and moved away. "And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground: and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left. And the Egyptians pursued. . . . And it came to pass, that in the morning watch the Lord looked unto the host of the Egyptians through the pillar of fire and of the cloud, and troubled the host of the Egyptians, and took off their chariot wheels . . . and the waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh that came into the sea after them; there remained not so much as one of them."1
The immense tides were caused by the presence of a celestial body close by; they fell when a discharge occurred between the earth and the other body.
Artapanus, the author of the no longer extant De Judaeis, apparently knew that the words, "The Lord looked unto the host of the Egyptians through the pillar of fire and of the cloud," refer to a great lightning. Eusebius quotes Artapanus: "But when the Egyptians . . . were pursuing them, a fire, it is said, shone out upon them from the front, and the sea overflowed the path again, and the Egyptians were all destroyed by the fire and the flood." 2
The great discharges of interplanetary force are commemorated in the traditions, legends, and mythology of all the peoples of the world. The god—Zeus of the Greeks, Odin of the Icelanders, Ukko of the Finns, Perun of the Russian pagans, Wotan (Woden) of the Germans, Mazda of the Persians, Marduk of the Babylonians, Shiva of the Hindus—is pictured with lightning in his hand and described as the god who threw his thunderbolt at the world overwhelmed with water and fire.
1 Exodus 14 : 19 ff.
2 Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel (transl. Gifford), Bk. ix, Chap, xxvii. Calmet, Commentaire, VExode, p. 154, correctly understood the passage in Artapanus because he paraphrases it as follows: "Artapanus dans Eusebe dit que les Egyptiens furent frappes de la foudre, et abbatus par le feu du ciel dans le meme temps que l'eau de la mer vint tomber sur eux."
WORLDS IN COLLISION ft
^Similarly, many psalms of the Scriptures commemorate the great discharges. "Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations also of the hills moved and were shaken. . . . He bowed the heavens also, and came down ... he did fly upon the wings of the wind. . . . At the brightness that was before him his thick clouds passed, hail stones and coals of fire. The Lord also thundered in the heavens, and the Highest gave his voice; hail stones and coals of fire . . . and he shot out lightnings. . . . Then the channels of waters were seen, and the foundations of the world were discovered." 3 "The voice of the Lord is powerful. . . . The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars.
. . . The voice of the Lord divideth the flames of fire. The voice of the Lord shaketh the wilderness; the Lord shaketh the wilderness of Kadesh."4 "The kingdoms were moved; he uttered his voice, the earth melted."5 "The waters saw thee; they were afraid: the depths also were troubled . . . the skies sent out a sound: thine arrows also went abroad. The voice of thy thunder was in the heaven; the lightnings lightened the universe: the earth trembled and shook."
6 "Clouds and darkness are round about him ... a fire goeth before him and burneth up his enemies round about. . . . His lightnings enlightened the world: the earth saw, and trembled."7
^Nothing is easier than to add to the number of such quotations from other parts of the Scriptures—Job, the Song of Deborah, the Prophets.
With the fall of the double wall of water, the Egyptian host was swept away. The force of the impact threw the pharaoh's army into the air. "Come and see the works of God: he is terrible in his doing toward the children of men. He turned the sea into dry land: they went through the flood on foot. . . . Thou hast caused men to ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water." 8
This tossing of the Egyptian host into the air by an avalanche of
8 Psalms 18 : 7-15. * Psalms 29 : 4-8. » Psalms 46 : 6.
6 Psalms 77 : 16-19. Tevel is the universe, but the King James Version translates "world"; world is olam.
7 Psalms 97 : 2-4.
robin-bobin
8 Psalms 66 : 5-12. On cosmic discharges see infra the Sections, ^gnis e Coelo" and "Synodos."
88 WORLDS IN COLLISION
water is referred to also in the Egyptian source I quoted before: on the shrine found in el-Arish the story is told of a hurricane and of a prolonged darkness when nobody could leave the palace, and of the pursuit by the pharaoh Taoui-Thom of the fleeing slaves whom he followed to Pi-khiroti, which is the biblical Pi-ha-khiroth. "His Majesty leapt into the place of the whirlpool."
Then it is said that he was 'lifted by a great force." 9
Although the larger part of the Israelite fugitives were already out of the reach of the falling tidal waves, a great number of them perished in this disaster, as in the previous ones of fire and hurricane of cinders. That Israelites perished at the Sea of Passage is implied in Psalm 68 where mention is made of "my people" that remained in "the depths of the sea."
These tidal waves also overwhelmed entire tribes who inhabited Tehama, the thousand-mile-long coastal region of the Red Sea.
"God sent against the Djorhomites swift clouds, ants, and other signs of his rage, and many of them perished. ... In the land of Djohainah an impetuous torrent carried off all of them in a night.
The scene of this catastrophe is known by the name of Idam (fury)." The author of this passage, Masudi, an Arab author of the tenth century, quotes an earlier author, Omeyah, son of Abu-Salt:
"In days of yore the Djorhomites settled in Tehama, and a violent flood carried all of them away."10
Likewise the tradition related in Kitab Alaghaniu is familiar with the plague of insects (ants of the smallest variety) that forced the tribe to migrate from Hedjaz to their native land, where they were destroyed by "Toufan"—a deluge. In my reconstruction of ancient history, I endeavor to establish the synchronism of these events and the Exodus.
9 Griffith, The Antiquities of Tel-el-Yahudiyeh; Goyon, "Les travaux de Chou et les tribulations de Geb," Kemi (1936).
10 EI-Macoudi, Les Prairies d'or (transl. C. Barbier and P. de Courteille, 1861), III, Chap. 39. An English translation is by A. Sprenger (1841): El-Mas'udi, Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems.
11 F. Fresnel, "Sur l'Histoire des Arabes avant I'lslamisme (Kitab alaghaniyy)," Journal asiatique (1838).
WORLDS IN COLLISION 89
The Collapsed Sky
The rain of meteorites and fire from the sky, the clouds of dust of exogenous origin that drifted low, and the displacement of the world quarters created the impression that the sky had collapsed.
The ancient peoples of Mexico referred to a world age that came to its end when the sky collapsed and darkness enshrouded the world.1
Strabo relates, in the name of Ptolemaeus, the son of Lagus, a general of Alexander and founder of the Egyptian dynasty called by his name, that the Celti who lived on the shores of the Adriatic were asked by Alexander what it was they most feared, to which they replied that they feared no one, but only that the sky might collapse.2
The Chinese refer to the collapse of the sky which took place when the mountains fell.3 Because mountains fell or were leveled at the same time when the sky was displaced, ancient peoples, not only the Chinese, thought that mountains support the sky.
"The earth trembled, and the heavens dropped . . . the mountains melted," says the Song of Deborah.4 "The earth shook, the heavens also dropped at the presence of God: even Sinai itself was moved," says the psalmist.5
The tribes of Samoa in their legends refer to a catastrophe when "in days of old the heavens fell down." The heavens or the clouds were so low that the people could not stand erect without touching them.6
The Finns tell in their Kalevala that the support of the sky gave way and then a spark of fire kindled a new sun and a new moon.7 The Lapps make offerings accompanied by the prayer that the sky
robin-bobin
1 Seler, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, II, 798.
2 Strabo, The Geography, vii, 3, 8.
8 A. Forke, The World Conception of the Chinese (1925), p. 43.
4 Judges 5 : 4-5.
5 Psalms 68 : 8. On periodic collapses of the firmament see also Rashi's commentary on Genesis 11:1, referred to in the Section, "World Ages."
6 Williamson, Religious and Cosmic Beliefs of Central Polynesia, I, 41.
7 See Section, "The Darkness," note 8.
90 WORLDS IN COLLISION
should not lose its support and fall down.8 The Eskimos of Greenland are afraid that the support of the sky may fail and the sky fall down and kill all human beings; a darkening of the sun and the moon will precede such a catastrophe.9
The primitives of Africa, in eastern as well as western provinces of the continent, tell about the collapse of the sky in the past. The Ovaherero tribesmen say that many years ago "the Greats of the sky" (Eyuru) let the sky fall on the earth; almost all the people were killed, only a few remained alive. The tribes of Kanga and Loanga also have a tradition of the collapse of the sky which annihilated the human race. The Wanyoro in Unyoro likewise relate that the sky fell on the earth and killed everybody: the god Kagra threw the firmament upon the earth to destroy mankind.10
The tradition of the Cashinaua, the aborigines of western Brazil, is narrated as follows: "The lightnings flashed and the thunders roared terribly and all were afraid. Then the heaven burst and the fragments fell down and killed everything and everybody. Heaven and earth changed places.
Nothing that had life was left upon the earth." u
In this tradition are included the same elements: the lightnings and thunderings, "the bursting of heaven," the fall of meteorites. About the change of places between heaven and earth there is more to say, and I shall not postpone the subject for long.
8 Olrik, Ragnarok (German ed.), p. 446.
9 Ibid., p. 406. The tradition was told by the Eskimos to P. Egede (1734-1740).
10 L. Frobenius, Die Weltanschauung der Naturvolker (1898), pp. 355-357.
11 Bellamy, Moons, Myths and Man, p. 80.
CHAPTER 4
Boiling Earth and Sea
TWO CELESTIAL BODIES were driven near to each other. The interior of the terrestrial globe pushed toward the exterior, The earth, disturbed in its rotation, developed heat. The land surface became hot. Various sources of many peoples describe the melting of the earth's surface and the boiling of the sea.
The earth burst and lava flowed. The Mexican sacred book, Popol Vuh, the Manuscript Cakchiquel, the Manuscript Troano all record how the mountains in every part of the Western Hemisphere simultaneously gushed lava. The volcanoes that opened along the entire chain of the Cordilleras and in other mountain ranges and on flat land vomited fire, vapor, and torrents of lava. These and other Mexican sources relate how, at the closing hours of the age that was brought to an end by the rain of fire, mountains swelled under the pressure of molten masses and new ridges rose; new volcanoes sprang out of the earth, and streams of lava flowed out of the cleft earth.1 .-.Events underlying Greek and Mexican traditions are narrated in the Scriptures.
"The mountains shake with the swelling . . . the earth melted." 2 "Clouds and darkness . . . fire . .
. the earth saw and trembled. The hills melted like wax." 3 "He looketh on the earth, and it trembleth: he toucheth the hills, and they smoke." * "The earth trembled . . . the mountains melted . . . even that Sinai." 5 "He rebuketh the sea, and maketh it dry, and drieth up all the rivers.
1 See Seler, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, II, 798. 2 Psalms 46 : 3-6. 8 Psalms 97 : 2-5. *
Psalms 104 : 32. " Song of Deborah, Judges 5 : 4-5.
91
robin-bobin
92 WORLDS IN COLLISION
. . . The mountains quake at him, and the hills melt, and the earth is burned . . . yea, the world, and all that dwell therein." 8
The rivers steamed, and even the bottom of the sea boiled here and there. "The sea boiled, all the shores of the ocean boiled, all the middle of it boiled," says the Zend-Avesta. The star Tistrya made the sea boil.7
The traditions of the Indians retain the memory of this boiling of the water in river and sea. The tribes of British Columbia tell: "Great clouds appeared . . . such a great heat came, that finally the water boiled. People jumped into the streams and lakes to cool themselves, and died." 8 On the North Pacific coast of America the tribes insist that the ocean boiled: "It grew very hot . . .
many animals jumped into the water to save themselves, but the water began to boil." 9 The Indians of the Southern Ute tribe in Colorado record in their legends that the rivers boiled.10
Jewish tradition, as preserved in the rabbinical sources, declares that the mire at the bottom of the Sea of Passage was heated. "The Lord fought against the Egyptians with the pillar of cloud and fire. The mire was heated to the boiling point by the pillar of fire." n The rabbinical sources say also that the pillar of fire and of smoke leveled mountains.12
Hesiod in his Theogony, relating the upheaval caused by a celestial collision, says: "The huge earth groaned. ... A great part of the huge earth was scorched by the terrible vapor and melted as tin melts when heated by man's art . . . or as iron, which is hardest of all things, is softened by glowing fire in mountain glens."13
.6Nahum 1:4-5.
7 The Zend-Avesta (Pt. II, p. 95 of J. Darmesteter's translation, 1883); Carnoy, Iranian Mythology, p. 268.
8 "Kaska Tales" collected by J. A. Teit, lournal of American Folk-lore, XXX (1917), 440.
9 S. Thompson, Tales of the North American Indians (1929); H. B. Alexander, North American Mythology (1916), p. 255.
10 R. H. Lowie, "Southern Ute," lournal of American Folk-lore, XXXVII (1924).
11 Ginzberg, Legends, III, 49.
^Ibid., II, 375; III, 316; VI, 116. Tractate Berakhot, 59a-59b. 13 Hesiod, Theogony (transl.
Evelyn-White), 11. 856 ff.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 93
According to the traditions of the New World, the profile of the land changed in a catastrophe, new valleys were formed, mountain ridges were torn apart, new gulfs were cut out, ancient heights were overturned and new ones sprang up. The few survivors of the ruined world were enveloped in darkness, "the sun in some way did not exist," and in intervals in the light of blazing fires they saw the silhouettes of new mountains.
The Mayan sacred book Popol-Vuh says that the god "rolled mountains" and "removed mountains," and "great and small mountains moved and shaked." Mountains swelled with lava.
Coniraya-Vira-cocha, the god of the Incas raised mountains from the flat land and flattened other mountains.14
> And similarly, "When Israel went out of Egypt . . . the sea saw and fled . . . the mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs. . . . Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord."1S
"Which removeth the mountains . . . which overturneth them in his anger; which shaketh the earth out of her place . . . which com-mandeth the sun and it riseth not . . . which alone spreadeth out the heavens, and treadeth upon the waves of the sea."16
Mount Sinai
Along the eastern shore of the Red Sea there stretches a mountain^ ous crest with a number of volcanic craters, at present extinguished; some, however, were active not many centuries ago.
One of these volcanoes is usually described as the Mount of the Lawgiving: In the seventies of the last century a scholar, Charles Beke, suggested that Mount Sinai was a volcano in the Arabian Desert.1 The Book of Deuteronomy (4:11) says "the mountain burned with fire unto the robin-bobin
midst of heaven, with darkness, clouds, and thick darkness." Beke's idea was rejected by his contemporaries and ultimately by himself.2 Modern scholars, however, agree with his original theory,
14 Brasseur, Sources de Vhistoire primitive du Mexique, pp. 30, 35, 37, 47. « Psalms 114 : 1-7.
M Job 9 : 5-8.
1 Beke, Mount Sinai, a Volcano (1873).
2 The Late Dr. Charles Beke's Discoveries of Sinai in Arabia and of Midian (1878), pp. 436, 561.
94 WORLDS IN COLLISION
and forthis reason they look for the Mount of the Lawgiving among the volcanoes of Mount Seir and not on the traditional Sinai Peninsula where there are no volcanoes. Thus the claims of the rival peaks of the Sinai Peninsula for the honor of being the Mount of the Law-giving 3 are silenced by new contestants.
'It is true that it is stated "the mountains melted . . . even that Sinai," * but this melting of summits does not necessarily mean an opening up of craters. Rocks turned into a flowing mass.
The plateau of the Sinai Peninsula is covered with formations of basalt lava; 5 wide stretches of the Arabian Desert also glisten with lava.6 Lava formations, interspersed with extinguished volcanoes, stretch from the vicinity of Palmyra southward into Arabia as far as Mecca.7 Only a few thousand years ago the deserts glowed with the beacons of many volcanoes, mountains melted, and lava flowed over the ground from numerous Assures.
-The celestial body that the great Architect of nature sent close to the earth, made contact with it in electrical discharges, retreated, and approached again. If we are to believe the Scriptural data, there elapsed seven weeks, or by another computation, about two months 8 from the day of the Exodus to the day of the revelation at Mount Sinai.
**There were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud; so that all the people that was in the camp trembled. . . . And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke . . . and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly. And when the voice of the trumpet sounded long, and waxed louder and louder, Moses spake, and God answered him by a voice." 9
3 Cf. Palmer, Sinai: From the Fourth Egyptian Dynasty to the Present Day.
4 Song of Deborah, Judges 5 : 5.
6 W. M. Flinders Petrie, "The Metals in Egypt," Ancient Egypt (1915), refers to "the enormous eruption of ferruginous basalt . . . which probably burnt up forests in its outflow.'
8 N. Glueck, The Other Side of the Jordan (1940), p. 34.
i C. P. Grant, The Syrian Desert (1937), p. 9. 8 Exodus 19 : 1.
» Exodus 19 : 16-19.
WORLDS IN COLLISION
95
The Talmud and Midrashim describe the Mountain of the Law-giving as quaking so greatly that it appeared as if it were lifted up and shaken above the heads of the people; and the people felt as it they were no longer standing securely on the ground, but were held up by some invisible force.10 The presence of a heavenly body overhead caused this phenomenon and this feeling.
"Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations also of the hills moved and were shaken, because he was wroth. . . . He bowed the heavens also, and came down: and darkness was under his feet. ... At the brightness that was before him his thick clouds passed, hail stones and coals of fire. The Lord also thundered in the heavens . . . hail stones and coals of fire. . . . He shot out lightnings. . . . Then the channels of waters were seen, and the foundations of the world were discovered." n
Earth and heaven participated in the cosmic convulsion. In the Fourth Book of Ezra the occurrences witnessed at Mount Sinai are described in these words: "Thou didst bow down the robin-bobin
heavens, didst make the earth quake, and convulsed the world. Thou didst cause the deeps to tremble and didst alarm the spheres." 12
The approach of a star toward the earth in the days of the revelation at Sinai is implied by the text of the Tractate Shabbat: Although the ancestors of the later proselytes were not present at the Mountain of the Lawgiving, their star was there close by.13
An author of the first century of the present era, whose work on biblical antiquities has been ascribed to Philo, the Alexandrian philosopher, thus describes the commotion on the earth below and in the sky above: "The mountain [Sinai] burned with fire and the earth shook and the hills were removed and the mountains overthrown; the depths boiled, and all the inhabitable places were shaken . . . and flames of fire shone forth and thunderings and lightnings were 10 CL Ginzberg, Legends, II, 92, 95.
n Psalms 18 : 7-15. An identical text is found in 2 Samuel 22.
12 IV Ezra (transl. Box), in The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, ed. R. H.
Charles.
13 The Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Shabbat 146a. According to Midrash Shir (15a-15b) the pharaoh warned the Israelites not to leave Egypt, because they would meet the bloody star Ra (in Hebrew "Evil").
96 WORLDS IN COLLISION
multiplied, and winds and tempests made a roaring: the stars were gathered together
[collided]."14 Referring to the verse, "He bowed the heavens also, and came down" (Psalms 18), Pseudo-Philo describes the events of Mount Sinai and says that the Lord "impeded the course of the stars."15 "The earth was stirred from her foundation, and the mountains and the rocks trembled in their fastenings, and the clouds lifted up their waves against the flame of the fire that it should not consume the world . . . and all the waves of the sea came together."16
The Hindus depict the cosmic catastrophe at the end of a world age: "The whole world breaks into flames. So also a hundred thousand times ten million worlds. All the peaks of Mount Sineru, even those which are hundreds of leagues in height, crumble and disappear in the sky. The flames of fire rise up and envelop the heaven." 17 The sixth sun or sun age ended. Similarly, in the Jewish tradition, with the revelation at Sinai the sixth world age was terminated and the seventh began.18
Theophany
Earthquakes are often accompanied by a roaring noise that comes from the bowels of the earth.
This phenomenon was known to early geographers. Pliny * wrote that earthquakes are "preceded or accompanied by a terrible sound." Vaults supporting the ground give way and it seems as though the earth heaves deep sighs. The sound was attributed to the gods and called theophany.
