Velikovsky Made Simple
Paul J. Gans
to post this to talk.origins for him.
Velikovsky Made Simple
This essay might be titled "Velikovsky for Dummies" or
"The Idiot's Guide to Velikovsky", but taking
cognizance of the earlier series of manuals popular in
the halcyon days of interest in Velikovsky,
"Velikovsky Made Simple" seems more appropriate. This
essay was written for Skeptic magazine to accompany
David Morrison's forthcoming survey article on the
Velikovsky controversy, which will contain much new
material, including acknowledgment of several of Carl
Sagan's errors in his uncritially acclaimed AAAS
critique of Worlds in Collision and the results of a
poll of major players in the revolution in the Earth
and space sciences concerning the influence Velikovsky
had on their interests and careers. Since Morrison's
story ends in 1985 with the publication of Henry
Bauer's Beyond Velikovsky and the "litmus test in the
ice" that was published in Kronos X:1, this essay
serves to describe key events since then and the
present state of the post-Velikovsky scene. An earlier
version of this essay was posted to talk.origins in
February. Text here in brackets was added after
submission to Skeptic:
WORLDS STILL COLLIDING
A Velikovsky Update
Leroy Ellenberger
----------------------------------------------------
ONE MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT THAT THE
Velikovsky movement would have ended with
the "crucial test" of the Greenland ice cores
(Kronos 10:1, 1984), first proposed by R.G.A.
Dolby in 1977. A visible layer of debris in
the ice caused by Velikovsky's planet-juggling
catastrophes, especially from the 40 years of
darkness at the Exodus, was never found. In
1986-7, Lynn Rose, a Velikovsky devotee (and
philosophy professor at SUNY-Buffalo) writing in
Kronos, suggested Velikovsky's signal is the
ice in the so-called "brittle" zones of deep
cores, deposited between Venus and Mars episodes,
when supposedly Earth's axis had no tilt. Assuming
Velikovsky correct, Rose discounted the fact
that the dates of the brittle zones did not
match Velikovsky's dates and ignored the
concordance of tree rings and ocean sediments
with ice cores. This, of course, makes a mockery
of the "interdisciplinary synthesis" heralded by
Velikovskians. In 1994 Charles Ginenthal, writing
in The Velikovskian, suggested the bulk of the
Greenland ice was deposited almost overnight. With
Kronos defunct, Sean Mewhinney refuted Rose in 1990
with "Ice Cores & Common Sense" in Catastrophism &
Ancient History and Ginenthal in 1998 with "Minds
io Ablation" at (http://www.pibburns.com/smmia.htm),
exposing their absurdities in exhaustive
detail. This denial of the clear message from
the ice cores is an example of "invincible
ignorance," reminiscent of the flat earthers'
rejection in 1870 of Alfred Russel Wallace's
proof of the Earth's curvature, tested on the Old
Bedford Canal.
Most Velikovskians in America have also spurned
the modern catastrophist alternative to Velikovsky's
scenario proposed by British astronomers Victor
Clube and Bill Napier starting with The Cosmic
Serpent (1982). These "neo-catastrophists" use
myth to inform our understanding of the ancient sky,
but reject Velikovsky's colliding planets. For them,
humanity's archetypal fear of comets and the
origin of sky-combat myths result from Earth's
intermittent, energetic interaction during the past
10,000 years with the then young Taurid meteor
stream, radiating from near the Pleiades
(http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/velidelu.html#ST).
Although not accepted by most astronomers, at least
this hypothesis does not contradict the laws of
physics. The growing list of scientists and
scholars who are favorably disposed towards Clube
and Napier's work includes astronomers Mark Bailey
and Duncan Steel, physicists Fred Hoyle and Gerrit
Verschuur, geographer Richard Huggett, and
dendrochronologist Mike Baillie [whose 1999 book
Exodus to Arthur makes the case for a cosmic vector
associated with several major global climate crises
in the past 5000 years]. Regardless, Velikovskians
reject it because they (1) have blindly accepted
Velikovsky's false premise that planets were the
first gods, when planets were only relatively
recently associated with deities whose earlier
origin had nothing to do with planets, and (2)
believe Venus really was once a comet, when it is
too massive ever to have had a visible tail as
real comets do.
Most surviving Velikovskians now see Worlds in
Collision and Ages in Chaos as seriously flawed, if
not completely wrong. Many instead propose that the
real interplanetary catastrophes occurred earlier
than Velikovsky thought. Adopting the "Saturn
theory," inspired by an unpublished Velikovsky
manuscript alluding to the ancient Sun-Saturn
polarity
(http://www.catastrophism.com/texts/sun-and-saturn/),
they claim that, during the "Golden Age" ruled by
[the god] Saturn/Kronos, Earth was part of a "polar
configuration" that orbited the Sun near Earth's
present location so that a nearby Saturn loomed
continuously over the north pole as a rotating
crescent. Situated between Earth and Saturn were
Venus and Mars with Jupiter hidden behind Saturn!
Saturnists believe (1) mythology preserves the
record of that alignment and transition to the
present Solar System by 2000 B.C.E. and (2) their
novel interpretation of ancient myth and sacred
symbol (which redefines such terms as "ocean,"
"sky," and "earth") gives results superior to
those of modern science. Scholars consider
this a naive re-imaging of the Greek divine
succession myth: Ouranos- Kronos- Zeus- Ares. The
claimed "historical" basis for the "Saturn theory"
is greatly exaggerated.
