Although the solar system today presents the illusion of aeons-long stability, we may be mistaken to interpret it this way. Ancient testimony seems to tell a very different story, and our ancestors may have witnessed the violence of cosmic catastrophe, plasma discharge, and possibly even planetary birth in recent millennia.

The Heavens were considered to be perfect and unchanging in much early religious thought, and perhaps even encoded with a secret message from God. Back then the Earth was also considered to be the center of the known universe. While the latter is now widely rejected, the intellectual baggage of the former still pervades much current thinking, and the assumption that the planets have occupied more or less stable orbits for billions of years has solidified into dogma.

While we often marvel at the ability of the ancients to accurately measure and record the heavens, we are equally perplexed by some apparent basic errors. A number of ancient calendars list 360 days in a year, probably explaining the origin of 360 degrees in a circle? The Mayan calendar also incorporated a 260 day cycle in relation to Venus, although Venus today orbits the Sun in roughly 224 days. There are various theories to account for the Venus anomalies. Either way, these cycles bear no relation to the natural cycles of the present era. Are these errors, or did the heavens move on different cycles in the not so distant past ... and within human memory?

Of course, such an idea is anathema to modern day astronomers, who speculate that our solar system has remained more-or-less steady and unchanging for millions if not billions of years.

However,

Chinese mathematicians are known to have based their geometry, as we do, on a 360 degree circle based on the annual movement of the sun, and to have then tried to modify the geometry to accommodate the 365 25 days of the current year.

In the Middle East, the Chaldeans of the neo-Babylonian empire, experts in astronomy in the first millennium BC, also had a year of only 360 days and a Zodiac of 36 decans, each section of which was traversed by the sun in 10 days. The Assyrians used a year of 360 days.

The Indian texts of the Veda use a year of 360 days divided into 12 months of 30 days. From approximately 700 BC, the Hindus used a civil year of 365 25 days but retained the sacred year of 360 days for religious purposes.

Similarly, the Persians used a year of 360 days until the 7th century BC, when they added 5 extra days. Although they assumed the sun rose through a different aperture each day, they retained the concept of 360 apertures without adding extra ones for the extra 5 days.

The Egyptian Canopus decree of 238BC refers to an earlier period when 5 days were added to the year to bring it to 365 days. The Romans at the time of Romulus had a year of only 360 days.

The Maya counted their 'year' as being 18 months of 20 days. The 360 day year also survives in the Long Count system of 'tuns'.

In every case, the additional 5 days were added to the year of 360 days and were thought to be unpropitious.

Velikovsky, 1895-1979, is perhaps the most famous catastrophist. His best-selling book Worlds in Collision was published in 1950, and occupied the number one spot for some time.

Even before its appearance, however, the book was surrounded by furious controversy. Macmillan, intimidated by threats from academics and scientists, transferred the book to Doubleday.

In Worlds in Collision Velikovsky proposed the following:

Planet Earth has suffered natural catastrophes on a global scale, both during and before recorded history. Here he is espousing Catastrophist as opposed to prevailing Uniformitarian/Gradualist ideas.

These catastrophes are recorded in the myths, legends and written history of all cultures and civilisations around the globe. He pointed to striking concordances in the accounts of many cultures, and proposed that they referred to the same real events, all couched in the individual religious and cultural viewpoints of their authors.

The psychoanalytic concept of 'Cultural Amnesia' as a mechanism whereby these events come to be regarded as myth.

The cause of these natural catastrophes were close-encounters between the Earth and other bodies within the solar system. The planets Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and Mars, have moved upon different orbits within human memory.

That Venus was a young planet, and as such would be hot with an atmosphere rich in hydro-carbons. These successful predictions came as a big shock as Venus was thought to be the twin of The Earth!

That electromagnetic forces played a much greater role than that acknowledged in conventional Newtonian mechanics.

The latter, of course, is of particular relevance to Plasma Cosmology, and was the focus of a bitter scientific backlash against Velikovsky. He is famous for remarking that the scientific theories should be updated to take account of the new evidence. See his quote, right.

While many contemporary catastrophists disagree with his chronology, and some of the specifics, his work has proved inspirational for many. Moreover, how often do pioneers get every detail correct?