The eruptions of volcanoes are also accompanied by loud noises. The sound produced by Krakatoa in the East Indies, during the eruption of 1883, was so loud that it was heard as far as Japan, 3,000 miles away, the farthest distance traveled by sound recorded in modern annals.2
•^Jn the days of the Exodus, when the world was shaken and rocked,
14 The Biblical Antiquities of Philo (transl. M. R. James, 1917), Chap. XI. is Ibid., Chap. XXIII.
" Ibid., Chap. XXXII. W Warren, Buddhism, p. 323. 18 Midrash Rabba, Bereshit. 1 Pliny.
Natural History, ii, 82.
2G. J. Symons (ed.), The Eruption of Krakatoa: Report of the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society (of London) (1888).
WORLDS IN COLLISION
97
and all volcanoes vomited lava and all continents quaked, the earth groaned almost unceasingly.
At an initial stage of the catastrophe, according to Hebrew tradition, Moses heard in the silence of the desert the sound which he interpreted to mean, "I am that I am." 3 "I am Yahweh," heard the people in the frightful night at the Mountain of the Lawgiving.4 "The whole mount quaked greatly" and "the voice of the trumpet sounded long." 5 "And all the people saw the roars, and robin-bobin
the torches, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they trembled, and stood afar off."6
It was a perfect setting for hearing words in the voice of nature in an uproar. An inspired leader interpreted the voice he heard, ten long, trumpetlike blasts. The earth groaned: for weeks now all its strata had been disarranged, its orbit distorted, its world quarters displaced, its oceans thrown upon its continents, its seas turned into deserts, its mountains upheaved, its islands submerged, its rivers running upstream—a world flowing with lava, shattered by meteorites, with yawning chasms, burning naphtha, vomiting volcanoes, shaking ground, a world enshrouded in an atmosphere filled with smoke and vapor.
Twisting of strata and building of mountains, earthquakes and rumbling of volcanoes joined in an infernal din. It was a voice not only in the desert of Sinai; the entire world must have heard it.
"The sky and the earth resounded . . . mountains and hills were moved," says the Midrash. "Loud did the firmament roar, and earth with echo resounded," says the epic of Gilgamesh.7 In Hesiod
"the huge earth groaned" when Zeus lashed Typhon with his bolts—"the earth resounded terribly, and the wide heaven above." 8
The approach of two charged globes toward each other could also produce trumpetlike sounds, varying as the distance between them increased or lessened.9 It appears that this phenomenon is described
3 Exodus 3 : 14. * Exodus 20 : 1. 5 Exodus 19 : 18-19.
6 Exodus 20 : 18; "the thunderings and the lightnings" of the King James Version is not an exact translation of Kolot and Lapidim.
i Epic of Gilgamish (transl. Thompson). 8 Theogony, 11. 820 ff., 852 ff.
9 This phenomenon of sound between two charged bodies changing with distance is utilized for musical effect by Theremin.
98 WORLDS IN COLLISION
by Pseudo-Philo as "testimony of the trumpets between the stars and their Lord."10 Here we can trace the origin of the Pythagorean notion of the "music of the spheres" and the idea that stars make music. In Babylonia the spheres of the planets were called "voices" and they were supposed to produce music.11 According to Midrashic literature, the trumpet sounding at Mount Sinai had seven different pitches (or notes), and the rabbinical literature speaks of "the heavenly music" heard at the revelation. "At the first sound the sky and the earth moved, the seas and the rivers turned to flight, mountains and hills were loosened in their foundations." 12
Homer depicts a similar occurrence in these words: "The wide earth rang, and round about great heaven pealed as with a trumpet." 13 "The world all burns at the blast of the horn," is said in the Voluspa.14
"'According to the Hebrew tradition, all the nations heard the roaring of the lawgiving. It appears that at Mount Sinai the sound that "sounded long" rose ten times; in this roaring the Hebrews heard the Decalogue.
'"'-'Thou shalt not kill" (Lo tirzah); "Thou shalt not commit adultery" (Lo tin of); "Thou shalt not steal" (Lo tignov). . . . "These words [of the Decalogue] . . . were not heard by Israel alone, but by the inhabitants of all the earth. The Divine voice divided itself into the seventy tongues of men, so that all might understand it. . . . The souls of the heathens almost fled from them when they heard it."15
The din caused by the groaning earth repeated itself again and again, but not so loud, as subterranean strata readjusted themselves after being dislocated; earthquakes incessantly shook the ground for years. The Papyrus Ipuwer calls these years "years of noise." "Years 10 The Biblical Antiquities of Philo, Chap. XXXII.
11 E. F. Weidner, Handbuch der Babylonischen Astronomie (1915), I, 75.
12 Sefer Pirkei Rabbi Elieser.
i» The Iliad, xxi, 385 ff. (transl. A. T. Murray, 1924).
14 Cf. W. Bousset, The Antichrist Legend (transl. A. H. Keane, 1896), p. 113.
robin-bobin
15 Ginzberg, Legends, III, 97; the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Shabbat 88b.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 99
of noise. There is no end to noise," and again, "Oh, that the earth would cease from noise, and tumult (uproar) be no more."18
The sound probably had the same pitch all over the world as it came from the deep interior of the earth, all of whose strata were dislocated when it was thrown from its orbit and forced from its axis.
The great king-lawgiver of China, in whose time a dreadful cataclysm took place and the order of nature was disturbed, bore the name Yahou.17 In the Preface to the Shu King, attributed to Confucius, it is written: "Examining into antiquity, we find that the Emperor Yaou was called Fang-heun." 18 Yahou was a surname given to him in the time following the flood, apparently inspired by the sound of the earth's groaning.
The same sound was heard in those years in the Western Hemisphere or wherever the ancestors of the Indians then lived. They relate that once when the heavens were very close to the earth, all mankind lifted the sky little by little at the repeated shouting 'Tahu," which rang all over the world.19
In Indonesia an oath is accompanied by the invocation of the heavenly bodies. An arrow is shot toward the sky, "while all present raise a cry of 'ju ju huwe.'" z0 The same sound is heard in the very name Jo, Jove (Jupiter). The name Yahweh is preserved in shorter
16 Papyrus Ipuwer 4 : 2, 4-5.
17 For the Chinese pronunciation of this name see R. van Bergen, Story of China (1902), p. 112:
"At the time of the flood, the Emperor of China was named Yau (Yah-oo)."
18 Shoo-king, the Canon of Yaou (transl. James Legge), Vol. Ill, Pt. 1 of The Chinese Classics (Hongkong, 1865). In this edition Legge used this spelling of the name of the book and of the name of the king; his later spelling is different.
In Volume LX of the Universal Lexicon (Leipzig and Halle, 1732-1754), s.v. "Yao," it is said tiiat some call Yao by the name Tarn and also Tao. This is curious because in my reconstruction of ancient history I come to the conclusion that the name of the pharaoh of the Exodus was Taui Thom (Greek "Tau Timaeus") of the Thirteenth Dynasty, the last of the Middle Kingdom. He was a contemporary of this Chinese king.
19 F. Shelton, "Mythology of Puget Sound: Origin of the Exclamation Tfahu,'" Journal of American Folk-lore, XXXVII (1924).
20 J. G. Frazer, The Worship of Nature (1926), p. 665. F. Boas, Kwakiutl Culture as Reflected in Mythology (1935), p. 130, tells of Yuwe gendayusens na lax ("die wind edge of our world"), from where also come "death-bringing arrows that set mountains on fire."
100 WORLDS IN COLLISION
forms, as well, Yahou and Yo,21 as the name of the Deity in the Bible.22 Diodorus wrote of Moses that he had received his laws from the God invoked by the name Iao.23
In Mexico, Yao or Yaotl is the god of war; the similarity of sound has already been noted.24
Nihongi, chronicles of Japan from the earliest times, begins with a reference to the time when "of old, heaven and earth were not yet separated, and the In and Yo not yet divided." Yo is the earth.
The time when the sky touched the earth is the time when the heavy dust and vapor-charged clouds of the comet enveloped the globe and lay very close to the ground.
Emperor Yahou
The history of China is commonly supposed to extend back to gray antiquity. But in reality the sources of the ancient period of the Chinese past are very scanty, for they were destroyed by the Emperor Tsin-chi-hoang (246-209 before the present era). He ordered all books on history and astronomy, as well as works of classic literature, to be burned. Search for these books was made throughout the empire for this purpose. The story persists that a few remnants of the old literature were again put into writing from the memory of an old man; some were said to have been found hidden in the sepulcher of Confucius, and are ascribed to his pen.
robin-bobin
Of these few remains of the old lore, the most cherished are those which tell of the Emperor Yahou and his times. His personality and his period are considered as "the most auspicious in the Chinese annals."1 The history of China preceding his reign is ascribed to the 21 Psalms 68 : 4.
22 Cf. R. A. Bowman, "Yahweh the Speaker," lournal of Near Eastern Studies, III (1944). H.
Torczyner, Die Bundeslade und die Anfdnge der Religion Israels (1930), p. iii, sees a connection between the name jhwh and the Arab word wahwa, to roar.
23 Diodorus of Sicily, Library of History, I, 94.
24 Brasseur, Quatre lettres sur le Mexique, p. 374.
1 H. Murray, J. Crawfurd, and others, An Historical and Descriptive Account of China.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 101
mythical period of the Chinese past. In the days of Yahou the event occurred which separates the almost obliterated and very dim past of China from the period that is considered historical: China was overwhelmed by an immense catastrophe.
"At that time the miracle is said to have happened that the sun during a span of ten days did not set, the forests were ignited, and a multitude of abominable vermin was brought forth." a "In the lifetime of Yao [Yahou] the sun did not set for ten full days and the entire land was flooded." 3
An immense wave "that reached the sky" fell down on the land of China. "The water was well up on the high mountains, and the foothills could not be seen at all." 4 (This recalls Psalm 104: "The waters stood above the mountains . . . they go up by the mountains" and Psalm 107: "The waves mount up to the heaven.")
"Destructive in their overflow are the waters of the inundation," said the emperor. "In their vast extent they embrace the hills and overtop the great heights, threatening the heavens with their floods." The emperor ordered that all efforts be made to open outlets for the waters that were caught in the valleys between the mountains. For many years the population labored, trying to free the plains and valleys of the waters of the flood by digging channels and draining the fields.
For a considerable number of years all efforts were in vain. The minister who was in charge of this urgent and immense work, Khwan, was sentenced to death because of his failure— "For nine years he labored, but the work was unaccomplished" 5—and only his son Yu succeeded in draining the land. This achievement was so highly rated that Yu became emperor of China after King Shun, first successor to Yahou. This Yu was the founder of the new and notable dynasty called by his name.
The chronicles of modern China preserve records of one million
2 "Yao," Universal Lexicon, Vol. LX (1749).
3 J. Hubner, Kurze Fragen aus der politischen Historie (1729).
* The Shu King, the Canon of Yao (transl. Legge, 1879). See also C. L. J. de Guignes, Le Chou-king (1770). Pt. 1, Chap. 1, and J. Moryniac, Histoire gSnerale de la Chine (1877), 1,53. o The Shu King.
102 WORLDS IN COLLISION
lives lost in a single overflow of the Yellow River.6 Another natural catastrophe—the earthquake—also caused great devastation in China at various times: it is estimated that in the year 1556 the quaking earth took 830,000 lives and 3,000,000 in 1662.7 Was not the catastrophe of the time of Yahou one of the major inundations of rivers, as modern scholars suppose it to have been? But the fact that this catastrophe has been vivid in traditions for thousands of years, while neither the overflow of the Yellow River, when a million people perished, nor the great earthquakes, play a conspicuous part in the recollections of the nation, is an argument against the established interpretation.
Rivers do not overflow in the form of a sky-high wave. The overflowing rivers of China subside in a few weeks, and the water does not remain in the plains until the following spring, but flows away, and the ground dries in a few more weeks. The flood of Yahou required draining for many years, and during all this period water covered the lower part of the country.
robin-bobin
Yahou's reign is remembered for the following undertaking: This emperor sent scholars to different parts of China, and even to Indo-China, to find out the location of north, west, east, and south by observing the direction of the sun's rising and setting and the motion of the stars. He also charged his astronomers to find out the duration of seasons, and to draw up a new calendar.
The Shu King is called the oldest book of Chinese chronicles, rewritten from memory or from some hidden manuscript after the burning of books by Tsin-chi-hoang. In its oldest section, the canon of Yaou [Yahou], it is written:
"Thereupon Yaou [Yahou] commanded He and Ho, in reverent accordance with the wide heavens, to calculate and delineate the movements and appearances of the sun, the moon, the stars, and the zodiacal spaces; and to deliver respectfully the seasons to the people." *
6 Andree, Die Flutsagen, p. 36; C. Deckert, "Der Hoangho und seine Strom-laufanderung,"
Globus, Zeitschrift fur Lander- und Volkerkunde, LIU (1888), 129, concerning the flood of 1887.
7 Daly, Our Mobile Earth, p. 3. 8 The Shoo-king (Hong Kong edition).
WORLDS IN COLLISION 103
The necessity, soon after the flood, of finding anew the four directions and learning anew the movements of the sun and the moon, of delineating the zodiacal signs, of compiling the calendar, of informing the population of China of the sequence of the seasons, creates the impression that during the catastrophe the orbit of the earth and the year, the inclination of the axis and the seasons, the orbit of the moon and the month, changed. We are not told what caused the cataclysm, but it is written in ancient annals that during the reign of Yahou "a brilliant star issued from the constellation Yin." 9
According to the old Tibetan traditions, the highlands of Tibet, too, were flooded in a great cataclysm.10 The traditions of the Tibetans speak also of terrifying comets that caused great upheavals.11
Calculations were undertaken to establish the dates of the Emperor Yahou. On the basis of a remark that the constellation Niao, thought to be the constellation Hydra, culminated at sunset on the day of the vernal equinox in the time of Yahou, it was reckoned that the flood occurred in the twenty-third century before the present era, but this date has been questioned by many.
Sometimes it has also been supposed that the "Flood of Yahou" was the Chinese story of the universal flood, but this point of view has been abandoned. The story of the deluge of Noah has its parallel in a Chinese tradition about a universal flood in prehistoric times, in the days of Fo-hi, who alone of all the country was saved. The flood of Yahou is sometimes regarded as simultaneous with the flood of Ogyges.
The flood of Ogyges did not occur in the third millennium, but in the middle of the second millennium before this era. In the section entitled "The Floods of Deucalion and Ogyges," the synchronism of these devastations with the catastrophes of the days of Moses and Joshua will be demonstrated and supported by ancient and chronological sources.
When we summarize what has been told about the time of Yahou,
9 The Annals of the Bamboo Books, Vol. 3, Pt. 1 of The Chinese Classics (transL
Legge), p. 112.
10Andree, Die Flutsagen, quoting S. Turner, An Account of an Embassy to the Court of the Teshoo Lama in Tibet (1800).
n Eckstein, Sur les Sources de la cosmogonie du Sanchoniathon (1860), p. 227.
104 WORLDS IN COLLISION
we have the following data: the sun did not set for a number of days, the forests were set on fire, vermin filled the country, a high wave "reaching the sky" poured over the face of the land and swept water over the mountain peaks and filled the valleys for many years; in the days of Yahou the four quarters of the heaven were established anew, and observations of the duration of the year and month and of the order of the seasons were made. The history of China in the period before this catastrophe is quite obliterated.
robin-bobin
All these data are in accord with the traditions of the Jewish people about the events connected with the Exodus: the sun disappeared for a number of days; the land was filled with vermin; gigantic sky-high tidal waves divided the sea; the world burned. As we shall see, the Hebrew sources, too, reveal that a new calendar was established reckoning from the days of the catastrophe and that the seasons and the four quarters of the heaven were no longer the same.
CHAPTER 5
East and West
OUR PLANET rotates from west to east. Has it always done so? In this rotation from west to east, the sun is seen to rise in the east and set in the west. Was the east the primeval and only place of the sunrise?
There is testimony from all parts of the world that the side which is now turned toward the evening once faced the morning.
In the second book of his history, Herodotus relates his conversations with Egyptian priests on his visit to Egypt some time during the second half of the fifth century before the present era.
Concluding the history of their people, the priests told him that the period following their first king covered three hundred and forty-one generations, and Herodotus calculated that, three generations being equal to a century, the whole period was over eleven thousand years. The priests asserted that within historical ages and since Egypt became a kingdom, "four times in this period (so they told me) the sun rose contrary to his wont; twice he rose where he now sets, and twice he set where he now rises." *
This passage has been the subject of exhaustive commentaries, the authors of which tried to invent every possible explanation of the phenomenon, but failed to consider the meaning which was plainly stated by the priests of Egypt, and their efforts through the centuries have remained fruitless.
The famous chronologist of the sixteenth century, Joseph Scaliger,
i Herodotus, Bk. ii, 142 (transl. A. D. Godley, 1921).
105
106 WORLDS IN COLLISION
weighed the question whether the Sothis period, or time reckoning by years of 365 days which, when compared with the Julian calendar, accumulated an error of a full year in 1,461 years, was hinted at by this passage in Herodotus, and remarked: "Sed hoc non fuerit occa-sum et orientem mutare" (No reversal of sunrise and sunset takes place in a Sothis period).2
Did the words of the priests to Herodotus refer to the slow change in the direction of the terrestrial axis during a period of approximately 25,800 years, which is brought about by its spinning or by the slow movement of the equinoctial points of the terrestrial orbit (precession of the equinoxes)? So thought Alexander von Humboldt of "the famous passage of the second book of Herodotus which so strained the sagacity of the commentators." 3 But this is also a violation of the meaning of the words of the priests, for during the period of spinning, orient and Occident do not exchange places.
One may doubt the trustworthiness of the priests' statements, or of Egyptian tradition in general, or attack Herodotus for ignorance of the natural sciences,4 but there is no way to reconcile the passage with present-day natural science. It remains "a very remarkable passage of Herodotus that has become the despair of commentators."5
Pomponius Mela, a Latin author of the first century, wrote: "The Egyptians pride themselves on being the most ancient people in the world. In their authentic annals . . . one may read that since they have been in existence, the course of the stars has changed direction four times, and that the sun has set twice in that part of the sky where it rises today." 6
It should not be deduced that Mela's only source for this statement was Herodotus. Mela refers explicitly to Egyptian written sources. He mentions the reversal in the movement of the stars as well as of the sun; if he had copied Herodotus, he would probably not have
2 Joseph Scaliger, Opus de emendatione temporum (1629), III, 198.
3 Humboldt, Vues des Cordilleres, II, 131 (Researches, II, 30).
robin-bobin
4 A. Wiedemann, Herodots zweites Ruch (1890), p. 506: "Tiefe Stufe seiner naturwissenschaftlichen Kenntnisse."
5 P. M. de la Faye in Histoire de I'art Sgyptien by Prisse d'Avennes (1879), p. 41.
6 Pomponius Mela De situ orbis. i. 9. 8.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 107
mentioned the reversal in the movement of the stars (sidera). At a time when the movement of the sun, planets, and stars was not yet regarded as the result of the movement of the earth, the change in the direction of the sun was not necessarily connected in Mela's mind with a similar change in the movement of all heavenly bodies.7
If, in Mela's time, there were Egyptian historical records which referred to the rising of the sun in the west, we ought to investigate the old Egyptian literary sources extant today.
The Magical Papyrus Harris speaks of a cosmic upheaval of fire and water when "the south becomes north, and the Earth turns over." 8
In the Papyrus Ipuwer it is similarly stated that "the land turns round [over] as does a potter's wheel" and the "Earth turned upside down." 9 This papyrus bewails the terrible devastation wrought by the upheaval of nature. In the Ermitage Papyrus (Leningrad, 1116b recto) also, reference is made to a catastrophe that turned the 'land upside down; happens that which never (yet) had happened."10 It is assumed that at that time—in the second millennium—people were not aware of the daily rotation of the earth, and believed that the firmament with its luminaries turned around the earth; therefore, the expression, "the earth turned over," does not refer to the daily rotation of the globe.