Significantly, the ice core evidence also
disproves the "polar configuration," not to
mention the conservation laws of energy and angular
momentum. Having failed to make a prima facie
case, the Saturnists shift the burden-of-proof by
inviting "scholarly critics" to disprove their
model by identifying "a single recurring mythical
theme not predicted by the model." They simply
do not believe that their coherent, internally
consistent narrative, based solely on mythological
exegesis, can be wrong. Their leading theorist
remarked in 1987, at a time when he did not
appreciate the difference between zenith and
pole, "it is not possible that a simply-stated
theory could predict all mythical archetypes but
be false." To the contrary, systems of thought
can be internally consistent yet bear no
resemblance to physical reality. Coherence is no
guarantor of truth.
[Interestingly, in 1987 an essay by independent
scholar and Sanskrit specialist Roger Ashton, "The
Bedrock or Myth", was accepted for publication in
the then fledgling "Saturnist" journal Aeon.
Drawing on the contents of the Hindu Rgveda,
Ashton showed that the "polar configuration"
imagery can be explained without recourse to
planets. Although Aeon subsequently suppressed
this paper, it is now being posted on the WWW:
(http://www.saturnisn.org/bedrock.htm).]
Since conventional physics precludes any such
arrangement, Velikovskians have adopted the
plasma-theoretic "electric universe" model,
propounded in the 1970s by [civil engineer] Ralph
Juergens, as a deus ex machina. Supposedly the
Sun is an electric discharge powered by an influx
of [galactic] electrons. Based largely on various
analogies, this "theory" has no quantitative
basis and, despite all the hand waving, is
disproved by everything known about the Sun's
behavior; see
(http://www.geocities.com/Tim_J_Thompson/electric-sun.html).
Juergens' work is carried on by the "Holoscience"
project (http://www.holoscience.com)
[organized by Wal Thornhill, a retired computer
systems engineer who now bills himself as an
"Australian physicist" on the basis of his 1964
B.S. degree].
What of Velikovsky's revision of ancient history?
Chronology revisionists exist today in two schools:
modest and drastic. The modest revisionists shorten
Egyptian chronology less drastically than
Velikovsky's 500 year compression, eliminating
only a century or two by various schemata, e.g.,
(http://www.centuries.co.uk). The drastic
revisionists claim, in essence, that the second
millennium B.C.E. is a fiction that duplicates the
first millennium; see
(http://www.knowledge.co.uk/sis/ancient.htm).
Today, interest in Velikovskian studies resides
primarily with four groups: (1) Saturnists are the
most visible with the journal Aeon
(http://www.aeonjournal.com/) and Kronia Group
(http://www.kronia.com) {founded in 1987 by Dave
Talbott, author of The Saturn Myth (1980), whose
efforts as publisher of Pensee arguably led to the
1974 AAAS Symposium where Carl Sagan and Velikovsky
clashed}, which publishes the electronic newsletter
Thoth, produces the Mythscape video series, and
runs the [moderated] kroniatalk listserve. Their
alternative-science conferences include invited
speakers with bona fide scientific credentials,
such as plasma physicist Anthony Peratt and
astronomer Halton Arp, who provide a veneer of
scholarly respectability [with the Intersect2001
world conference being held this weekend at
Laughlin, NV,
(http://www.kronia.com/intersect2.html)]; (2) Charles
Ginenthal founded The Velikovskian
in 1992
(http://www.knowledge.co.uk/velikovskian/index.htm)
and has produced several books and sponsored annual
conferences, recently with Cosmos & Chronos, the
original Velikovsky discussion group founded in
1965 by geologist H.H. Hess at Princeton
University and now headed by C.J. Ransom in Texas; (3)
The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies in Great
Britain, established in 1974
(http://www.knowledge.co.uk/sis/), publishes
Chronology & Catastrophism Review [and, while it
is nominally interested in catastrophism and
ancient chronology and its leadership embraces
the work of Clube and Napier, a large portion of
the membership has a strong affection for
Velikovsky and an indiscriminate interest in the
work of other distinctly fringe writers]; and
(4) The Velikovsky Archive is a web resource
(http://www.varchive.org) containing many
manuscripts, lectures, correspondence, and the
1972 Canadian television documentary "Velikovsky:
The Bonds of the Past."
Velikovsky continues to be revered especially by
those who, for a variety of reasons, distrust
mainstream science and scholarship, believing they
are, in good part, socially constructed consensus
mythologies, and believe he was correct on three
points: (1) the present order of the Solar System is
recent, (2) electromagnetism plays a more important
role in the cosmos than generally appreciated, and
(3) the chronology of ancient Egypt is seriously
flawed. The resistance of Velikovsky's successors to
all the contradictory physical evidence mounting since
1977 indicates they are demonstrably incapable of
changing their core belief, namely, recent
interplanetary catastrophism. Velikovskian believers
have often subordinated their judgment to that of a
charismatic authority figure and, as with other "true
believers," secular no less than religious, no amount
of evidence is going to change their minds. As Carol
Tavris incisively noted in 1984 regarding Freud, "One
of the sturdiest findings in the slushy social
sciences is that when such a belief system meets
contrary evidence -- when faith meets facts -- the
facts are sacrificed." By contrast, the
revolutionary terminal Cretaceous impact 65 million
years ago was accepted during this time by most
scientists within a decade.
Leroy Ellenberger is a chemical engineer with
graduate degrees in finance and operations research.
He was "Executive Secretary & Senior Editor" for the
Velikovsky journal Kronos, "devil's advocate" for
Aeon, and a one-time confidant to Velikovsky. His
"An Antidote to Velikovskian Delusions" appeared in
Skeptic, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1995
(http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/velidelu.html) and
his "A lesson from Velikovsky," in Skeptical Inquirer,
Vol. 10, No. 4, 1986
(http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/vlesson.html). His
e-mail address is (c.l...@rocketmail.com).