Further: The Ghost of Velikovsky

Velikovsky was a close personal friend of Einstein and details of their correspondence and meetings can be viewed at www.varchive.org

Much of their discussion focused on Newtonian versus electrodynamic mechanisms for celestial phenomena, and the difficulties in assessing the veracity of either viewpoint. Einstein favoured the former, but was nonetheless impressed by some of Velikovsky's predictions, and used his influence to try and test them.

Velikovsky predicted radio noise from Jupiter and high temperatures for the atmosphere of Venus, among many other successful predictions. His critics generally respond with the trite comment that 'There is no greater sin than to be right for the wrong reason', and thus the controversy rages on.

In 1963, The famous geologist Harry Hess wrote to Velikovsky:

We are philosophically miles apart because basically we do not accept each other s form of reasoning logic. I am of course quite convinced of your sincerity and I also admire the vast fund of information which you have painstakingly acquired over the years.

I am not about to be converted to your form of reasoning though it certainly has had successes. You have after all predicted that Jupiter would be a source of radio noise, that Venus would have a high surface temperature, that the sun and bodies of the solar system would have large electrical charges and several other such predictions. Some of these predictions were said to be impossible when you made them. All of them were predicted long before proof that they were correct came to hand. Conversely I do not know of any specific prediction you made that has since been proven to be false. I suspect the merit lies in that you have a good basic background in the natural sciences and you are quite uninhibited by the prejudices and probability taboos which confine the thinking of most of us.

Whether you are right or wrong I believe you deserve a fair hearing.

Much of the criticism of Velikovsky's work can best be described as petulant and irrational. For example, a number of prominent scientists and academics engineered the dismissal of the veteran senior editor at McMillan despite his 25 years plus service after he accepted Worlds in Collision for publication. They also had the director of the famous Hayden Planetarium fired, merely for proposing to mount a display of Velikovsky's cosmological theory. Furthermore, Velikovsky was systematically attacked in the scientific journals via distortion, misrepresentation, and ad hominem attacks, while space was rarely if ever permitted for him to defend himself.

In respect of an Electric Sun, Ralph E. Juergens noted the following.

"In 1952, in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Donald Menzel, Director of the Harvard College Observatory, offered calculations to show that if Velikovsky were right about electromagnetic forces in the solar system, the sun would have a surface electric potential of 10^19 (10 billion, billion) volts - an absolute impossibility, according to the astronomers; but in 1960, V.A. Bailey, emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Sidney, claimed that the sun is electrically charged and that it had a surface potential of 10^19 volts - precisely the value calculated by Menzel. Bailey, at the time his theory was first published, was entirely unaware of Velikovsky's work and of Menzel's refutation of it. The idea that his 'quantitative refutation of Velikovsky's wild hypothesis - Menzel's own description of his contribution to the Proceedings in 1952 - should now be brought to Velikovsky's support was intolerable to the Harvard Astronomer. So when he mailed his paper to Harper's in 1963, he also sent a copy to Bailey in Sidney and asked him in a covering letter to revoke his theory of electric charge on the sun. That theory was casting doubt on the continuing efforts of Menzel and other American scientists to discredit Velikovsky, and Menzel pointed out what he conceived to be an error in Bailey's work."

Populist scientist of the time, Carl Sagan, issued an apology, expressing his regret that scientists and academics had lost all rational comportment and dignity in their vicious attacks against Velikovsky, admitting that a number of them attempted to suppress Velikovsky's ideas. After his own contribution to the whole unsavoury affair, Sagan added:

"The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and it has no place in the endeavour of science. We do not know beforehand where fundamental insights will come from, and the history of our lovely and mysterious solar system shows clearly that accepted and conventional ideas are often wrong. Fundamental insights can arise from the most unexpected sources."

On the other side of the coin, comparative mythologist Rens van der Sluijs notes that Velikovsky failed to credit a number of planetary catastrophists whose work preceded his own.

On the Shoulders of Suppressed Giants Part One
On the Shoulders of Suppressed Giants Part Two

From part one:

Ever since 1950, 'Velikovsky' has been a household name, associated with a set of adventurous but highly unorthodox claims that remain contested today.