Nor do these descriptions in the papyri of Leiden and Leningrad leave room for a figurative explanation of the sentence, especially if we consider the text of the Papyrus Harris—the turning over of the earth is accompanied by the interchange of the south and north poles.
Harakhte is the Egyptian name for the western sun. As there is but one sun in the sky, it is supposed that Harakhte means the sun at its setting. But why should the sun at its setting be regarded as a
T Mela, differing from Herodotus, computed the length of Egyptian history as equal to 330
generations until Amasis (died —525) and figured it at more than thirteen thousand years.
8 H. O. Lange, "Der Magische Papyrus Harris," K. Danske Videnskabemes Selskab (1927), p.
58.
9 Papyrus Ipuwer 2 : 8. Cf. Lange's (German) translation of tne papyrus (Sitzungsberichte d.
Preuss. Akad. der Wissenschaften [1903], pp. 601-610).
10 Gardiner, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, I (1914); Cambridge Ancient History, I, 346.
108 WORLDS IN COLLISION
deity different from the morning sun? The identity of the rising and the setting sun is seen by everyone. The inscriptions do not leave any room for misunderstanding: "Harakhte, he riseth in the west." u
The texts found in the pyramids say that the luminary "ceased to live in the Occident, and shines, a new one, in the orient."12
After the reversal of direction, whenever it may have occurred, the words "west" and "sunrise"
were no longer synonyms, and it was necessary to clarify references by adding: "the west which is at the sun-setting." It was not mere tautology, as the translator of this text thought.13
Inasmuch as the hieroglyphics were deciphered in the nineteenth century, it would be only reasonable to expect that since then the commentaries on Herodotus and Mela would have been written after consulting the Egyptian texts.
In the tomb of Senmut, the architect of Queen Hatshepsut, a panel on the ceiling shows the celestial sphere with the signs of the zodiac and other constellations in "a reversed orientation" of the southern sky.14
The end of the Middle Kingdom antedated the time of Queen Hatshepsut by several centuries.
The astronomical ceiling presenting a reversed orientation must have been a venerated chart, made obsolete a number of centuries earlier.
robin-bobin
"A characteristic feature of the Senmut ceiling is the astronomically objectionable orientation of the southern panel." The center of this panel is occupied by the Orion-Sirius group, in which Orion appears west of Sirius instead of east. "The orientation of the southern panel is such that the person in the tomb looking at it has to lift his head and face north, not south." "With the reversed orientation of the south panel, Orion, the most conspicuous constellation of the 11 Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, III, Sec. 18.
12 L. Speelers, Les Textes des Pyramides (1923), I.
13 K. Piehl, Inscriptions hi6roglyphiques, seconde seiie (1892), p. 65: 'Touest qui est a l'occident."
14 A. Pogo, "The Astronomical Ceiling Decoration in the Tomb of Senmut (XVIIIth Dynasty),"
Isis (1930), p. 306.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 109
southern sky, appeared to be moving eastward, i.e., in the wrong direction." 15
The real meaning of "the irrational orientation of the southern panel" and the "reversed position of Orion" appears to be this: the southern panel shows the sky of Egypt as it was before the celestial sphere interchanged north and south, east and west. The northern panel shows the sky of Egypt as it was on some night of the year in the time of Senmut.
Was there no autochthonous tradition in Greece about the reversals of the revolution of the sun and stars?
Plato wrote in his dialogue, "The Statesman" (Politicus): "I mean the change in the rising and setting of the sun and the other heavenly bodies, how in those times they used to set in the quarter where they now rise, and used to rise where they now set . . . the god at the time of the quarrel, you recall, changed all that to the present system as a testimony in favor of Atreus."
Then he proceeded: "At certain periods the universe has its present circular motion, and at other periods it revolves in the reverse direction. ... Of all the changes which take place in the heavens this reversal is the greatest and most complete."16
Plato continued his dialogue, using the above passage as the introduction to a fantastic philosophical essay on the reversal of time. This minimizes the value of the quoted passage despite the categorical form of his statement.
The reversal of the movement of the sun in the sky was not a peaceful event; it was an act of wrath and destruction. Plato wrote in Politicus: "There is at that time great destruction of animals in general, and only a small part of the human race survives."
The reversal of the movement of the sun was referred to by many Greek authors before and after Plato. According to a short fragment of a historical drama by Sophocles (Atreus), the sun rises in the east
M Ibid., pp. 306, 315, 316.
is Plato, The Statesman or Politicus (transl. H. N. Fowler, 1925), pp. 49, 53.
110 WORLDS IN COLLISION
only since its course was reversed. "Zeus . . . changed the course of the sun, causing it to rise in the east and not in the west."17
Euripides wrote in Electra: "Then in his anger arose Zeus, turning the stars' feet back on the fire-fretted way; yea, and the sun's car splendour-burning, and the misty eyes of the morning grey.
And the flash of his chariot-wheels back-flying flushed crimson the face of the fading day. . . .
The sun . . . turned backward . . . with the scourge of his wrath in affliction repaying mortals."18
Many authors in later centuries realized that the story of Atreus described some event in nature.
But it could not have been an eclipse. Strabo was mistaken when he tried to rationalize the story by saying that Atreus was an early astronomer who "discovered that the sun revolves in a direction opposite to the movement of the heavens." 19 During the night the stars move from east to west two minutes faster than the sun which moves in the same direction during the day.20
Even in poetical language such a phenomenon would not have been described as follows: "And the sun-car's winged speed from the ghastly strife turned back, changing his westering track robin-bobin
through the heavens unto where blush-burning dawn rose," as Euripides wrote in another work of his.21
Seneca knew more than his older contemporary Strabo. In his drama Thyestes, he gave a powerful description of what happened when the sun turned backward in the morning sky, which reveals much profound knowledge of natural phenomena. When the sun reversed its course and blotted out the day in mid-Olympus (noon), and the sinking sun beheld Aurora, the people, smitten with fear,
W The Fragments of Sophocles, ed. by A. C. Pearson (1917), III. 5, Fragment 738; see also ibid., I, 93. Those of the Greek authors who ascribed a permanent change in the direction of the sun to the time of the Argive tyrant Atreus, confused two events and welded them into one: a lasting reversal of west and east in earlier times and a temporary retrograde movement of the sun in the days of the Argive tyrants. *8 Euripides, Electra (transl. A. S. Way), 11. 727 ff.
19 Strabo, The Geography, i, 2, 15.
20 Every night stars rise four minutes earlier: the earth rotates 366% times in a year in relation to the stars, but 365K times in relation to the sun.
21 Euripides, Orestes (transl. A. S. Way), 11. 1001 ff.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 111
asked: "Have we of all mankind been deemed deserving that heaven, its poles uptorn, should overwhelm us? In our time has the last day come?" 22
The early Greek philosophers, and especially Pythagoras, would have known about the reversal of the revolution of the sky, if it actually occurred, but as Pythagoras and his school kept their knowledge secret, we must depend upon the authors who wrote about the Pythagoreans. Aristotle says that the Pythagoreans differed between the right- and the left-hand motion of the sky ("the side from which the stars rise" is heaven's right, "and where they set . . . its left"23), and in Plato we find: "A direction from left to right—and that will be from west to east."24 The present sun moves in the opposite direction.
In the language of a symbolic and philosophical astronomy, probably of Pythagorean origin, Plato describes in Timaeus the effects of a collision of the earth "overtaken by a tempest of winds" with "alien fire from without, or a solid lump of earth," or waters of "the immense flood which foamed in and streamed out": the terrestrial globe engages in all motions, "forwards and backwards, and again to right and to left, and upwards and downwards, wandering every way in all the six directions."25
As the result of such a collision, described in a not easily understandable text which represents the earth as possessing a soul, there was a "violent shaking of the revolutions of the Soul," "a total blocking of the course of the same," "shaking of the course of the other," which "produced all manner of twistings, and caused in their circles fractures and disruptures of every possible kind, with the result that, as they [the earth and the "perpetually flowing stream"?] barely neld together one with another, they moved indeed but more irrationally, being at one time reversed, at another oblique, and again
22 Seneca, Thyestes (transl. F. J. Miller), 11. 794 ff.
23 Aristotle, On the Heavens, II, ii (transl. W. K. C. Guthrie, 1939). Cf. also Plutarch, who, in his The Opinions of the Philosophers, wrote that according to Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle,
"east is the right side, and west is the left side." 2*Plato, Laws (transl. R. G. Bury, 1926), Bk. iv, 11. 760 D.
25 Plato, Timaeus (transl. Bury, 1929), 43 B and C.
112 WORLDS IN COLLISION
upside down." 26 In Plato's terminology, "revolution of the same" is from east to west, and
"revolution of the other" is from west to east.27 In The Statesman, Plato put this symbolic language into very simple terms, speaking of the reversal of the quarters in which the sun rises and sets.
I shall return later to some other Greek references to the sun setting in the east.28
robin-bobin
Caius Julius Solinus, a Latin author of the third century of the present era, wrote of the people living on the southern borders of Egypt: "The inhabitants of this country say that they have it from their ancestors that the sun now sets where it formerly rose." 29
The traditions of peoples agree in synchronizing the changes in the movement of the sun with great catastrophes which terminated world ages. The changes in the movement of the sun in each successive age make the use by many peoples of the term "sun" for "age" understandable.
"The Chinese say that it is only since a new order of things has come about that the stars move from east to west." 30 "The signs of the Chinese zodiac have the strange peculiarity of proceeding in a retrograde direction, that is, against the course of the sun." 31
In the Syrian city Ugarit (Ras Shamra) was found a poem dedicated to the planet-goddess Anat, who "massacred the population of the Levant" and who "exchanged the two dawns and the position of the stars." 32
The hieroglyphics of the Mexicans describe four movements of the sun, nahui ollin tonatiuh.
"The Indian authors translate ollin by 'motions of the sun.' When they find the number nahui added, they render nahui ollin by the words 'sun (tonatiuh) in his four mo-26 Cf. Bury's comments to Timaeus, notes, pp. 72, 80. " Plato, Timaeus, 43 D and E.
28 See for literature Frazer's note to Epitome II in his translation of Apollodorus; Wiedemann, Herodots zweites Buch, p. 506; Pearson, The Fragments of Sophocles, III, note to Fragment 738.
29 Solinus, Polyhistor, xxxii. 30 Bellamy, Moons, Myths and Man, p. 69. si Ibid.
32 C. Virolleaud, "La deesse Anat," Mission de Ras Shamra, Vol. IV (1938).
WORLDS IN COLLISION 113
tions.'" 33 These "four motions" refer "to four prehistoric suns" or "world ages," with shifting cardinal points.34
The sun that moves toward the east, contrary to the present sun, is called by the Indians Teotl Lixco.35 The people of Mexico symbolized the changing direction of the sun's movement as a heavenly ball game, accompanied by upheavals and earthquakes on the earth.36
The reversal of east and west, if combined with the reversal of north and south, would turn the constellations of the north into constellations of the south, and show them in reversed order, as in the chart of the southern sky on the ceiling of Senmut's tomb. The stars of the north would become stars of the south; this is what seems to be described by the Mexicans as the "driving away of the four hundred southern stars." 37
The Eskimos of Greenland told missionaries that in an ancient time the earth turned over and the people who lived then became antipodes.88
Hebrew sources on the present problem are numerous.39 In Tractate Sanhedrin of the Talmud it is said: "Seven days before the deluge, the Holy One changed the primeval order and the sun rose in the west and set in the east." 40
Tevel is the Hebrew name for the world in which the sun rose in
33 Humboldt, Researches, I, 351. See also by the same author, Examen critique de Vhistoire de la gSographie du nouveau continent (1836-1839), II, 355.
34 Seler, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, II, 799.
35 Seler, perplexed by the statement of the old Mexican sources that the sun moved toward the east, writes: "The traveling toward the east and the disappearance in the east . . . must be understood literally. . . . However, one cannot imagine the sun as wandering eastward: the sun and the entire firmament of the fixed stars travel westward." "Einiges iiber die natiirlichen Gnindlagen mexicanischer Mythen" (1907) in Gesammelte Abhandlungen, Vol. III.
36 Ibid. Also Brasseur, Histoire des nations civilise'es du Mexique, I, 123.
37 Seler, "Ueber die natiirlichen Grundlagen," Gesammelte Abhandlungen, III, 320.
88 Olrik, Ragnarok, p. 407.
39 See M. Steinschneider, Hebrdische Bibliographie (1877), Vol. XVIII.
40 Tractate Sanhedrin 108b.
114 WORLDS IN COLLISION
the west.*1 Arabot is the name of the sky where the rising point was in the west.42
robin-bobin
Hai Gaon, the rabbinical authority who flourished between 939 and 1038, in his Responses refers to the cosmic changes in which the sun rose in the west and set in the east.43
The Koran speaks of the Lord "of two easts and of two wests," 44 a sentence which presented much difficulty to the exegetes. Aver-rhoes, the Arab philosopher of the twelfth century, wrote about the eastward and westward movements of the sun.45
References to the reversal of the movement of the sun that have been gathered here do not refer to one and the same time: the Deluge, the end of the Middle Kingdom, the days of the Argive tyrants, were separated by many centuries. The tradition heard by Herodotus in Egypt speaks of four reversals. Later in this book and again in the book that will deal with earlier catastrophes, I shall return to this subject. At this point, I leave historical and literary evidence on the reversal of earth's cardinal points for the testimony of the natural sciences on the reversal of the magnetic poles of the earth.
The Reversed Polarity of the Earth
A thunderbolt, on striking a magnet, reverses the poles of the magnet. The terrestrial globe is a huge magnet. A short circuit between it and another celestial body could result in the north and south magnetic poles of the earth exchanging places.
It is possible to detect in the geological records of the earth the orientation of the terrestrial magnetic field in past ages.
"When lava cools and freezes following a volcanic outburst, it takes up a permanent magnetization dependent upon the orientation of the Earth's magnetic field at the time. This, because of small capacity for magnetization in the Earth's magnetic field after freezing, may remain practically constant. If this assumption be correct, the
41 Steinschneider, Hebraische Bibliographie, Vol. XVIII, pp. 61 ff.
42 Ginzberg, Legends, I, 69. 43 Taam Zekenim 55b, 58b. 44 Koran, Sura LV.
48 Steinschneider, Hebraische Bibliographie, Vol. XVIII.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 115
direction of the originally acquired permanent magnetization can be determined by tests in the laboratory, provided that every detail of the orientation of the mass tested is carefully noted and marked when it is removed." 1
We would expect to find a full reversal of magnetic direction. Although repeated heating of lava and rocks can change the picture, there must have remained rocks with inverted polarity.
Another1 author writes:
"Examination of magnetization of some igneous rocks reveals that they are polarized oppositely from the prevailing present direction of the local magnetic field and many of the older rocks are less strongly magnetized than more recent ones. On the assumption that the magnetization of the rocks occurred when the magma cooled and that the rocks have held their present positions since that time, this would indicate that the polarity of the Earth has been completely reversed within recent geological times." 2
Because the physical facts seemed entirely inconsistent with every cosmological theory, the author of the above passage was cautious not to draw further conclusions from them.
The reversed polarity of lava indicates that in recent geological times the magnetic poles of the globe were reversed; when they had a very different orientation, abundant flows of lava took place.
Additional problems, and of a large scope, are: whether the position of the magnetic poles has anything to do with the direction of rotation of the globe, and whether there is an interdependence in the direction of the magnetic poles of the sun and of the planets.
The Quarters of the World Displaced
The traditions gathered in the section before last refer to various epochs; actually, Herodotus and Mela say that according to Egyp-1 J. A. Fleming, "The Earth's Magnetism and Magnetic Surveys" in Terrestrial Magnetism and Electricity, ed. by J. A. Fleming (1939), p. 32.
robin-bobin
2 A. McNish, "On Causes of the Earth's Magnetism and Its Changes" in Terrestrial Magnetism and Electricity, ed. by Fleming, p. 326.
116 WORLDS IN COLLISION
tian annals, the reversal of the west and east recurred: the sun rose in the west, then in the east, once more in the west, and again in the east.
Was the cosmic catastrophe that terminated a world age in the days of the fall of the Middle Kingdom and of the Exodus one of these occasions, and did the earth change the direction of its rotation at that time? If we cannot assert this much, we can at least maintain that the earth did not remain on the same orbit, nor did its poles stay in their places, nor was the direction of the axis the same as before. The position of the globe and its course were not settled when the earth first came into contact with the onrushing comet; in Plato's terms, already partly quoted, the motion of the earth was changed by "blocking of the course" and went through "shaking of the revolutions" with "disruptures of every possible kind," so that the position of the earth became
"at one time reversed, at another oblique, and again upside down," and it wandered "every way in all six directions."
The Talmud and other ancient rabbinical sources tell of great disturbances in the solar movement at the time of the Exodus and the Passage of the Sea and the Lawgiving.1 In old Midrashim it is repeatedly narrated that four times the sun was forced out of its course in the few weeks between the day of the Exodus and the day of the Lawgiving.2
The prolonged darkness (and prolonged day in the Far East) and the earthshock (i.e., the ninth and the tenth plagues) and the world conflagration were the result of one of these disturbances in the motion of the earth. A few days later, if we follow the biblical narration, immediately before the hurricane changed its direction, "the pillar of cloud went from before their faces and stood behind them"; this means that the column of fire and smoke turned about and appeared from the opposite direction. Mountainous tides uncovered the bottom of the sea; a spark sprang between two celestial bodies;
1 See, e.g., the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Taanit 20; Tractate Avoda Zara 25a.
2 Pirkei Rabbi Elieser 41; Ginzberg, Legends, VI, 45-46.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 117
and "at the turning of the morning," 3 the tides fell in a cataclysmic avalanche.
The Midrashim speak of a disturbance in the solar movement on the day of the Passage: the sun did not proceed on its course.4 On that day, according to the Psalms (76 : 8), "the earth feared and was still." It is possible that Amos (8 : 8-9) is reviving the memory of this event when he mentions the "flood of Egypt," at the time "the earth was cast out of the sea, and dry land was swallowed by the sea," and "the sun was brought down at noon," although, as I show later on, Amos might have referred to a cosmic catastrophe of a more recent date.
Also, the day of the Lawgiving, when the worlds collided again, was, according to numerous rabbinical sources, a day of unusual length: the motion of the sun was disturbed.5 ^^On this occasion, and generally in the days and months following the Passage, the gloom, the heavy and charged clouds, the lightning, and the hurricanes, aside from the devastation by earthquake and flood, made observation very difficult, if not impossible. "They walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course" (Psalms 82:5) is a metaphor used by the Psalmist.
e Papyrus Ipuwer, which says that "the earth turned over like a potter's wheel" and "the earth is upside down," was written by an eyewitness of the plagues and the Exodus.6 The change is described also in the words of another papyrus (Harris) which I have quoted once before: "The south becomes north, and the earth turns over." v,Whether there was a complete reversal of the cardinal points as a result of the cosmic catastrophe of the days of the Exodus, or only a substantial shift, is a problem not solved here. The answer was not apparent even to contemporaries, at least for a number of decades. In the gloom that endured for a generation, observations were im-3 Rashi, the commentator, is surprised by the combination of the words, "at the turning of the morning" (lifnot haboker). The word lifnot (from pana), when used with reference to time, means robin-bobin
"to turn away" or "to go down." The word is applied here, not to "day," which goes down, but to the morning, which rises, changes to day, but does not go down.
* Midrash Psikta Raboti; Likutim Mimidrash Ele Hadvarim (ed. Buber, 1885). B Ginzberg, Legends, III, 109. 6 See the Section, "The Red World," note is
\Th
118 WORLDS IN COLLISION
possible, and very difficult when the light began to break through.
The Kalevala relates that "dreaded shades" enveloped the earth, and "the sun occasionally steps from his accustomed path." T Then Ukko-Jupiter struck fire from the sun to light a new sun and a new moon, and a new world age began.
