindly superimpose modern concepts on ancient traditions
ignoring the orality-literacy divide (KRONOS XI:1, p. 103) and the
difference between cosmogonic, scientific, and historical thinking
(Ibid., p. 107).
Conclusion
The "Saturnists"' interpretation of myth is methodologically unsound and
totally unconstrained by the laws of physics. There is no good reason
to give any credence to the Saturn myth and its polar configuration
whose physical impossibility has been explained to Grubaugh and the
people at AEON for the past year by Tom Van Flandern and Victor
Slabinski through Ellenberger's missives and memorandums. The
"Saturnists" do not explain anything that cannot be explained more
economically by conventional scholarship. Most, if not all, of the sky-
combat and Venus-comet imagery and the general fear of comets can be
explained by Clube & Napier's model (_In the Cosmic Winter_ (1990)) of
earth's episodic, energetic interaction with the dense portion of the
Taurid-Encke complex during the Holocene, which was the stimulus for
periods of eschatological enthusiasm in the Bible--real comets, real
firestorms out of the sky (often about 40 days after proto-Encke was
spotted), all relatable by archaic reasoning to Venus, and all
astronomically feasible. Yet Talbott never discusses Clube & Napier's
model as an alternative to his planetary delusion. When confronted with
uncomfortable information such as Ashton's "Bedrock...", their reaction
is to suppress it rather than to deal with it, or to ignore it as with
Clube & Napier. Given their myriad failings, they are clueless in the
mythosphere.
Leroy Ellenberger, Confidant to
Velikovsky, 4/78-11/79 and
formerly Sr. Ed. & Exec. Sec'y,
KRONOS
fax: 314-773-9273
St. Louis, MO, 20 June 1994
REFERENCES
1. A. Aveni, _Conversing with the Planets: How Science and Myth
Invented the Cosmos_ (New York, 1992).
2. H.H. Bauer, _Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific
Method_ (Urbana, 1992).
3. W. Hartner, "The Earliest History of the Constellations in the Near
East and the Motif of the Lion-Bull Combat," in W. Hartner,
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_JNES_ (1965).
4. P.J. Huber, "Early Cuneiform Evidence of the Existence of the Planet
Venus," in D. Goldsmith (ed.), _Scientists Confront Velikovsky_
(Ithaca, 1977), 117-144.
5. P.J. Huber, "Dating by Lunar Eclipse Omina," in J.L. Berggren & B.R.
Goldstein (eds.), _From Ancient Omens to Statistical Mechanics_
(Copenhagen, 1987), 3-13.
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I_ (Feb. 1994), 370-391.
8. H.A.T. Reiche, "The Archaic Heritage: Myths of Decline & End in
Antiquity," in S. Friedlander et al. (eds.), _Visions of
Apocalypse: End or Rebirth_ (1985), 21-43.
9. A.E. Roy, "The Origin of the Constellations," _Vistas in Astronomy_
27 (1984) 171-197.
10. W. Simpson, _The Buddhist Praying-Wheel_ (London, 1896).
11. K.D. Smith-Tranquillson, "The Structure of Authority during the
Late Uruk Period in Mesopotamia: A Synthetic Analysis," (M.A.
Thesis, Berkeley, 1989); and David and Joan Oates, _The Rise of
Civilization_ (New York, 1976).
12. V.S. Tuman, "The Cerberus Slab of Hatra," _Q Jl. R. astr. Soc._ 24
(1983) 14-23.
13. T.D. Worthen, _The Myth of Replacement: Stars, Gods, and Order in
the Universe_ (Tucson, 1991).
Jim Lippard _Skeptic_ magazine:
lip...@ccit.arizona.edu ftp://ftp.rtd.com/pub/zines/skeptic/
Tucson, Arizona http://www.rtd.com/~lippard/skeptics-society.html