In his writings, Immanuel Velikovsky documented his ideas with copious references, but gave the impression that the ideas themselves were the spontaneous fruits of his own creative mind. As it happens, however, almost every generation since the Enlightenment had its own 'Velikovsky', advancing remarkably similar ideas. This is true to the extent that virtually none of Velikovsky's core hypotheses were original.

Who were these earlier 'Velikovskys'?

In 1655, the French lawyer and theologian Isaac de la Peyr re (1596-1676) departed from Christian consensus with his 'pre-Adamite' thesis. Taking a cue from earlier Jewish discourse, de la Peyr re reasoned that a race of humans had existed long before Adam and the 'creation of the world' as narrated in Genesis really concerned only the latest episode in a continuous cycle of cosmic destruction and creation. Velikovsky opened Worlds in Collision with a discussion of such 'world ages' and wrote a chapter entitled 'The Pre-Adamite Age' that remains unpublished today...

More than fifty years ago David Talbott proposed that world mythology reflects a planetary arrangement quite different from anything that we see today. This 'radical' vision has since grown into a collaborative consensus which outweighs any differences of opinion in catastrophism circles.

Talbott's historical investigation converged with the work of Australian physicist, Wallace Thornhill, the leading advocate of the Electric Universe. Thornhill convinced Talbott that the formations reconstructed from ancient testimony were plasma related phenomena.

A further milestone occurred when Anthony Peratt, a leading plasma physicist, realised that Talbott s reconstruction of events leading to the mythic 'ladder of heaven' matched very closely the evolution of the 'Peratt Instability'. Peratt was inspired to spend several years of fieldwork gathering thousands of ancient rock art images and related designs which verify that the ancient artists were not imagining things. They recorded the same configurations that he has recreated in the laboratory.

This convergence of science and myth shouts that the consistent worldwide story should no longer be dismissed as mere ignorance and superstition.

David Talbott has pioneered an empirical approach to mythology which he refers to as 'Points of Agreement.' The below is summarised from a bulletin board conversation.

"People do not know where myths come from. Nor do they understand where widespread superstitions come from. To answer the first mystery is to answer the second because superstition is, demonstrably, a residue of mythology as the myths, over time, begin to fragment into disconnected pieces.

"For example, there is a universal superstition that a comet signals disaster, but this superstition does not stand alone. It is part of a complex of fragments. Another universal superstition holds that the appearance of a comet means the death of a great king. But this doesn't stand alone either; it cannot be separated from an equally popular superstition that a comet is the 'soul' of a great king soaring into the sky. On the face of it, the superstitions do not add up, however, because another theme declares that the comet is a raging goddess, queen, or princess, lamenting the death of her father, lover, or son.

"As we explore the nuances of comet superstitions, a light goes on. We realize that they have an ancient history, and what appear as incompatible or competing superstitions are actually part of a unified memory. They are fragments of the archetypal myth of the 'Great Comet,' tracing to a time before the word comet was detached from mythology to become part of the descriptive language of the early sciences. The story originated in a pre-scientific age, and literally all of the later, well documented superstitions about comets, when traced backward, reveal themselves to be nuances of a story told around the world.

"It is the story of the dying god-king, or universal sovereign. This primeval power often appearing as an exemplary 'sun'-god displayed a central eye, heart, or soul that was a great star, the far-famed 'star of glory.' It was not just a star, however, it was the mother goddess, identified in all later astronomies as the planet Venus. When the god-king died, the star (soul) departed from him, raging in the heavens with long-flowing, wildly disordered hair (i.e., as the feared comet) and threatening to destroy the world.

"The appearance of the Great Comet thus meant disaster, the death of a great king, the soul of the king rising in the sky, and the raging goddess. At the level of the universal themes or archetypes, the substructure of mythology is fully unified, although not a single theme refers to the familiar world of today.

"This is an abbreviated summary of a story that would require volumes to tell in detail, but the point is that the great myths progressively fragmented over time, often persisting as nothing more than disconnected superstition."