In Voluspa (Poetic Edda) of the Icelanders we read:
No knowledge she [the sun] had where her home should be,
The moon knew not what was his,
The stars knew not where their stations were.
Then the gods set order among the heavenly bodies.
The Aztecs related: "There had been no sun in existence for many years. . . . [The chiefs] began to peer through the gloom in all directions for the expected light, and to make bets as to what part of heaven he [the sun] should first appear in. Some said 'Here,' and some said 'There'; but when the sun rose, they were all proved wrong, for not one of them had fixed upon the east." 8
Similarly, the Mayan legend tells that "it was not known from where the new sun would appear."
"They looked in all directions, but they were unable to say where the sun would rise. Some thought it would take place in the north and their glances were turned in that direction. Others thought it would be in the south. Actually, their guesses included all directions because the dawn shone all around. Some, however, fixed their attention on the orient, and maintained that the sun would come from there. It was their opinion that proved to be correct." 9
According to the Compendium of Wong-shi-Shing (1526-1590), it was in the "age after the chaos, when heaven and earth had just separated, that is, when the great mass of cloud just lifted from the earth," that the heaven showed its face.10
7 J. M. Crawford in the Preface to his translation of Kalevala.
8 Quoted by I. Donnelly, Ragnarok, p. 215, from Andres de Olmos. Donnelly thought that this tradition signified that "in the long-continued darkness they had lost all knowledge of the cardinal points"; he did not consider that it might refer to the displacement of the cardinal points.
9 Sahagun, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva Espana, Bk. VII, Chap. 2.
10 Quoted by Donnelly, Ragnarok, p. 210.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 119
In the Midrashim it is said that during the wandering in the desert the Israelites did not see the face of the sun because of the clouds. They were also unable to orient themselves on their march.11
The expression repeatedly used in the Books of Numbers and Joshua, "the east, to the sunrising,"
12 is not tautology, but a definition, which, by the way, testifies to the ancient origin of the literary materials that served as sources for these books; it is an expression that has its counterpart in the Egyptian "the west which is at the sun-setting."
The cosmological allegory of the Greeks has Zeus, rushing on his way to engage Typhon in combat, steal Europa (Erev, the evening land) and carry her to the west. Arabia (also Erev) kept its name, "the evening land,"13 though it lies to the east of the centers of civilization—Egypt, Palestine, Greece. Eusebius, one of the Fathers of the Church, assigned the Zeus-Europa episode to the time of Moses and the Deucalion Flood, and Augustine wrote that Europa was carried by the king of Crete to his island in the west, "betwixt the departure of Israel out of Egypt and the death of Joshua."14
The Greeks, like other peoples, spoke of the reversal of the quarters of the earth and not merely in allegories but in literal terms.
robin-bobin
The reversal of the earth's rotation, referred to in the written and oral sources of many peoples, suggests the relation of one of these events to the cataclysm of the day of the Exodus. Like the quoted passage from Visuddhi-Magga, the Buddhist text, and the cited tradition of the Cashinaua tribe in western Brazil, the versions of the tribes and peoples of all five continents include the same elements, familiar to us from the Book of Exodus: lightning and "the bursting of heaven,"
which caused the earth to be turned "upside down," or "heaven and earth to change places." On the Andaman Islands the natives are afraid that a natural catastrophe will cause the world 11 Exodus 14 : 3; Numbers 10 : 31.
i2 Numbers 2 : 3; 34 : 15; Joshua 19 : 12.
13 Cf. Isaiah 21 : 13. In Jeremiah 25 : 20 the name "Arab" is used to denote "a mingled people."
** Eusebius, Werke, Vol. V, Die Chronik (transl. J. Karst, 1911), "Chronikon Kanon"; St. Augustine, The City of God, Bk. XVIII, Chap. 12.
120 WORLDS IN COLLISION
to turn over.15 In Greenland also the Eskimos fear that the earth will turn over.16
Curiously enough, the cause of such perturbation is revealed in beliefs like that of the people of Flanders in France. Thus we read: "In Menin (Flanders) the peasants say, on seeing a comet: 'The sky is going to fall; the earth is turning over!'"1T
Changes in the Times and the Seasons
Many agents collaborated to change the climate. Insolation was impaired by heavy clouds of dust, and the radiation of heat from the earth was equally hindered.1 Heat was generated by the earth's contacts with another celestial body; the earth was removed to an orbit farther from the sun; the polar regions were displaced; oceans and seas evaporated and the vapors precipitated as snow on new polar regions and in the higher latitudes in a long Fimbul-winter and formed new ice sheets; the axis on which the earth rotated pointed in a different direction, and the order of the seasons was disturbed.
Spring follows winter and fall follows summer because the earth rotates on an axis inclined toward the plane of its revolution around the sun. Should this axis become perpendicular to that plane, there would be no seasons on the earth. Should it change its direction, the seasons would change their intensity and their order.
The Egyptian papyrus known as Papyrus Anastasi IV contains a complaint about gloom and the absence of solar light; it says also: "The winter is come as (instead of) summer, the months are reversed and the hours are disordered." 2
15 Hastings, "Eschatology," Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics.
!« Olrik, Ragnarok. p. 406.
if Revue des traditions populaires, XVII (1902-1903), 571.
1 Cf. the works of Arrhemus on the influence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on the temperature, and J. Tyndall (Heat a Mode of Motion, 6th ed., pp. 417-418) on the influence or the climate of a theoretical layer of olefiant gas surrounding our earth at a short distance above its surface.
2 A. Erman, Egyptian Literature (1927). p 309. Cf. also J. Vandier, La Famine dans I'Egtjpte ancienne (1936), p. 118: "Les mois sont a l'envers, et les heures se confondent" (Papyrus Anastasi IV, 10), and R. Weill, Bases, methodes, et risultats de la chronologie igyptienne (1926), p. J>5.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 121
"The breath of heaven is out of harmony. . . . The four seasons do not observe their proper times," we read in the Texts of Taoism.3
In the historical memoirs of Se-Ma Ts'ien, as in the annals of the Shu King which we have already quoted, it is said that Emperor Yahou sent astronomers to the Valley of Obscurity and to the Sombre Residence to observe the new movements of the sun and of the moon and the syzygies or the orbital points of the conjunctions, also "to investigate and to inform the people of the order of the seasons." * It is also said that Yahou introduced a calendar reform: he brought robin-bobin
the seasons into accord with the observations; he did the same with the months; and he
"corrected the days." 5
Plutarch gives the following description of a derangement of seasons: "The thickened air concealed the heaven from view, and the stars were confused with a disorderly huddle of fire and moisture and violent fluxions of winds. The sun was not fixed to an unwander-ing and certain course, so as to distinguish orient and Occident, nor did he bring back the seasons in order." 6
In another work of his, Plutarch ascribes these changes to Typhon, "the destructive, diseased and disorderly," who caused "abnormal seasons and temperatures." 7
It is characteristic that in the written traditions of the peoples of antiquity the disorder of the seasons is directly connected with the derangement in the motion of the heavenly bodies.
The oral traditions of primitive peoples in various parts of the world also retain memories of this change in the movement of the heavenly bodies, the seasons, the flow of time, during a period when darkness enveloped the world. As an example I quote the tradition of the Oraibi in Arizona. They say that the firmament hung low and the world was dark, and no sun, no moon, nor stars were seen. "The people murmured because of the darkness and the cold." Then the 3 Texts of Taoism (transl. Legge), I, 301.
* Les Memoires historiques de Se-ma Ts'ien (transl. E. Chavannes, 1895), p. 47.
B Ibid., p. 62.
6 Plutarch, "Of Eating of Flesh," Morals (transl. "by several hands," revised by W. Goodwin, ed.
1898).
7 Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, 49.
122 WORLDS IN COLLISION
planet god Machito "appointed times, and seasons, and ways for the heavenly bodies." 8
Among the Incas the "guiding power in regulating the seasons and the courses of the heavenly bodies" was Uira-cocha. "The sun, the moon, the day, the night, spring, winter, are not ordained in vain by thee, O Uira-cocha." 9
The American sources, which speak of a world colored red, of a rain of fire, of world conflagration, of new rising mountains, of frightening portents in the sky, of a twenty-five-year gloom, imply also that "the order of the seasons was altered at that epoch." "The astronomers and geologists whose concern is all this . . . should judge of the causes which could effect the derangement of the day and could cover the earth with tenebrosity," wrote a clergyman who spent many years in Mexico and in the libraries of the Old World which store ancient manuscripts of the Mayas and works of early Indian and Spanish authors about them.10 It did not occur to him that the biblical narrative of the time of the Exodus contains the same elements.
.->With the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, when the Israelites left that country, the old order of seasons came to an end and a new world age began. The Fourth Book of Ezra, which borrows from some earlier sources, refers to the "end of the seasons" in these words: "I sent him
[Moses] and led my people out of Egypt, and brought them to Mount Sinai, and held him by me for many days. I told him many wondrous things, showed him the secrets of the times, declared to him the end of the seasons." n
J>Because of various simultaneous changes in the movement of the earth and the moon, and because observation of the sky was hindered when it was hidden in smoke and clouds, the calendar could not be correctly computed; the changed lengths of the year, the month, and the day required prolonged, unobstructed observation. The words
8 Donnelly, Ragnarok, p. 212. • C. Markham, The Incas of Peru, pp. 97-98. 10 Brasseur, Sources de Vhistoire primitive du Mexique, pp. 28-29. In his later work Quatre lettres sur Mexique (1868), Brasseur came to the conclusion that a stupendous catastrophe occurred in America and that migrating tribes carried the echo of this catastrophe to many peoples of the world, ii IV Ezra 14 : 4.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 123
of the Midrashim, that Moses was unable to understand the new' calendar, refer to this situation;
"the secrets of the calendar" (sod ha-avour), or more precisely, "the secret of the transition" from robin-bobin
one time-reckoning to another, was revealed to Moses, but he had difficulty in comprehending it.
Moreover, it is said in rabbinical sources that in the time of Moses the course of the heavenly bodies became confounded.12
"^>The month of the Exodus, which occurred in the spring, became the first month of the year:
"This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you." 18 Thus, the strange situation was created in the Jewish calendar that the New Year is observed in the seventh month of the year: the beginning of the calendar year was moved to a point about half a year away from the New Year in the autumn.
With the fall of the Middle Kingdom and the Exodus, one of the great world ages came to its end. The four quarters of the world were displaced, and neither the orbit nor the poles nor, probably, the direction of rotation remained the same. The calendar had to be adjusted anew. The astronomical values of the year and the day could not be the same before and after an upheaval in which, as the quoted Papyrus Anastasi IV says, the months were reversed and "the hours disordered."
"-The length of the year during the Middle Kingdom is not known from any contemporaneous document. Because in the Pyramid texts dating from the Old Kingdom there is mention of "five days," it was erroneously concluded that in that period a year of 365 days was already known.14
But no inscription of the Old or Middle Kingdom has been found in which mention is made of a year of 365 days or even 360 days. Neither is any reference to a year of 365 days or to "five days" found in the very numerous inscriptions of the New Kingdom prior to the dynasties of the seventh century.15 Thus the infer--
12 Pirkei Rabbi Elieser 8; Leket Midrashim 2a; Ginzberg, Legends, VI, 24.
13 Exodus 12 : 2. ** Breasted, A History of Egypt, p. 14.
15 The table of the dynasties in Egypt and their chronological ordei are the subject of die forthcoming Ages in Chaos.
124 WORLDS IN COLLISION
ence that "the five days" of the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom signify the five days over 360
is not well founded.
There exists a direct statement found as a gloss on a manuscript of Timaeus that a calendar of a solar year of three hundred and sixty days was introduced by the Hyksos after the fall of the Middle Kingdom; 16 the calendar year of the Middle Kingdom apparently had fewer days. ^The fact I hope to be able to establish is that from the fifteenth century to the eighth century before the present era the astronomical year was equal to 360 days; neither before the fifteenth century, nor after the eighth century was the year of this length. In a later chapter of this work extensive material will be presented to demonstrate this point.
The number of days in a year during the Middle Kingdom was less than 360; the earth then revolved on an orbit somewhat closer to the present orbit of Venus. An investigation into the length of the astronomical year during the periods of the Old and Middle Kingdoms is reserved for that part of this work which will deal with the cosmic catastrophes that occurred before the beginning of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt.
^.Here I give space to an old Midrashic source which, taking issue with a contradiction in the scriptural texts referring to the length of time the Israelites sojourned in Egypt, maintains that
"God hastened the course of the planets during Israel's stay in Egypt," so that the sun completed 400 revolutions during the space of 210 regular years.17 These figures must not be taken as correct, since the intention was to reconcile two biblical texts, but the reference to the different motion of the planets in the period of the Israelites' stay in Egypt during the Middle Kingdom is worth mentioning.
In Midrash Rabba,18 it is said on the authority of Rabbi Simon
16 See Bissing, Geschichte Aegyptens (1904), pp. 31, 33; Weill, Chronologie egijptienne, p. 32.
But cf. also "The Book of Sothis" of Pseudo-Manetho in Manetho (transl. Waddell), Loeb Classical Library; there the introduction of the reform of adding five days to a year of 360 days is ascribed to the Hyksos King Aseth, who also introduced the worship of the bull calf Apis.
robin-bobin
17 An unknown Midrash quoted in Shita Mekubetzet, Nedarim 31b; see Ginzberg, Legends, V, 420.
18 Midrash Rabbah, Bereshit (ed. Freedman and Simon), ix, 14.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 125
that a new world order came into being with the end of the sixth world age at the revelation on Mount Sinai. "There was a weakening (metash) of the creation. Hitherto world time was counted, but henceforth we count it by a different reckoning." Midrash Rabba refers also to "the greater length of time taken by some planets." 19
19 Ibid., p. 73, footnote of the editors.
CHAPTER 6
The Shadow of Death
AN ENTIRE YEAR after the eruption of Krakatoa in the East - Indies in 1883, sunset and sunrise in both hemispheres were very colorful. Lava dust suspended in the air and carried around the globe accounted for this phenomenon.1
In 1783, after the eruption of Skaptar-Jokull in Iceland, the world was darkened for months; records of this phenomenon are found in many contemporary authors. One German contemporary compared the gloomy world of the year 1783 with the Egyptian plague of darkness.2
The world was gloomy in the year of Caesar's death, —44. "After the murder of Caesar the dictator and during the Antonine war," there was "almost a whole year's continuous gloom,"
wrote Pliny.3 Virgil described this year in these words: "The sun . . . veiled his shining face in dusky gloom, and godless age feared everlasting night. . . . Germany heard the clash of arms through all the sky; the Alps rocked with unwonted terrors . . . and spectres, pale in wondrous wise, were seen at evening twilight." 4
On September 23, —44, a short while after the death of Caesar, on the very day when Octavian performed the rites in honor of the deceased, a comet became visible at daytime; it was very bright and
1 The Eruption of Krakatoa: Report, ed. by G. J. Symons, pp. 40 f.
2 Ibid., p. 393; W. J. Phythian-Adams, The Call of Israel (1934), p. 165.
3 Natural History, Bk. ii, 30.
* Virgil, Georgics (transl. H. R. Fairclough, 1920), i, 466.
126
WORLDS IN COLLISION 127
moved from north to west. It was seen for only a few days and vanished while still in the north.6
It appears that the gloom which enveloped the world the year after Caesar's death was caused by the dust of the comet dispersed in the atmosphere. The "clash of arms" heard "through all the sky" was probably the sound that accompanied the entrance of the gases and dust into the earth's atmosphere.
If the eruption of a single volcano can darken the atmosphere over the entire globe, a simultaneous and prolonged eruption of thousands of volcanoes would blacken the sky. And if the dust of the comet of —44 had a darkening effect, contact of the earth with a great cinder-trailing comet of the fifteenth century before this era could likewise cause the blackening of the sky. As this comet activated all the volcanoes and created new ones, the cumulative action of the eruptions and of the comet's dust must have saturated the atmosphere with floating particles.
Volcanoes vomit water vapor as well as cinders. The heating effect of the contact of the globe with the comet must have caused a great evaporation from the surface of the seas and rivers.
Two kinds of clouds—water vapor and dust—were formed. The clouds obscured the sky, and drifting very low, hung as a fog. The veil left by the gaseous trail of the hostile star and the smoke of the volcanoes caused darkness, not complete, but profound. This condition prevailed for decades, and only very gradually did the dust subside and the water vapors condense.
"A vast night reigned over all the American land, of which tradition speaks unanimously: in a sense the sun no longer existed for this ruined world which was lighted up at intervals only by robin-bobin
frightful conflagrations, revealing the full horror of their situation to the small number of human beings that had escaped from these calamities." 6
"Following the cataclysm caused by the waters, the author of the
6 Dio Cassius, Roman History, xlv. 7; Pliny ii. 71. 93; Suetonius Caesar 88; Plutarch Caesar 69.
3. It is remarkable that a new world age was proclaimed by an Etruscan diviner named Voclanius as having begun with the approach of the comet of —44. Cf. "Komet." by Stegemann in Handworterhuch des deutschen Aberglaubens (1927). 6 Brasseur, Sources de Fhistoire primitive du Mexique, p. 47.
128 WORLDS IN COLLISION
Codex Chimalpopoca, in his history of the suns, shows us terrifying celestial phenomena, twice followed by darkness that covered the face of the earth, in one instance for a period of twenty-five years." "This fact is mentioned in the Codex Chimalpopoca and in most of the traditions of Mexico." 7
Gomara, the Spaniard who came to the Western Hemisphere in the middle of the sixteenth century, shortly after the conquest, wrote: 8 "After the destruction of the fourth sun, the world plunged in darkness during the space of twenty-five years. Amid this profound obscurity, ten years before the appearance of the fifth sun, mankind was regenerated."
In the years of this gloom, when the world was covered with clouds and shrouded in mist, the Quiche tribe migrated to Mexico, crossing a sea enveloped in a somber fog.9 In the so-called Manuscript Quiche it is also narrated that there was 'little light on the surface of the earth . . . the faces of the sun and of the moon were covered with clouds." 10
In the Ermitage Papyrus in Leningrad previously mentioned there are lamentations about a terrible catastrophe, when heaven and earth turned upside down ("I show thee the land upside down; it happened that which never had happened"). After this catastrophe, darkness covered the earth: "The sun is veiled and shines not in the sight of men. None can live when the sun is veiled by clouds. . . . None knoweth that midday is there; the shadow is not discerned. . . . Not dazzled is the sight when he [the sun] is beheld; he is in the sky like the moon." u In this description the light of the sun is compared to the light of the moon; but even in the light of the moon objects cast a shadow. If the midday could not be discerned, the disc of the sun was not clearly visible, and only its diffused light made the day different from the night. The gloom gradually lifted with the passing years as
» Ibid., pp. 28-29.
8 Gomara, Conquista de Mexico, II, 261. See Humboldt, Researches, II, 16.
9 Brasseur, Histoire des nations civilisSes du Mexique, I, 11. 10 Ibid., p. 113. 11 Papyrus 1116b recto, published by Gardiner, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, I (1914).
WORLDS IN COLLISION 129
the clouds became less thick; little by little the sky and the sun appeared less and less veiled.
~The years of darkness in Egypt are described in a number of other documents. The Papyrus Ipuwer, which contains the story of the plagues of Egypt, says that the land is without light
[dark].12 In the Papyrus Anastasi IV the years of misery are described, and it is said: "The sun, it hath come to pass that it riseth not." 13 ^ It was the time of the wandering of the Israelites in the desert.14 Is there any indication that the desert was dark? Jeremiah says (2 : 6): "Neither said they, Where is the Lord that brought vis up out of the land of Egypt, that led us through the wilderness, through a land of deserts and of pits, through a land of drought, and of the shadow of death, through a land that no man passed through, and where no man dwelt?"
v->The "shadow of death" is related to the time of the wanderings in the desert after the Exodus from Egypt. The sinister meaning of the words "shadow of death" corresponds with the description of the Ermitage Papyrus: "None can live when the sun is veiled by clouds."
At intervals the earth was lighted by conflagrations in the desert.15 S».The phenomenon of gloom enduring for years impressed itself on the memory of the Twelve Tribes and is mentioned in many passages of the Bible: "Thou hast . . . covered us with the shadow of death" (Psalms 44 : 19); "The people that walked in darkness ... in the land of the shadow of death" (Isaiah 9:2). The robin-bobin
Israelites "wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way . . . hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them," and the Lord "brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death" (Psalms 107);
"The terrors of the shadow of death" (Job 24 : 17).
In Job 38 the Lord speaks: "Who shut up the sea with doors [barriers], when it brake forth. . . .
When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddling band for it . . . and caused
12 Papyrus Ipuwer 9 : 8.
13 Erman, Egyptian Literature, p. 309.
" See the Section, "The Red World," note 2. 15 Numbers 11 : 3; 16 : 35.
130 WORLDS IN COLLISION
the dayspring to know his place; that it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it?" 16 ^The low and slowly drifting clouds enshrouded the wanderers in the desert. These clouds dimly glowed at night; their upper portion reflected the sunlight. The glow being pale during the day and red after sunset, the Israelites were able to distinguish between day and night.17 They were protected by the clouds from the sun during the wandering in the desert, and according to the Midrashic literature, they saw sun and moon for the first time only at the end of the wandering.18
^The clouds that covered the desert during the wandering of the Twelve Tribes were called a
"celestial garment" or "clouds of glory." "He spread a cloud for a covering; and fire to give light in the night." "And the cloud of the Lord was upon them by day." 19 For days or months the cloud tarried in one place, and the Israelites "journeyed not"; but when the cloud moved, the wanderers followed it, and revered it because of its celestial origin.20
In Arabic sources, too, we read that the Amalekites, who left Hedjaz because of plagues, followed the cloud in their wandering through the desert.21
JZ> On their way to Palestine and Egypt they met the Israelites, and in the battles between them the screen of clouds played an important part.22
Nihongi, a chronicle of Japan from the earliest period, refers to a time when there was
"continuous darkness" and "no difference of day and night." It describes in the name of the Emperor Kami Yamato an ancient time when "the world was given over to widespread desola-i« Cf. also Job 28 : 3 and 36 : 32.
17 Baraita d'Melekhet ha-Mishkan 14; Ginzberg, Legends, V, 439. Cf. also Job 37 : 15.
18 Ginzberg, Legends, VI, 114.
i» Psalms 105 : 39; Numbers 10 : 34.
20 Numbers 9 : 17-22; 10 : 11 ff. The names Bezalel and Rafael mean "in the shadow of God"
and "the shade of God."
21 Kitab-Alaghaniyy (French transl. F. Fresnel), lournal asiatique, 1838. Cf. El-Macoudi (Mas'udi), Les Prairies d'or, III, Chap. 39. In Ages in Chaos these events will be synchronized with the Exodus.
22 Sources in Ginzberg, Legends, VI, 24, n. 141.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 131
tion; it was an age of darkness and disorder. In this gloom Hiko-ho-no-ninigi-no-Mikoto fostered justice, and so governed this western border." 23
In China the annals telling of the time of the Emperor Yahou refer to the Valley of Obscurity and to the Sombre Residence as places of astronomical observations.24
The name "shadow of death" expresses the influence of the sunless gloom upon the life processes. The Chinese annals of Wong-shi-Shing, in the chapter dealing with the Ten Stems (the ten stages of the earth's primeval history), relate that "at Wu, the sixth stem . . . darkness destroys the growth of all things." 25
Buddhist scholars declare that with the beginning of the sixth world age or "sun," "the whole world becomes filled with smoke and saturated with greasiness of that smoke." There is "no distinction of day and night." The gloom is caused by a "cycle-destroying great cloud" of cosmic origin and dimensions.26
robin-bobin
On the Samoan islands the aborigines narrate: "Then arose smell . . . the smell became smoke, which again became clouds. . . . The sea too arose, and in a stupendous catastrophe of nature the land sank into the sea. . . . The new earth (the Samoan islands) arose out of the womb of the last earth." 27 In the darkness that enveloped the world, the islands of Tonga, Samoa, Rotuma, Fiji, and Uvea (Wallis Island), and Fotuna rose from the bottom of the ocean.28
Ancient rhymes of the inhabitants of Hawaii refer to a prolonged darkness:
The earth is dancing . . .
let darkness cease. . . .
The heavens are enclosing. . . .
Finished is the world of Hawaii.29
23Nihongi (transl. W. G. Aston), pp. 46 and 110.
24 Les Memoires historiques de Se-ma Ts'ien (transl. Chavannes, 1895), I, 47.
25 Donnelly, Ragnarok, p. 211.
26 Warren, Buddhism in Translations, pp. 322-327.
27 Williamson, Religious and Cosmic Beliefs of Central Polynesia, I, 8.
28 Ibid., I, 37. 29 Ibid., I, 30.
132
WORLDS IN COLLISION
The Quiche tribe migrated to Mexico, the Israelites roamed in the desert, the Amalekites migrated toward Palestine and Egypt—an uneasy movement took place in all corners of the ruined world. The migration in Central Polynesia, shrouded in gloom, is narrated in the traditions of the aborigines of this part of the world about a chief named Te-erui who "lived long in utter darkness in Avaiki," who migrated in a canoe named "Weary of Darkness" to find a land of light, and who, after many years of wandering, saw the sky clearing little by little and arrived at a region "where they could see each other clearly." 30
In the Kalevala, the Finnish epos which "dates back to an enormous antiquity," 31 the time when the sun and moon disappeared from the sky, and dreaded shadows covered it, is described in these words:
Even birds grew sick and perished, men and maidens, faint and famished, perished in the cold and darkness, from the absence of the sunshine, from the absence of the moonlight. . . . But the wise men of the Northland could not know the dawn of morning, for the moon shines not in season nor appears the sun at midday, from their stations in the sky-vault.32
An explanation which would rationalize this picture as the description of a seasonal long night in northern regions will stumble over the second part of the passage: the seasons did not return in their wonted order. The dreaded shadow covered the earth when Ukko, the highest of the Finnish deities, relinquished the support of the heavens. Hailstones of iron rained down furiously, and then the world became shrouded in a generation-long darkness.
This "twilight of the gods" of the Nordic races is but the "shadow 30 Ibid., I, 28-29.
31 Crawford, in the Preface to the English translation of the Kalevala, refers the poem to a time when Hungarians and Finns were still united as one people, "in other words, to a time at least three thousand years ago."
32 The Kalevala, Rune 49.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 133
of death" of the Scriptures. The entire generation of those who left Egypt perished in the lightless desert. Vegetation died in the catastrophe. The Iranian book of Bundahis says: "Blight was diffused over the vegetation, and it withered away immediately." 33 When the sky was shattered, the day became dark, and the earth teemed with noxious creatures. For a long time there was no green thing seen; seeds would not germinate in a sunless world. It took many years before the earth again brought forth vegetation; this is told in the written and oral traditions of many peoples. According to American sources, the regeneration of the world and of humankind took place under the veil of the gloomy shadows, and the time is indicated as the end of the fifteenth robin-bobin
year of the darkness, ten years before the end of the gloom.34 In the scriptural narration it was probably the day when Aaron's dried twig budded for the first time.35
~The eerie world, dark and groaning, was unpleasant to all the senses save the sense of smell: the world was fragrant. When the breeze blew, the clouds conveyed a sweet odor.
In the Papyrus Anastasi IV, written "in the year of misery," in which it is said that the months are reversed, the planet-god is described as arriving "with the sweet wind before him." 36
-In a similar text of the Hebrews we read that the times and seasons were confused, and "a fragrance perfumed all the world," and the perfume was brought by the pillar of smoke. The fragrance was like that of myrrh and frankincense. "Israel was surrounded by clouds," and as soon as the clouds were set in motion, the winds "breathed myrrh and frankincense." 3T
The Vedas contain hymns to Agni which "glows from the sky." Its fragrance became the fragrance of the earth.
33 The Bundahis, Chap. 3, Sec. 16.
34 Gomara, Conquista, cxix.
35 Numbers 17 : 8. The cover of clouds remained over the desert until after the death of Aaron.
Cf. Ginzberg, Legends, VI, 114.
36 Erman, Egyptian Literature, p. 309.
37 Ginzberg, Legends, III, 158 and 235; VI, 71. According to Targum Yerushalmi, Exodus 35 : 28: "The clouds brought the perfumes from paradise and placed them in the wilderness for Israel."
134 WORLDS IN COLLISION
That fragrance of thine . . .
which the immortals of yore gathered up.38
The generation of those days, when the star conveyed its fragrance to men on the earth, is immortalized in the tradition of the Hindus. The Vedic hymn compares the fragrance of the star Agni to the scent of the lotus.
Ambrosia
In what way did this veil of gloom dissolve itself?
When the air is overcharged with vapor, dew, rain, hail, or snow falls. Most probably the atmosphere discharged its compounds, presumably of carbon and hydrogen, in a similar way.
Has any testimony been preserved that during the many years of gloom carbohydrates precipitated?
'When the dew fell upon the camp in the night, the manna fell upon it." It was like "the hoar frost on the ground." It had the shape of coriander seed, the yellowish color of bdellium, and an oily taste like honeycomb. It was called "corn of heaven" and it was ground between stones and baked in pans.1 The manna fell from the clouds.2
After the nightly cooling, the carbohydrates precipitated and fell with the morning dew. The grains dissolved in the heat and evaporated; but in a closed vessel the substance could be preserved for a long time.3
The exegetes have endeavored to explain the phenomenon of manna and were helped by the naturalists who discovered that a tamarisk in the desert of Sinai sheds its seeds during certain months of the year.4 But why should this seed be called "corn of heaven,"
38 Hymns of the Atharva-Veda (transl. M. Bloomfield, 1897), 201-202. i Exodus 16 : 14-34; Numbers 11 : 7-9. 2 Psalms 78 : 23-24.
3 Exodus 16 : 21, 33-34.
4 See A. P. Stanley, Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church (1863), Pt. I, p. 147: "The manna . . . according to the Jewish tradition of Josephus, and the belief of the Arab tribes, and of the Greek church at the present day, is still found in the dropping from the tamarisk bushes."
However, Josephus, in his Antiquities, III, 26 ff.: does not speak of tamarisks but of dew which looked like snow and still falls in the desert, being a "mainstay to dwellers in these parts."
An expedition of Jerusalem University in 1927 investigated the tamarisk in
WORLDS IN COLLISION 135
robin-bobin
"bread of heaven,"5 or why should it be said it "will rain bread from heaven?" 6 It is also not easy to explain how a multitude of men and animals could have existed for many years in a wilderness on the scarce and seasonal seeds of some desert plant. Were such a thing possible, the desert would be preferable to tillable land that yields bread to the laborer only in the sweat of his brow.
• The clouds brought the heavenly bread, it is also said in the Talmud.7 But if the manna fell from clouds that enveloped the entire world, it must have fallen not only in the Desert of Wanderings, but everywhere; and not only the Israelites, but other peoples, too, must have tasted it and spoken of it in their traditions.
There was a world fire, says the Icelandic tradition, followed by the Fimbul-winter, and only one human pair remained alive in the north. "This human pair lie hidden in the holt during the fire of Surt." Then came "the terrible Fimbul-winter at the end of the world [age]; meanwhile they feed on morning dew, and from them come the folk who people the renewed earth." 8
Three elements are connected in the Icelandic tradition which are the same three we met in the Israelite tradition: the world fire, the dark winter that endured many years, and the morning dew that served as food during these years of gloom when nothing budded.
The Maoris of New Zealand tell of fiery winds and fierce clouds that lashed the waters into tidal waves that touched the sky and were accompanied by furious hailstorms. The ocean fled. The progeny of the storm and hail were "Mist, and Heavy-dew and Light-dew." After the catastrophe
"but little of the dry land was left standing above the sea. Then clear light increased in the world, and the beings who had
the Sinai Desert. See F. S. Bodenheimer and O. Theodor, Ergebnisse der Sinai Expedition (1929), Pt. III.
A German professor suggested also Blattlause. "Blattlause wie Blattsauger schwitzen zuweilen auch aus dem After einen honigartigen Saft in solcher Menge aus, dass die Pflanzen, besonders im Juli, damit gleichsam iiberfirnisst sind" (W. H. Roscher, Nektar und Ambrosia [1883], p. 14).
But where are forests in a desert where lice would prepare on the leaves of the trees three meals a day for a myriad of migrants?
5 Psalms 78 : 24 and 105 : 40. 6 Exodus 16:4. 1 Tractate Yoma 75a.
*J. A. MacCulloch, Eddie Mythology (1930), p. 168.
136 WORLDS IN COLLISION
been hidden between [sky and earth] before they were parted, now multiplied upon the earth." 9
This tradition of the Maoris has substantially the same elements as the Israelite tradition. The destruction of the world was accompanied by hurricanes, hail (meteorites), and sky-high billows; the land submerged; a mist covered the earth for a long time; heavy dew fell to the ground together with light dew, as in the passage quoted from Numbers 11 : 9.
The writings of Buddhism relate that when a world cycle comes to an end with the world destroyed and the ocean dried up, there is no distinction of day and night and heavenly ambrosia serves as food.10
In the hymns of Rig-Veda,11 it is said that honey (madhu) comes from the clouds. These clouds originated from the pillar of cloud. Among the hymns of the Atharva-Veda there is one to the honey-lash: "From heaven, from earth, from the atmosphere, from the sea, from the fire, and from the wind, the honey-lash hath verily sprung. This, clothed in amrite (ambrosia), all the creatures revering, acclaim in their hearts." 12
The Egyptian Book of the Dead speaks of "the divine clouds and the great dew" that bring the earth into contact with the heavens.13
The Greeks called the heavenly bread ambrosia. It is described by the Greek poets in identical terms with manna: it had the taste of honey and a fragrance. This heavenly bread has given classical scholars many headaches. Greek authors from Homer and Hesiod down through the ages continually referred to ambrosia as the heavenly food which in its fluid state is called nectar.14 But it was used also as ointment15 (it had the fragrance of a lily), and as food for the horses of Hera when she visited Zeus in the sky.16 Hera (Earth) was
robin-bobin
9 Tylor, Primitive Culture, I, 324. "> Warren, Buddhism in Translations, p. 322.
11 Cf. Roscher, Nektar und Ambrosia, p. 19.
12 Hymns of the Atharva-Veda, p. 229, Rigveda I, 112.
13 E. W. Budge, The Book of the Dead (2nd ed., 1928), Chap. 98; cf. G. A. Wainwright, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, XVIII (1932), 167.
14 Roscher, Nektar und Ambrosia. 15 Iliad xiv. 170 ff.
10 Iliad v. 368 f?.; see also ibid., v. 775 ff.; xiii. 34 ff., and Ovid, Metamorphoses ii. 119 ff.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 137
veiled in it when she hurried from her brother Ares (Mars) to Zeus (Jupiter). What could it be, this heavenly bread, which served also as a veil for a goddess-planet, and was used as an ointment, too? It was honey, said some scholars. But honey is a regular food for mortals, whereas ambrosia was given only to the generation of heroes.
"Then what was this substance that served as fodder on the ground for horses, as a veil for planets, bread from the sky for heroes, and that also turned fluid for their drink, and was oil and perfume for ointments?
•It was the manna that was baked into bread, had an oily taste and also a honey taste, was found on the ground by man and beast, wrapped the earth and the heavenly bodies in a veil, was called
"corn of heaven" and "bread of the mighty,"1T had a fragrant odor, and served the women in the wilderness as ointment.18 Manna, like ambrosia, was compared with honey and with morning dew.
The belief of Aristotle and other writers19 that honey falls from the atmosphere with the dew was based on the experience of those days when the world was veiled in the carbon clouds that precipitated honey-frost.
These clouds are described as "dreaded shades" in the Kalevala. From these "dreaded shades,"
says the epos, honey dropped. "And the clouds their fragrance sifted, sifted honey . . . from their home within the heavens." 20
The Maoris in the Pacific, the Jews on the border of Asia and Africa, the Hindus, the Finns, the Icelanders, all describe the honey-food being dropped from the clouds, dreary shades of the shadow of death, that enveloped the earth after a cosmic catastrophe. All traditions agree also that the source of the heavenly bread falling from the clouds with the morning dew was a celestial body. The Sibyl says that the sweet heavenly bread came from the starry heavens.21
The planet-god Ukko, or Jupiter, is said to have been the source of the
17 Tractate Yoma 75a. 18 Ginzberg, Legends, III, 49.
19 Aristotle, Historia Animalium ("Generation of Animals"), v. 22. 32; Galen (ed. by C. G.
Kiihn, 1821-1823), VI, 739; Pliny, Natural History, xi. 30; Diodorus, The Library of History, xvii. 75.
20 The Kalevala (transl. Crawford), p. xvi and Rune 9.
21 Ginzberg, Legends, VI, 17.
138 WORLDS IN COLLISION
honey that dropped from the clouds.22 Athena covered other planet-goddesses with a "robe ambrosial," and provided nectar and ambrosia to the heroes.23 Other traditions, too, see the origin of the honey-dew in a celestial body that enveloped the earth in clouds. For this reason ambrosia or manna is called "heavenly bread."
Rivers of Milk and Honey
•^The honey-frost fell in enormous quantities. The haggadic literature says that the quantity which fell every day would have sufficed to nourish the people for two thousand years.1 All the peoples of the East and the West could see it.2
A few hours after the break of day, the heat under the cloud cover liquefied the grains and volatilized them.3 The ground absorbed some of the liquefied mass, as it absorbs dew. The grains also fell upon the water, and the rivers became milky in appearance.
The Egyptians relate that the Nile flowed for a time blended with honey.4 The strange appearance of the rivers of Palestine—in the desert the Israelites saw no river—caused the scouts robin-bobin
who returned from a survey of the land to call it the land that "floweth with milk and honey"
(Numbers 13 : 27). "The heavens rain oil, the wadis run with honey," says a text found in Ras-Shamra (Ugarit) in Syria.5
In the rabbinical literature it is said that "melting of manna formed streams that furnished drink to many deer and other animals." 6
The Atharva-Veda hymns say that honey-lash came down from fire and wind; ambrosia fell, and streams of honey flowed upon the earth. "The broad earth shall milk for us precious honey . . .
shall
22 The Kalemla, Rune 15.
23 Iliad xiv. 170 ff. Cf. Plutarch, On the Face (De facie quae in orbe lunae apparet).
1 Midrash Tehillim to Psalm 23; Tosefta Sota 4, 3. 2 Tractate Yoma 76a.
3 Exodus 16 : 21.
4 Manetho refers this phenomenon to the time of Pharaoh Nephercheres. See the volume of Manetho in the Loeb Classical Library, pp. 35, 37, 39.
5 C. H. Gordon, The Loves and Wars of Baal and Anat (1943), p. 10.
6 Midrash Tannaim, 191; Targum Yerushalmi on Exodus 16 : 21; Tanhuma, Beshalla 21, and other sources.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 139
pour out milk for us in rich streams." T The Finnish tradition narrates that land and water were covered successively by black, red, and white milk. The first and second were the colors of the substances, ashes and "blood," that constituted the plagues (Exodus 7 and 9); the last one was the color of ambrosia that turned into nectar on land and water.