Elephants are the biggest contemporary land animals. For much larger creatures like dinosaurs to have thrived in the past it has been shown that gravity would need to have been one third of what it is today. It is highly speculative to assume they survived by paddling in water in order to support themselves. For a start, they'd likely have got stuck in the mud or sand without much bigger feet, and would surely have perished during dry periods. How exactly was gravity attenuated? Furthermore, can a single impact event really account for their global extinction and fossilisation?

If gravity is fundamentally electrical in nature, could this provide insights into the demise of the dinosaurs, the sky our ancestors saw, and why they feared doomsday events?

In addition to attenuated gravity, Theodore Holden contends that dinosaurs may have existed more recently than generally accepted. It's a controversial view, but soft tissue has been discovered in recent dinosaur finds. How could it survive for many millions of years? Holden contends that this points to dinosaurs living as recently as 20-40,000 years ago! Counter claims speculate that high iron content in dinosaur blood could preserve the soft tissue. Holden isn't buying it.

The idea that rocks (meteors) could fall from the sky was denied by several of the best minds of the 18th and 19th centuries. It was dismissed as too ridiculous to merit serious discussion, although the fact was well known to the ancient Sumerians and others. All but lost for several millennia, such knowledge is once again commonplace among schoolboys the world over.

Equally lesson-laden was the controversy over the possibility that rocks from Mars could somehow find their way to the Earth, again fervently denied by various leading authorities until around 1987. The eventual triumph of the Martian meteorite hypothesis is yet another classic example of the leading paradigms of the Scientific Age being instantly overturned by a series of anomalous findings.

Science, much like religion, proves to be notoriously malleable in this regard what is considered impossible or fantastic by one generation might well come to be accepted by future generations unencumbered by similar prejudices.

The Hoba meteorite in Namibia, pictured right, left no crater although it is estimated to weigh in at 66 tons!

The planet Jupiter, like Mars, is also associated with thunderbolts. The picture, right, is taken from the front cover of the book Thunderbolts of The Gods by David Talbott and Wallace Thornhill.

The below is quoted from the link:

"Thunderbolts of the Gods by David Talbott and Wallace Thornhill, is the first in a series of volumes contending that planetary instability and large scale electrical phenomena in ancient times led to a series of global catastrophes remembered around the world.

"Talbott and Thornhill claim that earthshaking upheaval occurred so recently as to have profoundly affected early human cultures. And the two authors suggest that the myths and religions of all ancient peoples memorialized these events. To make their case, they offer a new synthesis of ancient testimony, high-energy plasma laboratory experiments, and space age discoveries."

See also Thunderbolts in myth and legend.

Birds carrying burning sticks!

As per the headline of this article from Smithsonian.com:

"When Scientists Discover What Indigenous People Have Known For Centuries
When it supports their claims, Western scientists value what Traditional Knowledge has to offer. If not, they dismiss it. A team of researchers in northern Australia have documented kites and falcons, 'firehawks,' intentionally carrying burning sticks to spread fire."

This is of particular relevance to catastrophism. Isn't it funny how we can be selective about the 'ancient' knowledge we choose to accept and ignore?

Immanuel Velikovsky called this book the 'Fulfillment of his oath of Hippocrates to serve humanity.' The traumas experienced by our ancestors have been repressed into the human collective unconsciousness, and thus much of mankind's behaviour remains irrational. Velikovsky returns to his roots as a psychologist and psychotherapist to study humanity as a whole. After an overview of the foundations of the various psycho-analytical systems, he takes a step into crowd psychology and reopens Worlds in Collision as a psychoanalytical case study. The vicious and irrational hostility to Velikovsky's brilliant scholarship still rages today. By way of tragic irony, perhaps this vindicates his work?

Pictured right is an American A10 Thunderbolt aircraft, a formidable weapon perhaps paying tribute to the thunderbolts of the gods?

"The Post Traumatic stress disorder we have inherited threatens our very existence on this planet. It manifests as a desire not to know the shocking truth, because it exposes our existential fears."
Wal Thornhill

"Man is a wounded animal. His survival is astonishing, but his inability to heal his wounds is tragic."
Dr. Roger W. Wescott