A memory of a time when "streams of milk and streams of sweet nectar flowed" is also preserved in Ovid.8
Jericho
' The earth's crust trembled and cracked again and again as its strata settled after the major displacement. Chasms opened up, springs disappeared, and new springs appeared.1 When the Israelites approached the river Jordan, a slice of one bank fell, blocking the stream long enough for the tribes to cross over. "The waters which came down from above stood and rose up upon a heap very far from the city Adam, that is beside Zaretan: and those that came down toward the sea of the plain, even the salt sea, failed, and were cut off: and the people passed over right against Jericho." 2
A similar occurrence took place on the eighth of December, 1267, when the Jordan was dammed for sixteen hours, and again following the earthquake of 1927, when a slice of one bank fell into the river not far from Adam and blocked the water for over twenty-one hours; at Damieh (Adam) the people crossed the river on its dry bed.3
The fall of the walls of Jericho at the blast of the trumpets is a well-known episode, but it is not well interpreted. The horns blown by the priests for seven days played no greater natural role than Moses' rod with which, in the legend, he opened a passage in the sea. "When the people heard the sound of the trumpet," it happened that
* "Hymn to Goddess Earth," Hymns of the Atharva-Veda (transl. Bloomfield), pp. 199 f.
» Metamorphoses (transl. F. J. Miller, 1916), i. 111-112.
i Numbers 16 : 31-35; 20 : 11; Psalms 78 : 16; 107 : 33-35.
2 Joshua 3 : 16. A correct translation requires: "very far at the city Adam."
8 J. Garstang, The Foundations of Bible History (1931), p. 137.
140 WORLDS IN COLLISION
"the wall fell down flat."4 The great sound of the trumpet was produced by the earth; the Israelite tribes, believing in magic, thought that the sound of the earth came in response to the blowing of the rams' horns for seven days.
-.The great walls of Jericho—they were twelve feet wide—have been excavated.5 They were found to have been destroyed by an earthquake. The archaeological evidences also prove that robin-bobin
these walls collapsed at the beginning of the Hyksos period, or shortly after the close of the Middle Kingdom.6 The earth had not yet recovered from the previous world catastrophe, and reacted with continuous tremors when the hour of a new cosmic disaster approached: the event we described at the beginning of this book only to go back to the cataclysm of the Exodus—the upheaval of the days of Joshua, when the earth stood still on the day of the battle at Beth-horon.
4 Joshua 6 : 20.
5 E. Sellin and C. Watzinger, Jericho: Die Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen (1913).
6 J. Garstang and G. B. E. Garstang, The Story of Jericho (1940).
CHAPTER 7
Stones Suspended in the Air
THE HOT HAILSTONES which, at Moses' intercession, had remained suspended in the air when they were about to fall upon the Egyptians, were now cast down upon the Canaanites." 1
These words mean that a part of the meteorites of the cometary train of the days of Exodus remained in the celestial sphere for about fifty years, falling in the days of Joshua, in the valley of Beth-horon, on the same forenoon when the sun and the moon stood still for the length of a full day.
The language of the Talmud and Midrash suggests that the same comet returned after some fifty years. Once more it passed very close to the earth. This time it did not reverse the poles of the earth, but kept the terrestrial axis tilted for a considerable length of time. Again the world was, in the language of the rabbis, "consumed in the whirlwind," "and all the kingdoms tottered," "the earth quaked and trembled from the noise of thunder"; terrified mankind was decimated once more, and carcasses were like rubbish in this Day of Anger.2
On the day when this took place on the earth, the sky was in confusion. Stones fell from the heavens, sun and moon stopped in their paths, and a comet must also have been seen. Habakkuk describes the portent in the sky on that memorable day when, in his words, "the sun and moon stood still in their habitation": it had the form of a man on a chariot drawn by horses and was regarded as God's angel.
1 Ginzberg, Legends, IV, 10; the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Berakhot 54b. See also Midrash of Rabbi Elieser or of 32 Midot.
2 See the Section, "The Most Incredible Story."
141
142
WORLDS IN COLLISION
In the King James version the passages read:
'His glory covered the heavens . . . and his brightness was as the light; he had horns coming out of his hand . . . burning coals went forth at his feet . . . [he] drove asunder the nations; and the everlasting mountains were scattered. . . . Was thine anger against the rivers? Was thy wrath against the sea, that thou didst ride upon thine horses and thy chariots of salvation . . . ? Thou didst cleave the earth with rivers. The mountains saw thee, and they trembled: the overflowing of the water passed by: the deep uttered his voice. . . . The sun and moon stood still in their habitation: at the light of thy arrows they went, and at the shining of thy glittering spear. Thou didst march through the land in indignation, thou didst thresh the heathen in anger. . . . Thou didst walk through the sea with thine horses, through the heap of great waters." 3
Since the texts of the Scriptures have, for some psychological reason rooted in the readers, the quality of being easily misread, misunderstood, or misinterpreted, I give also some of the passages of the third chapter of Habakkuk in another, modernized reading:
His splendour over all the sky,
his glory filling all the earth,
his radiance is a lightning blaze,
on either side flash rays. . . .
At his step the earth is shaken,
at his look nations are scattered,
robin-bobin
the ancient hills are shattered,
mountains of old sink low. . . .
Art thou wrathful at the sea,
that thou art storming on the steeds,
upon the chariots in triumph . . . ?
The hills writhe at thy sight . . .
the sun forgets to rise,
the moon to move,
before the flashes of thy darting arrows,
before the sheen of thy lightning, thy lance.
Thou trampest earth in fury,
thou art threshing the peoples in thine anger.4
3 Habakkuk 3 : 3-15.
4 The Old Testament: A New Translation (transl. James Moffatt, 1924-1925).
WORLDS IN COLLISION 143
With the earth disturbed in its spinning on its axis, the mechanical friction of displaced strata and magma must have set the world on fire.
The world burned. The Greek story of Phaethon will be introduced here because of the interpretation heard by Solon during his visit to Egypt.
Phaethon
The Greeks as well as the Carians and other peoples on the shores of the Aegean Sea told of a time when the sun was driven off its course and disappeared for an entire day, and the earth was burned and drowned.
The Greek legend says that the young Phaethon, who claimed parentage of the sun, on that fatal day tried to drive the chariot of the sun. Phaethon was unable to make his way "against the whirling poles," and "their swift axis" swept him away. Phaethon in Greek means "the blazing one."
Many authors have dealt with the story of Phaethon; the best known version is a creation of the Latin poet Ovid. The chariot of the sun, driven by Phaethon, moved "no longer in the same course as before." The horses "break loose from their course" and "rush aimlessly, knocking against the stars set deep in the sky and snatching the chariot along through uncharted ways."
The constellations of the cold Bears tried to plunge into the forbidden sea, and the sun's chariot roamed through unknown regions of the air. It was "borne along just as a ship driven before the headlong blast, whose pilot has let the useless rudder go and abandoned the ship to the gods and prayers." 1
"The earth bursts into flame, the highest parts first, and splits into deep cracks, and its moisture is all dried up. The meadows are burned to white ashes; the trees are consumed, green leaves and all, and the ripe grain furnishes fuel for its own destruction. . . . Great cities perish with their walls, and the vast conflagration reduces whole nations to ashes."
"The woods are ablaze with the mountains. . . . Aetna is blazing
* Ovid, Metamorphoses (transl. F. J. Miller), Book II.
144 WORLDS IN COLLISION
boundlessly . . . and twin-peaked Parnassus. . . . Nor does its chilling clime save Scythia; Caucasus burns . . . and the heaven-piercing Alps and cloud-capped Apennines."
The scorched clouds belched forth smoke. Phaethon sees the earth aflame. "He can no longer bear the ashes and whirling sparks, and is completely shrouded in the dense, hot smoke. In this pitchy darkness he cannot tell where he is or whither he is going."
"It was then, as men think, that the peoples of Aethiopia became black-skinned, since the blood was drawn to the surface of their bodies by the heat."
"Then also Libya became a desert, for the heat dried up her moisture. . . . The Don's waters steam; Babylonian Euphrates burns; the Ganges, Phasis, Danube, Alpheus boil; Spercheos' banks are aflame. The golden sands of Tagus melt in the intense heat, and the swans . . . are scorched. .
robin-bobin
. . The Nile fled in terror to the ends of the earth . . . the seven mouths lie empty, filled with dust; seven broad channels, all without a stream. The same mischance dries up the Thracian rivers, Hebrus and Strymon; also the rivers of the west, the Rhine, Rhone, Po and the Tiber. . . . Great cracks yawn everywhere. . . . Even the sea shrinks up, and what was but now a great watery expanse is a dry plain of sand. The mountains, which the deep sea had covered before, spring forth, and increase the numbers of the scattered Cyclades."
How could the poets have known that a change in the movement of the sun across the firmament must cause a world conflagration, blazing of volcanoes, boiling of rivers, disappearance of seas, birth of deserts, emergence of islands, if the sun never changed its harmonious journey from sunrise to sunset?
The disturbance in the movement of the sun was followed by a period as long as a day, when the sun did not appear at all. Ovid continues: "If we are to believe report, one whole day went without the sun.2 But the burning world gave light."
A prolonged night in one part of the world must be accompanied by a prolonged day in another part; in Ovid we see the phenomenon related in the Book of Joshua, but from another longitude.
This may 2 "Si modo credimus. irnum isse diem sine sole ferunt."
WORLDS IN COLLISION
145
stimulate surmise as to the geographical origin of the Indo-Iranian or Carian migrants to Greece.
The globe changed the inclination of its axis; latitudes changed, too. Ovid ends the description of the world catastrophe contained in the story of Phaethon: "Causing all things to shake with her mighty trembling, she [the earth] sank back a little lower than her wonted place."
Plato recorded the story heard two generations before from Solon, the wise ruler of Athens.3
Solon, on his visit to Egypt, questioned the priests, versed in the lore of antiquity, on early history. He discovered that "neither he himself nor any other Greek knew any thing at all, one might say, about such matters." Solon unfolded before tha priests the tale of the deluge, the only ancient tradition he was aware of. One of the priests, an old man,4 said:
"There have been and there will be many and divers destructions of mankind, of which the greatest are by fire and water, and lesser ones by countless other means. For in truth the story that is told in your country as well as ours, how once upon a time Phaethon, son of Helios, yoked his father's chariot, and, because he was unable to drive it along the course taken by his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth and himself perished by a thunderbolt—that story, as it is told, has the fashion of a legend, but the truth of it lies in the occurrence of a shifting of the bodies in the heavens which move around the earth, and a destruction of the things on the earth by fierce fire, which recurs at long intervals." 6
The Egyptian priest explained to Solon that in these catastrophes the literary works of many peoples and their learned men perished; for that reason the Greeks were still childish, as they no longer knew the true horrors of the past.
These words of the priest were only an introduction to a revelation of his knowledge about lands that were erased when Greece also and
3 Plato Timaeus (transl. R. G. Bury, 1929).
4 According to Plutarch (Isis and Osiris) the name of the priest was Sonchis of Sais.
0 Plato Timaeus 22 C-D.
146
WORLDS IN COLLISION
the entire world were visited with heavenly wrath. He told the story of a mighty kingdom on a great island in the middle of the Atiantic Ocean that submerged and sank forever into its waters.
Atlantis
The story narrated by Plato of the island of Atlantis that ruled Africa as far as the border of Egypt and Europe as far as Tuscany on the Apennine peninsula and that in one fatal night was shattered by earthquakes and sank, never ceased to occupy the imagination of the literati. Strabo and Pliny thought that the story of Atlantis was an illusion of the elderly Plato. But to this day robin-bobin
the tradition, as revived by Plato, has not died. Poets and novelists have exploited the story freely; scientists have done so with caution. An incomplete catalogue of the literature on Atlantis in 1926 included 1,700 titles.1 Although Plato said clearly that Atlantis was situated behind the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar), in the Atlantic Ocean, as is also indicated by the name of the island, travelers and other guessers have placed Atlantis in all parts of the world, even on dry land, as, for example, in Tunisia,2 Palestine,3 and South America. Ceylon, Newfoundland, and Spitzbergen have also been considered. This was due to the fact that traditions of inundations and submersion of islands exist in all parts of the world.
Plato set down what Solon had heard in Egypt from the learned priest. "The [Atlantic] ocean there was at that time navigable; for in front of the mouth which you Greeks call, as you say, 'the Pillars of Heracles' [Hercules], there lay an island which was larger than Libya and Asia [Asia Minor] together; and it was possible for the travellers of that time to cross from it to the other islands, and from the islands to the whole of the continent over against them which encompasses that veritable ocean. . . . Yonder is a real ocean, and the land surrounding it may most rightly be called, in the fullest and
1 J. Gattefosse and C. Roux, Bibliographie de TAtlantide et des questions con-nexes (1926).
2 A. Herrmann, Unsere Ahnen und Atlantis (1934). 8 F. C. Baer, L'Atlantique des anciens (1835).
WORLDS IN COLLISION 147
truest sense, a continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there existed a confederation of kings, a great and marvelous power, which held sway over all the island, and over many other islands also and parts of the continent; and, moreover, of the lands here within the Straits they ruled over Libya as far as Egypt, and over Europe as far as Tuscany." 4
In the nineteenth century ships sailed the Atlantic Ocean to explore its bed in search of Atlantis, and before the Second World War scientific societies existed for the sole purpose of exploring the problem of the sunken island.
Much speculation was offered, not only on the whereabouts of Atlantis, but also on the cultural achievements of its inhabitants. Plato, in another work of his (Critias), wrote a political treatise, and, as no real place in the world could have been the scene of his utopia, he chose for that purpose the sunken island. Modern scholars, finding some affinity between American, Egyptian, and Phoenician cultures, think that Atlantis may have been the intermediary link. There is much probability in these speculations; if they are justified, Crete, a maritime base of Carian navigators, may disclose some information about Atlantis as soon as the Cretan scripts are satisfactorily deciphered.
One point in Plato's story about the submersion of Atlantis requires correction. Plato said that Solon told the story to Critias the elder, and that the young Critias, Plato's friend, heard it from his grandfather when he was a ten-year-old boy. Critias the younger remembered having been told that the catastrophe which befell Atlantis happened 9,000 years before. There is one zero too many here. We do not know of any vestiges of human culture, aside from that of the Neolithic age, nor of any navigating nation, 9,000 years before Solon. Numbers we hear in childhood easily grow in our memory, as do dimensions. When revisiting our childhood home, we are surprised at the smallness of the rooms—we had remembered them as much larger. Whatever the source of the error, the most probable date of the sinking of Atlantis would be in the middle of the second millennium, 900 years before Solon, when the earth twice suffered great
* Plato Timaeus 24 E-25 B.
148 WORLDS IN COLLISION
catastrophes as a result of "the shifting of the heavenly bodies." These words of Plato received the least attention, though they deserved the greatest.
The destruction of Atlantis is described by Plato as he heard it from his source: "At a later time there occurred portentous earthquakes and floods, and one grievous day and night befell them, when the whole body of your [Greek] warriors was swallowed up by the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner was swallowed up by the sea and vanished; wherefore also the ocean at robin-bobin
that spot has now become impassable and unsearchable, being blocked up by the shoal mud which the island created as it settled down." 5
At the time when Atlantis perished in the ocean, the people of Greece were destroyed: the catastrophe was ubiquitous.
As if recalling what had happened, the Psalmist wrote: "Destructions are come to a perpetual end: and thou hast destroyed cities, their memorial is perished with them." 6 He prayed also:
"God is our refuge and strength . . . therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters thereof roar and be troubled." T
The Floods of Deucalion and Ogyges
The history of Greece knows two great natural catastrophes: the floods of Deucalion and of Ogyges. One of them, usually that of Deucalion, is described by Greek authors as having been simultaneous with the conflagration of Phaethon. The floods of Deucalion and Ogyges brought overwhelming destruction to the mainland of Greece and to the islands around and caused changes in the geographical profile of the area. That of Deucalion was most devastating: water covered the land and annihilated the population. According to the legend, only two persons—
Deucalion and his wife—remained alive. This last detail must not be taken more literally than similar statements found in descriptions of great catastrophes all around the world; for example, two daughters of Lot, who hid with him in a cave
« Plato Timaeus 25 C-D. « Psalms 9:6. » Psalms 46 : 1-3.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 149
after the catastrophe of Sodom and Gomorrah, believed that they and their father were the only survivors in the land.1 ^*"
The chronologists among the Fathers of the Church found material for assuming that one of the two catastrophes, the flood of Deucalion or that of Ogyges, had been contemporaneous with the Exodus.
Julius Africanus wrote: "We affirm that Ogygus [Ogyges] from whom the first flood [in Attica]
derived its name, and who was saved when many perished, lived at the time of the Exodus of the people from Egypt along with Moses." 2 He further expressed his belief in the coincidence of the catastrophe of Ogyges and the one that occurred in Egypt in the days of the Exodus in the following words: J^"The Passover and the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt took place, and also in Attica the flood of Ogygus. And that is according to reason. For when the Egyptians were being smitten in the anger of God with hail and storms, it was only to be expected that certain parts of the earth should suffer with them." s
^Eusebius placed the Flood of Deucalion and the conflagration of Phaethon in the fifty-second year of Moses' life.4 Augustine also synchronized the Flood of Deucalion with the time of Moses; 5 he assumed that the Flood of Ogyges took place earlier. .-^ A chronologist of the seventh century (Isidore, bishop of Seville) * dated the Flood of Deucalion in the time of Moses; chronologists of the seventeenth century likewise calculated that the Flood of Deucalion took place in the time of Moses, close to but not simultaneous with the Exodus.7
It would seem to be more probable that, if the catastrophes oc-
1 Genesis 19 : 31.
2 Julius Africanus in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson (1896), VI, 132.
3 Ibid., p. 134. 4 Eusebius, Werke, Vol. V, Die Chronik, "Chronikon-Kanon." s The City of God, Bk. XVIII, Chaps. 10, 11.
6 See J. G. Frazer, Folklore in the Old Testament (1918), I. 159. ?Seth Calvisius, in Opus chronologicum (1629), assigns the year 2429 anno mundi or 1519 before the present era to Phaethon's conflagration, and 2432 (-1516) to the Flood of Deucalion, and 2453 (-1495) to the Exodus.
Christopher Helvicus (1581-1617), in Theatrum historicum (1662), assigns 2437 anno mundi to the Flood of Deucalion and Phaethon's conflagration, and 2453 (or 797 a Diluvio universali) to the Exodus from Egypt.
robin-bobin
150 WORLDS IN COLLISION
curred one shortly after the other, the catastrophe of Ogyges took place after that of Deucalion which practically destroyed the land, depopulated it, and erased every memory of what had happened up to that time. In the words of Plato, who quoted the Egyptian priest speaking to Solon, the catastrophes must have escaped the notice of the future generations because, as a result of the devastation, "for many generations the survivors died with no power to express themselves in writing." The memory of the catastrophe of Ogyges would have vanished in the catastrophe of Deucalion if Ogyges had preceded Deucalion.8
Apparently, the truth is with those who placed the catastrophe of Deucalion in the days of Exodus; but those who reckoned that Ogyges was a contemporary of Moses were also correct, except that Moses did not live until the Flood of Ogyges—it took place in the days of Joshua.
In commemoration of the Deucalion flood, the people of Athens observed a feast in the month of Anthesterion, which is a spring month; the feast was called Anthesteria. On the thirteenth of the month, the main day of the feast, honey and flour were poured into a fissure in the earth as a sacrifice.9
The date of this ceremony—the thirteenth day of Anthesterion in the spring—is revealing if we remember what was said in the section entitled "13." It was on the thirteenth day of the spring month (Aviv) that the great planetary contact occurred which preceded by a few hours the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.
The offering of honey and flour as the main ceremony of the feast is also revealing if we recollect that manna, or heavenly corn, tasting like honey, fell on the earth after the contact of the earth with a celestial body.
As to the provenance of the name Deucalion, scholars admit that
8 But cf. Frazer, "Ancient Stories of a Great Flood," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, XLVI (1916). However, Eusebius placed Deucalion before Ogyges.
9 Cf. Pausanias, Description of Greece, I, xviii, 7. Pauly-Wissowa, ReaUEncyclo-padie, s. v.
"Anthesterion"; also Andree, Die Flutsagen, p. 41.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 151
it is not known.10 For the name and the person of Ogyges we have some concrete information.
Although Ogyges was a king, the Greek annalists who wrote of the "flood of Ogyges" as one of the outstanding events of the past of their country, at the same time did not know anything about a king of that name in Greece.11 Who was Ogyges?
> We can solve this problem. When the Israelites under Moses approached the border of Moab, Balaam in his blessing of Israel used these words: "His king shall be higher than Agag [Agog]."
12 Agog must have been the most important king of that time in the area around the eastern Mediterranean.
In my reconstruction of ancient history, I shall put forward proofs that the Amalekite king, Agog I, was identical with the Hyksos king whose name the Egyptologists tentatively read Apop I, and who, a few decades after the invasion of Egypt by the Amu (Hyksos), laid the foundation of Thebes, the future capital of the New Kingdom in Egypt.
In conformity with this assertion, I can point to the fact that Greek tradition, which does not know of any activities of King Ogyges in Attica, occasionally places the domicile of Ogyges in Egyptian Thebes, and Aeschylus calls Thebes of Egypt "the Ogygian Thebes," to differentiate it from the Greek Thebes in Boeotia. Ogyges is also credited with founding Thebes in Egypt.13
¦^Agog was a contemporary of the aging Moses; he was a ruler who, in his time, had no equal in the region bordering the eastern Medi-10 "While the meaning of the legend is clear, the meaning of the name Deucalion is enigmatic."
Roscher, "Deukalion," Lexikon d. griech. und romisch. Mythologie.
According to Homer, Deucalion was a son of Minos, king of Crete, and a grandson of Zeus and Europa (The Iliad, xiv, 321 ff; xiii, 450 f.). According to Apollodoms (The Library, I, vii), Deucalion was a son of Prometheus.
robin-bobin
11 Julius Africanus wrote: "After Ogygus [Ogyges], by reason of the vast destruction caused by the flood, the present land of Attica remained without a king up to Cecrops, a period of 189
years." Fragment of the Chronography in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, VI.
12 Numbers 24 : 7. Cf. the vowels in the name in the Hebrew text of I Samuel 15.
13 Aeschylus, The Persians, 1. 37. See also Scholium to Aristides. Cf. Roscher, "Ogyges, als Konig des agyptischen Thebes," Lexikon d. griech. und romisch Mythologie, Vol. 31, Col. 689.
152 WORLDS IN COLLISION
terranean;14 the catastrophe in the time of Joshua, successor to Moses, was called by his, Agog's, name.
The assertion of Solinus, the author of Polyhistor, that the flood of Ogyges was followed by a night of nine months' duration does not necessarily signify a confusion with the darkness that ensued after the cataclysm of the Exodus; as the causes were similar, similar results must have followed. The eruption of thousands of volcanoes would suffice to produce this darkness, of a shorter duration than that which followed the cataclysm of the Exodus.15
Thus, the Greek traditions of the floods of Ogyges and Deucalion contain elements which, though interchanged, can be traced to two great upheavals in the middle of the second millennium before the present era.16
14 The rabbinical sources say that Amalek went to conquer "the entire world." Seals of the Hyksos kings were found on Crete, in Palestine, in Mesopotamia, and in other places outside Egypt.
15 Cf. Polyhistor, translated by A. Golding (London, 1587), Chap, xvi, and the translation by Agnant (Paris, 1847), Chap. xi.
16 It seems that the legend of Deucalion contains also elements of the story of the universal Deluge (of Noah).
CHAPTER 8
The Fifty-two Year Period
THE WORKS of Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, the early Mexican scholar (circa 1568-1648) who was able to read old Mexican texts, preserve the ancient tradition according to which the multiple of fifty-two-year periods played an important role in the recurrence of world catastrophes.1 He asserts also that only fifty-two years elapsed between two great catastrophes, each of which terminated a world age.
s I have already pointed out, the Israelite tradition counts forty years of wandering in the desert; between the time when the Israelites left the desert and started the difficult task of the conquest, and the time of the battle at Beth-horon twelve years may well have passed. The conquest of Canaan took fourteen years, and the entire duration of Joshua's leadership amounted to twenty-eight years.2 ¦ -Now there exists a remarkable fact: the natives of pre-Columbian Mexico expected a new catastrophe at the end of every period of
1 Ixtlilxochitl, Obras historicas (ed. 1891-1892 in 2 vols.). French translation of his annals is Histoire des Chichimdques (1840).
In the Codex Vaticanus the world ages are reckoned in multiples of fifty-two years with a changing number of years as an addition to these figures. A. Hum-boldt (Researches, II, 28) contraposed the lengths of the world ages in the Vatican manuscript (No. 3738) and their lengths in the system of the tradition preserved by Ixtlilxochid.
Four ages of 105 years are referred to by Censorinus (Liber de die natali) as having taken place, according to the belief of the Etruscans, between world catastrophes presaged by celestial portents.
2 Seder Olam 12. Augustine speaks of 27 years of Joshua's leadership (The City of God, Bk.
XVIII, Chap. 11).
153
-A
154 WORLDS IN COLLISION
robin-bobin
fifty-two years and congregated to await the event. "When the night of this ceremony arrived, all the people were seized with fear and waited in anxiety for what might take place." They were afraid that "it will be the end of the human race and that the darkness of the night may become permanent: the sun may not rise anymore."3 They watched for the appearance of the planet Venus, and when, on the feared day, no catastrophe occurred, the people of Maya rejoiced. They brought human sacrifices and offered the hearts of prisoners whose chests they opened with knives of flint. On that night, when the fifty-two-year period ended, a great bonfire announced to the fearful crowds that a new period of grace had been granted and a new Venus cycle started.4
"•'The period of fifty-two years, regarded by the ancient Mexicans as the interval between two world catastrophes, was definitely related by them to the planet Venus; and this period of Venus was observed by both the Mayas and the Aztecs.5
The old Mexican custom of sacrificing to the Morning Star survived in human sacrifices by the Skidi Pawnee of Nebraska in years when the Morning Star "appeared especially bright, or in years when there was a comet in the sky."8
What had Venus to do with the catastrophes that brought the world to the brink of destruction?
Here is a question that will carry us very far, indeed.
Jubilee
I shall postpone only a little giving the answer to the question just posed. First, I should like to find an explanation for the institution of the jubilee year of the Israelites.
,.->Every seventh year, according to the law, was a sabbatical year during which the land had to be left fallow and Jewish slaves set free. The fiftieth year was a jubilee year, when the land not only had
3 B. de Sahagun, Historia general de la cosas de Nueva Espafia (French transl. by D. Jourdanet and R. Simeon, 1880), Bk. VII, Chaps. X-XIII.
4 Cf. Seler, Gesammelte Abhandlvngen, I, 618 ff.
5 W. Gates in De Landa, Yucatan, note to p. 60.
8 This ceremony was described by G. A. Dorsey. See infra, the Section, "Venus in the Folklore of the Indians."
WORLDS IN COLLISION 155
to be left fallow, but had to be returned to its original proprietors. According to the law, one could not convey his land for ever; the deed of sale was but a lease for whatever number of years remained until the jubilee year. The year was proclaimed by the blowing of horns on the Day of Atonement. "In the Day of Atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land.
And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you, and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family." 1
Ever since, exegetes have labored over the biblical statement that the jubilee year was to be observed every fiftieth year. The seventh sabbatical year is the forty-ninth year: "And the space of the seven sabbaths of years shall be unto thee forty and nine years. . . . And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year." 2 To leave the land fallow for two consecutive years was too great a demand and cannot be explained by the need of the soil under cultivation for rest. The festival of the jubilee, with the return of land to its original owners and the release of slaves, bears the character of an atonement, and its proclamation on the Day of Atonement emphasizes this still further. Was there any special reason why fear returned every fifty years? The jubilee of the Mayas must have had a genesis similar to that of the jubilee of the Israelites. The difference lies in the human character of the festival of the Jews and its inhuman character among the Mayas; but with both peoples it was a year of atonement, repeating itself every fiftieth year in the one case and every fifty-second year in the other.
Comets do not return at exact periods because of perturbations caused by larger planets.3 The Mayas expected the return of a catastrophe every fifty-second year because that was the interval between two cataclysms that had taken place. It may be that the comet was actually seen again at such intervals. The Jews fasted and prepared
robin-bobin
1 Leviticus 25 : 9 ff. 2 Leviticus 25 : 8-10.
3 Halley's comet has an average period of 77 years, with single periods as short as 74/3 years or as long as 79K years.
156 WORLDS IN COLLISION
themselves for the Day of Judgment on the earliest possible date of its return; the Mayas had their festival when the dreaded time had passed without harm.
. On the Day of Atonement the Israelites used to send a scapegoat to "Azazel" in the desert.4 It was a ceremony of propitiation of Satan. In Egypt tne goat was an animal dedicated to Seth-Typhon.5 Azazel was a fallen star or Lucifer. It was also called Azzael, Azza, or Uzza.8
According to the rabbinical legend, Uzza was the star angel of Egypt: it was thrown into the Red Sea when the Israelites made their passage.7 The Arab name of the planet Venus is al-Uzza.8
Arabs used to bring human sacrifices to al-Uzza; Mohammed, too, in his early days, worshiped it, and even today the Arabs seek its help.9
On the day on which the jubilee year was proclaimed, the Israelites dispatched a placating offering of a scapegoat to Lucifer. But what had Venus to do with the jubilee and the atonement?
The Birth of Venus
A planet turns and revolves on a quite circular orbit around a greater body, the sun; it makes contact with another body, a comet, that travels on a stretched out ellipse. The planet slips from its axis, runs in disorder off its orbit, wanders rather erratically, and in the end is freed from the embrace of the comet.
The body on the long ellipse experiences similar disturbances. Drawn off its path, it glides to some new orbit; its long train of gaseous substances and stones is torn away by the sun or by the planet, or runs away and revolves as a smaller comet along its own
?Leviticus 16 : 8-26. The priests used to cast lots for two goats: one goat for the Lord and the other as the scapegoat for Azazel.
5 Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, 73; cf. Herodotus ii. 46, Diodorus i. 84.4, and Strabo xvii. 1.19.
« Ginzberg, Legends, V, 152, 170.
7 Ibid., VI, 293. According to another legend, the fallen angel Uzza is chained to the Mountains of Darkness (ibid., V, l70), the Caucasus.
8 See "al-Uzza," Encylopaedia of Islam (1913-1934), Vol. IV.
9 J. Wellhausen, Reste arabischen Heidentums (2nd ed., 1897), pp. 40-44; C. M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta (new ed., 1921), II, 516; P. K. Hitti, History of the Arabs (1937), pp.
98 ff.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 157
ellipse; a part of the tail is retained by the parent comet on its new orbit.
Ancient Mexican records give the order of the occurrences. The sun was attacked by Quetzal-cohuatl; after the disappearance of this serpent-shaped heavenly body, the sun refused to shine, and during four days the world was deprived of its light; a great many people died at that time.
Thereafter, the snakelike body transformed itself into a great star. The star retained the name of Quetzal-cohuatl [Quetzal-coatl]. This great and brilliant star appeared for the first time in the east.1 Quetzal-cohuatl is the well-known name of the planet Venus.2
Thus we read that "the sun refused to show itself and during four days the world was deprived of light. Then a great star . . . appeared; it was given the name Quetzal-cohuatl . . . the sky, to show its anger . . . caused to perish a great number of people who died of famine and pestilence." 3
The sequence of seasons and the duration of days and nights became disarranged. "It was then . .
. that the people [of Mexico] regulated anew the reckoning of days, nights, and hours, according to the difference in time." 4
"It is a remarkable thing, moreover, that time is measured from the moment of its [Morning Star's] appearance. . . . Tlahuizcal-panteuctli or the Morning Star appeared for the first time following the convulsions of the earth overwhelmed by a deluge." It looked like a monstrous serpent. "This serpent is adorned with feathers: that is why it is called Quetzal-cohuatl, Gukumatz or Kukulcan. Just as the world is about to emerge from the chaos of the great robin-bobin
catastrophe, it is seen to appear." 5 The feather arrangement of Quetzal-cohuatl "represented flames of fire." 6
Again, the old texts speak "of the change that took place, at the moment of the great catastrophe of the deluge, in the condition of
1 Brasseur, Histoire des nations civilisees du Mexique, I, 181.
2 Seler, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, I, 625.
3 Brasseur, Histoire des nations civilisees du Mexique, I, 311. * Ibid., I, 120.
5 Brasseur, Sources de I'histoire ¦primitive du Mexique, p. 82.
6 Sahagun, A History of Ancient Mexico (transl. F. R. Bandelier, 1932), p. 26.
158 WORLDS IN COLLISION
many constellations, principal among them being precisely Tlahuiz-calpanteuctli or the star of Venus."7
v. The cataclysm, accompanied by a prolonged darkness, appears to have been that of the days of the Exodus, when a tempest of cinders darkened the world disturbed in its rotation. Some of the references may allude to the subsequent catastrophe of the time of the conquest by Joshua, when the sun remained for more than a day in the sky of the old world. Since it was the same comet that on both occasions made contact with the earth, and at each of the contacts the comet changed its own orbit, the relevant question is not, "On which occasion did the comet change its orbit?" but first of all, "Which comet changed to a planet?" or "Which planet was a comet in historical times?" The transformation of the comet into a planet began on contact with the earth in the middle of the second millennium before the present era and was carried a step further one jubilee period later. "After the dramatic events of the time of Exodus, the earth was shrouded in dense clouds for decades, and observation of stars was not possible; after the second contact, Venus, the new and splendid member of the solar family, was seen moving along its orbit. It was in the days of Joshua, a time designation meaningful to the reader of the sixth book of the Scriptures; but for the ancients it was "the time of Agog." As I explained above, he was the king by whose name the cataclysm (the Deluge of Ogyges) was known, and who, according to Greek tradition, laid the foundations of Thebes in Egypt.
In The City of God by Augustine it is written:
"From the book of Marcus Varro, entitled Of the Race of the Roman People, I cite word for word the following instance: 'There occurred a remarkable celestial portent; for Castor records that in the brilliant star Venus, called Vesperugo by Plautus, and the lovely Hesperus by Homer, there occurred so strange a prodigy, that it changed its color, size, form, course, which never happened before nor since. Adrastus of Cyzicus, and Dion of Naples, famous mathematicians, said that this occurred in the reign of Ogyges.'" 8
7 Brasseur, Sources de I'histoire primitive du Mexique, p. 48.
8 Bk. XXI, Chap. 8 (transl. M. Dods).
WORLDS IN COLLISION 159
The Fathers of the Church considered Ogyges a contemporary of Moses. Agog, mentioned in the blessing of Balaam, was the king Ogyges. The upheaval that took place in the days of Joshua and Agog, the deluge that occurred in the days of Ogyges, the metamorphosis of Venus in the days of Ogyges, the star Venus which appeared in the sky of Mexico after a protracted night and a great catastrophe—all these occurrences are related.
Augustine went on to make a curious comment on the transformation of Venus: "Certainly that phenomenon disturbed the canons of the astronomers ... so as to take upon them to affirm that this which happened to the Morning Star (Venus) never happened before nor since. But we read in the divine books that even the sun itself stood still when a holy man, Joshua the son of Nun, had begged this from God."
Augustine had no inkling that Castor, as quoted by Varro, and the Book of Jasher, as quoted in the Book of Joshua, refer to the same occurrence.
Are Hebrew sources silent on the birth of a new star in the days of Joshua? They are not. It is written in a Samaritan chronicle that during the invasion of Palestine by the Israelites under robin-bobin
Joshua, a new star was born in the east: "A star arose out of the east against which all magic is vain." 9
Chinese chronicles record that "a brilliant star appeared in the days of Yahu [Yahou]."10
The Blazing Star
Plato, citing the Egyptian priest, said that the world conflagration associated with Phaethon was caused by a shifting of bodies in the sky which move around the earth. As we have reason to assume that it was the comet Venus that, after two contacts with the earth, eventually became a planet, we shall do well to inquire: Did Phaethon turn into the Morning Star?
Phaethon, which means "the blazing star,"1 became the Morning
• Ginzberg, Legends, VI, 179.
10Legge; The Chinese Classics (Hong Kong ed., 1865), III, Pt. 1, 112, note.
1 Cf. Cicero De natura deorum (transl. H. Rackham), ii. 52.
160 WORLDS IN COLLISION
Star. The earliest writer who refers to the transformation of Phaethon into a planet is Hesiod.2
This transformation is related by Hyginus in his Astronomy, where he tells how Phaethon, that caused the conflagration of the world, was struck by a thunderbolt of Jupiter and was placed by the sun among the stars (planets) .3 It was the general belief that Phaethon changed into the Morning Star.4
On the island of Crete, Atymnios was the name of the unlucky driver of the sun's chariot; he was worshiped as the Evening Star, which is the same as the Morning Star.5
The birth of the Morning Star, or the transformation of a legendary person (Istehar, Phaethon, Quetzal-cohuatl) into the Morning Star was a widespread motif in the folklore of the oriental6
and occidental 7 peoples. The Tahitian tradition of the birth of the Morning Star is narrated on the Society Island in the Pacific;8 the Mangaian legend says that with the birth of a new star, the earth was battered by countless fragments.9 The Buriats, Kirghiz, and Yakuts of Siberia, and the Eskimos of North America also tell of the birth of the planet Venus.10
A blazing star disrupted the visible movement of the sun, caused a world conflagration, and became the Morning-Evening Star. This may be found not only in the legends and traditions, but also in astronomical books of the ancient peoples of both hemispheres.
The Four-Planet System
By asserting that the planet Venus was born in the first half of the second millennium, I assume also that in the third millennium only
2 Theogony, 11. 989 ff. 3 Hyginus, Astronomy, ii. 42.
* See Roscher, "Phaethon" in Roscher's Lexihon d. griech. und rom. Mythologie, Col. 2182.
8 Nonnos Dionysiaca xi. 130 f.; xii. 217; xix. 182; Solinus, Polyhistor xi.
6 Ginzberg, Legends, V, 170.
7 Brasseur, Histoire des nations civilisees du Mexique, I, 311-312.
8 Williamson, Religious and Cosmic Beliefs of Central Polynesia, I, 120. »Ibid., p. 43.
10 Holmberg, Siberian Mythology, p. 432; Alexander, North American Mythology, p. 9.
WORLDS IN COLLISION
161
four planets could have been seen, and that in astronomical charts of this early period the planet Venus cannot be found.
In an ancient Hindu table of planets, attributed to the year —3102, Venus alone among the visible planets is absent.1 The Brahmans of the early period did not know the five-planet system,2 and only in a later ("middle") period did the Brahmans speak of five planets.
Babylonian astronomy, too, had a four-planet system. In ancient prayers the planets Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Mercury are invoked; the planet Venus is missing; and one speaks of "the four-planet system of the ancient astronomers of Babylonia." 3 These four-planet systems and the inability of the ancient Hindus and Babylonians to see Venus in the sky, even though it is more conspicuous than the other planets, are puzzling unless Venus was not among the planets.
robin-bobin
On a later date "the planet Venus receives the appellative: The great star that joins the great stars.' The great stars are, of course, the four planets Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn . . . and Venus joins them as the fifth planet." 4
Apollonius Bhodius refers to a time "when not all the orbs were yet in the heavens." 5
One of the Planets Is a Comet
Democritus (circa —460 to circa —370), a contemporary of Plato and one of the great scholars of antiquity, is accused by the moderns of not having understood the planetary character of Venus.1 Plutarch
1 J. B. J. Delambre, Histoire de Vastronomie ancienne (1817), I, 407: "Venus alone is not found there."
2 "It is often denied that the Veda-Hindus knew of the existence of the five planets." "The striking fact that the Brahmans . . . never mention five planets." G. Thibaut, "Astronomie, Astrologie und Mathematik" in Grundriss der indo-arischen Philol. und Altertumskunde, III (1899).
3 E. F. Weidner, Handbuch der babylonischen Astronomie (1915), p. 61, writes of a star list found in Boghaz Keui in Asia Minor: "That the planet Venus is missing will not startle anybody who knows the eminent importance of the four-planet system in the Babylonian astronomy."
Weidner supposes that Venus is missing in the list of planets because "she belongs to a triad with the moon and the sun." On Ishtar in early inscriptions cf. infra, p. 175.
* Ibid., p. 83. 5 Apollonius Rhodius, The Argonautica, Bk. iv, 11. 257 ff.
1 "Democritus [says] that the fixed stars are in the highest place; after those the planets; after which the sun, Venus, and the moon, in their order." Plutarch, 162 WORLDS IN COLLISION
quotes him as speaking of Venus as if it were not one of the planets. But apparently the author of the treatises on geometry, optics, and astronomy, no longer extant, knew more about Venus than his critics think. From quotations which have survived in other authors, we know that Democritus built a theory of the creation and destruction of worlds which sounds like the modern planetesimal theory without its shortcomings. He wrote: "The worlds are unequally distributed in space; here there are more, there fewer; some are waxing, some are in their prime, some waning: coming into being in one part of the universe, ceasing in another part. The cause of their perishing is collision with one another." 2 He knew that "the planets are at unequal distances from us" and that there are more planets than we are able to discover with our eyes.3 Aristotle quoted the opinion of Democritus: "Stars have been seen when comets dissolve."4
Among the early Greek scholars, Pythagoras of the sixth century is generally credited with having had access to some secret science. His pupils, and their pupils, the so-called Pythagoreans, were cautious not to disclose their science to anyone who did not belong to their circle. Aristotle wrote of their interpretation of the nature of comets: "Some of the Italians called Pythagoreans say that the comet is one of the planets, but that it appears at great intervals of time and only rises a little above the horizon. This is the case with Mercury too; because it only rises a little above the horizon it often fails to be seen and consequently appears at great intervals of time." 5
This is a confused presentation of a theory; but it is possible to trace the truth in the Pythagorean teaching, which was not understood by Aristotle. A comet is a planet which returns at long intervals. One of the planets, which rises only a little above the horizon, was still regarded by the Pythagoreans of the fourth century as a comet. With the knowledge obtained from other sources, it is easy
Morals (transl. "by several hands," revised by W. W. Goodwin), Vol. Ill, Chap. XV. cf.
Roscher's Lexikon der Griech. u. Rom. Myth., col. 2182.
2 Hippolytus, The Refutation of All Heresies, I, Chap. XI. Plato, who was a contemporary of Democritus, similarly described the destruction of the earth and its future rebirth in a far-away region of the universe (Timaeus 56 D).
3 Seneca Naturales quaestiones vii. iii. 2. * Aristotle Meteorologica i. 6. 5 Ibid.
robin-bobin
WORLDS IN COLLISION 163
to guess that by "one of the planets" is meant Venus; only Mercury and Venus rise a little above the horizon.
Aristotle disagreed with the Pythagorean scholars who considered one of the five planets to be a comet.
"These views involve impossibilities. . . . This is the case, first, with those who say that the comet is one of the planets . . . more comets than one have often appeared simultaneously ... as a matter of fact, no planet has been observed besides the five. And all of them are often visible above the horizon together at the same time. Further, comets are often found to appear, as well when all the planets are visible as when some are not."6
With these words, Aristotle, who did not learn the secrets of the Pythagoreans directly, tried to refute their teaching by arguing that all five planets are in their places when a comet appears, as if the Pythagoreans thought that all comets were one and the same planet leaving its usual path at certain times. But the Pythagoreans did not think that one planet represents all comets.
According to Plutarch,7 they taught that each of the comets has its own orbit and period of revolution. Hence the Pythagoreans apparently knew that the comet which is "one of the planets"
is Venus.
The Comet Venus
During the centuries when Venus was a comet, it had a tail.
The early traditions of the peoples of Mexico, written down in pre-Columbian days, relate that Venus smoked. "The star that smoked, la estrella que humeava, was Sitlae choloha, which the Spaniards call Venus."1
"Now, I ask," says Alexander Humboldt, "what optical illusion could give Venus the appearance of a star throwing out smoke?"2
Sahagun, the sixteenth century Spanish authority on Mexico, wrote
«Ibid.
7 Plutarch, "Les Opinions des philosopher," in QZuvres de Plutarque (transl.
Amyot), Vol. XXI, Chap. Ill, Sec. 2.
1 Humboldt, Researches, II, 174; see E. T. Hammy, Codex Telleriano-Remensis (1899).
2 Humboldt, Researches, II, 174.
164 WORLDS IN COLLISION
that the Mexicans called a comet "a star that smoked." 3 It may thus be concluded that since the Mexicans called Venus "a star that smoked," they considered it a comet.
It is also said in the Vedas that the star Venus looks like fire with smoke.4 Apparently, the star had a tail, dark in the daytime and luminous at night. In very concrete form this luminous tail, which Venus had in earlier centuries, is mentioned in the Talmud, in the Tractate Shabbat: "Fire is hanging down from the planet Venus." 5
This phenomenon was described by the Chaldeans. The planet Venus "was said to have a beard."
6 This same technical expression ("beard") is used in modern astronomy in the description of comets.
These parallels in observations made in the valley of the Ganges, on the shores of the Euphrates, and on the coast of the Mexican Gulf prove their objectivity. The question must then be put, not in the form, What was the illusion of the ancient Toltecs and Mayas? but, What was the phenomenon and what was its cause? A train, large enough to be visible from the earth and giving the impression of smoke and fire, hung from the planet Venus.
Venus, with its glowing train, was a very brilliant body; it is therefore not strange that the Chaldeans described it as a "bright torch of heaven," 7 also as a "diamond that illuminates like the sun," and compared its light with the light of the rising sun.8 At present, the light of Venus is less than one millionth of the light of the sun. "A stupendous prodigy in the sky," the Chaldeans called it.9 vThe Hebrews similarly described the planet: "The brilliant light of 3 Sahagun, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva Espana, Bk. VII, Chap. 4. * J. Scheftelowitz, Die Zeit als Schicksalsgottheit in der iranischen Religion (1929), p. 4; Venus "aussieht wie ein robin-bobin
mit Rauch versehenes Feuer" ("looks like a fire accompanied by smoke"). Cf. Atharva-Veda vi.
3, 15. B Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Shabbat 156a.
6 M. Jastrow, Religious Relief in Rabylonia and Assyria (1911), p. 221; cf. J. Schaumberger,
"Der Bart der Venus' in F. X. Kugler, Sternkunde und Stern-dienst in Babel (3rd supp., 1935), p.
303.
7 "A Prayer of the Raising of the Hand to Ishtar," in Seven Tablets of Creation, ed. L. W. King.
8 Schaumberger in Kugler, Sternkunde und Stemdienst in Rabel, 3rd supp., p. 291.
»Ibid.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 165
Venus blazes from one end of the cosmos to the other end."10
The Chinese astronomical text from Soochow refers to the past when "Venus was visible in full daylight and, while moving across the sky, rivaled the sun in brightness." J1
.-As late as the seventh century, Assurbanipal wrote about Venus (Ishtar) "who is clothed with fire and bears aloft a crown of awful splendor."12 The Egyptians under Seti thus described Venus (Sekh-met): "A circling star which scatters its flame in fire ... a flame of fire in her tempest." 13
Possessing a tail and moving on a not yet circular orbit, Venus was more of a comet than a planet, and was called a "smoking star" or a comet by the Mexicans. They also called it by the name of Tzonte-mocque, or "the mane." 14 The Arabs called Ishtar (Venus) by the name Zebbaj or "one with hair," as did the Babylonians.15
"Sometimes there are hairs attached to the planets," wrote Pliny;1S an old description of Venus must have served as a basis for his assertion. But hair or coma is a characteristic of comets, and in fact "comet" is derived from the Greek word for "hair." The Peruvian name "Chaska" (wavy-haired) 17 is still the name for Venus, though at present the Morning Star is definitely a planet and has no tail attached to it.
The coma of Venus changed its form with the position of the planet. When the planet Venus approaches the earth now, it is only partly illuminated, a portion of the disc being in shadow; it has phases like the moon. At this time, being closer to the earth, it is most brilliant.
10 Midrash Rabba, Numeri 21. 245a: "Noga shezivo mavhik me'sof haolam ad sofo." Cf.
"Mazal" and "Noga" in J. Levy, Worterbuch iiber die Talmudim und Midrashim (2nd ed., 1924).
11 W. C. Rufus and Hsing-chih tien, The Soochow Astronomical Chart (1945).
12 D. D. Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria (1926-1927), II, Sec. 829.
13 Breasted, Records of Egypt, III, Sec. 117.
14 Brasseur, Sources de Vhistoire primitive du Mexique, p. 48, note.
18 H. Winckler, Himmels- und Weltenbild der Babylonier (1901), p. 43.
i« Pliny, Natural History, ii. 23.
1T "The Peruvians call the planet Venus by the name Chaska, the wavy-haired."
H. Kunike, "Sternmythologie auf ethnologischer Grundlage" in Welt und Mensch, IX-X. E. Nordenskiold, The Secret of the Peruvian Quipus (1925), pp. 533 ff.
166 WORLDS IN COLLISION
When Venus had a coma, the horns of its crescent must have been extended by the illuminated portions of the coma. It thus had two long appendages and looked like a bull's head.
%. Sanchoniathon says that Astarte (Venus) had a bull's head.18 The planet was even called Ashteroth-Karnaim, or Astarte of the Horns, a name given to a city in Canaan in honor of this deity.19 The golden calf worshiped by Aaron and the people at the foot of Sinai was the image of the star. Rabbinical authorities say that "the devotion of Israel to this worship of the bull is in part explained by the circumstance that, while passing through the Red Sea, they beheld the celestial Throne, and most distinctly of the four creatures about the Throne, they saw the ox."20
The likeness of a calf was placed by Jeroboam in Dan, the great temple of the Northern Kingdom.21
Tistrya of the Zend-Avesta, the star that attacks the planets, "the bright and glorious Tistrya mingles his shape with light moving in the shape of a golden-horned bull." 22
robin-bobin
•vThe Egyptians similarly pictured the planet and worshiped it in the effigy of a bull.23 The cult of a bull sprang up also in Mycenaean Greece. A golden cow head with a star on its brow was found in Mycenae, on the Greek mainland.24
The people of faraway Samoa, primitive tribes that depend on oral tradition as they have no art of writing, repeat to this day: "The planet Venus became wild and horns grew out of her head."
25
Examples and references could be multiplied ad libitum.
The astronomical texts of the Babylonians describe the horns of the planet Venus. Sometimes one of the two horns became more prominent. Because the astronomical works of antiquity have so much to say about the horns of Venus, modern scholars have asked them-18 Cf. L. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (1923-1941), I, Chap. X.
19 Genesis 14 : 5. See also I Maccabee v. 26, 43, and II Maccabee xii. 21-26; G. Rawlinson, The History of Herodotus (1858), II, 543.
20 Ginzberg, Legends, III, 123. 211 Kings 12 : 28.
™The Zend-Avesta (transl. James Darmesteter, 1883), Pt. II, p. 93.
23 Cf. E. Otto, Beitrdge zur Geschichte der Stierkulte in Agypten (1938).
2* H. Schliemann, Mycenae (1870), p. 217.
25 Williamson, Religious and Cosmic Beliefs of Central Polynesia, I, 128.
WORLDS IN COLLISION
167
selves whether the Babylonians could have seen the phases of Venus, which cannot now be distinguished with the naked eye; 26 Galileo saw them for the first time in modern history when he used his telescope.
The long horns of Venus could have been seen without the aid of a telescopic lens. The horns were the illuminated portions of the coma of Venus, which stretched toward the earth. These horns could also have extended toward the sun as Venus approached the solar orb, since comets were repeatedly observed with projections in the direction of the sun, while the tails of the comets are regularly directed away from the sun.
When Venus approached close to one of the planets, its horns grew longer: this is the phenomenon the astrologers of Babylon observed and described when Venus neared Mars.27
26 "It is well known that not a few passages in the cuneiform texts on astrology speak of the right or the left horn of Venus. It was deduced that the phases of Venus were observed already by the Babylonians and that Galileo, in the sixteenth century, was not the first to see them."
Schaumberger, "Die Homer der Venus" in Kugler, Stemkunde, 3rd Supp., pp. 302 ff.
27 Ibid.
CHAPTER 9
Pallas Athene
IN EVERY COUNTRY of the ancient world we can trace cosmo-logical myths of the birth of the planet Venus. If we look for the god or goddess who represents the planet Venus, we must inquire which among the gods or goddesses did not exist from the beginning, but was born into the family. The mythologies of all peoples concern themselves with the birth only of Venus, not with that of Jupiter, Mars, or Saturn. Jupiter is described as heir to Saturn, but his birth is not a mythological subject. Horus of the Egyptians and Vishnu, born of Shiva, of the Hindus, were such newborn deities. Horus battled in the sky with the monster-serpent Seth; so did Vishnu. In Greece the goddess who suddenly appeared in the sky was Pallas Athene. She sprang from the head of Zeus-Jupiter. In another legend she was the daughter of a monster, Pallas-Typhon, who attacked her and whom she battled and killed.
The slaying of the monster by a planet-god is the way in which the peoples perceived the convulsion of the pillar of smoke when the earth and the comet Venus disturbed each other in their orbits, and the head of the comet and its tail leaped against each other in violent electrical discharges.
robin-bobin
The birth of the planet Athene is sung in the Homeric hymn dedicated to her, "the glorious goddess, virgin, Tritogeneia." When she was born, the vault of the sky—the great Olympus—
"began to reel horribly," "earth round about cried fearfully," "the sea was moved and tossed with dark waves, while foam burst forth suddenly," and
168
WORLDS IN COLLISION 169
the sun stopped for "a long while." x The Greek text speaks of "purple waves"2 and of "the sea
[that] rises up like a wall," and the sun stopping in its course.3
Aristocles said that Zeus hid the unborn Athene in a cloud and then split it open with lightning,4
which is the mythological way to describe the appearance of a celestial body from the pillar of cloud.
Athene, or Latin Minerva, is called Tritogeneia (or Tritonia) after the lake Triton.5 This lake disappeared in a catastrophe in Africa when it broke into the ocean, leaving the desert of Sahara behind it, a catastrophe connected with the birth of Athene.
Diodorus,6 referring to undisclosed older authorities, says that Lake Triton in Africa
"disappeared from sight in the course of an earthquake, when those parts of it which lay toward the ocean were torn asunder." This account implies that a great lake or marsh in Africa, separated from the Atlantic Ocean by a mountainous barrier, disappeared when the barrier was broken or lowered in a catastrophe. Ovid says that Libya became a desert in consequence of Phaethon's conflagration.
In the Iliad it is said that Pallas Athene "darted down to earth a gleaming star" with sparks springing from it; it darted as a star "sent by Jupiter to be a portent for seamen or for a wide host of warriors, a gleaming star." 7 Athene's counterpart in the Assyro-Babylonian pantheon is Astarte (Ishtar) who shatters mountains, "bright torch of heaven" at whose appearance "heaven and earth quake," who causes darkness and appears in a hurricane.8 Like Astarte (Ash-teroth-Karnaim), Athene was pictured with horns. "Athena, daughter of Zeus . . . upon her head she set the helmet with two horns,"
1 "The Homeric Hymns to Athena" (transl. Evelyn-White) in Hesiod's volume in the Loeb Classical Library.
2 The correct translation requires "purple waves"; see "The Homeric Hymn to Minerva" (transl.
A. Buckley) in The Odyssey of Homer with the Hymns (1878).
3 L. R. Famell, The Cults of the Greek States (1896), I, 281. * Ibid.
5 "Minerva ... is reported to have appeared in virgin age in the times of Ogyges at the lake called Triton, from which she is also styled Tritonia."
Augustine, The City of God, Bk. XVIII, Chap. 8.
« Diodorus of Sicily iii. 55 (transl. C. H. Oldfather). * Iliad iv. 75 f.
8 "A Prayer ... to Ishtar" in Seven Tablets of Creation (transl. King); Famell, The Cults of the Greek States, I, 258 ff.
170
WORLDS IN COLLISION
said Homer.8 Pallas Athene is identified with Astarte (Ishtar) or the planet Venus of the Babylonians.10 Anaitis of the Iranians, too, is identified as Pallas Athene and as the planet Venus.11
Plutarch identified Minerva of the Romans or Athene of the Greeks with Isis of the Egyptians, and Pliny identified the planet Venus with Isis.12
It is necessary to recall this here because it is generally supposed that the Greeks had no deity of importance who personified the planet Venus13 and that, on the other hand, they "did not find even a star in which to place" Athene.14 Modern books on the mythology of the Greeks repeat today what Cicero wrote: "Venus, called in Greek Phosphorus and in Latin Lucifer when it preceded the sun, but when it follows it Hesperos." 15 Phosphorus does not play any role on Olympus. But following Cicero in his description of the planets, we read also of "the planet called Saturn's, the Greek name of which is Phaenon," though we know a more common name, robin-bobin
Cronus, by which the Greeks called the planet Saturn. Cicero gives the Greek names of other planets which are not the common ones. It is therefore entirely wrong to think that Phosphorus and Hesperos are the chief or only names of the planet Venus in Greek. Athene, in whose honor the city of Athens was named, was the planet Venus. Next to Zeus she was the most honored deity of the Greeks. The name Athene in Greek, according to Manetho, "is indication of self-originated move-
»Iliad v. 735. W s. Langdon, Tammuz and Ishtar (1914), p. 97.
11 F. Cumont, Les Mysteres de Mithra (3rd ed., 1913), p. 111.
12 Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, Chap. 62: "They often call Isis by the name of Athena." See G.
Rawlinson, The History of Herodotus, II, 542; Pliny, Natural History, ii, 37.
13 The name Venus or Aphrodite belonged to the moon.
i* Augustine, The City of God, Bk. VII, Chap. 16. Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States, I, 263, discusses the various hypotheses of the physical nature of Athene and, unable to agree with any, asks: "Is there any proof that Athene, as a goddess of the Hellenic religion, ever was a personification of some part of the physical world?"
Cicero De natura deorum i. 41, referred to a treatise by the Stoic Diogenes Babylonius, De Minerva, in which its author gave a natural explanation of the birth of Athene. The work is not extant.
15 Cicero De natura deorum ii. 53.
WORLDS IN COLLISION
171
ment." He wrote of the name Athene as meaning, "I came from myself." 18 Cicero, speaking of Venus, explained the origin of the name thus: "Venus was so named by our countrymen as the goddess who 'comes' [venire] to all things." 1T The name Vishnu signifies "per-vader," from the Sanskrit vish, to "enter" or "pervade."
The birth of Athene was assigned to the middle of the second millennium. Augustine wrote:
"Minerva [Athene] is reported to have appeared ... in the times of Ogyges." This statement is found in The City of God,18 the book containing the quotation from Varro that the planet Venus changed its course and form in the time of Ogyges. Augustine also synchronized Joshua with the time of Minerva's activities.19
The cover of carbonigenous clouds in which the earth was enveloped by the comet is the "robe ambrosial" wrought by Athene for Hera (Earth) .20 The source of ambrosia was closely connected with Athene.21 The origin of Athene as a comet is implied in her epithet Pallas which, as is commonly known, is synonymous with Typhon; Typhon, as Pliny said, was a comet.
The bull and the cow, the goat and the serpent, were animals dedicated to Athene. "The goat being usually tabooed but chosen as an exceptional victim for her," the animal was annually sacrificed on the Acropolis of Athens.22 With the Israelites the goat was the victim for Azazel, or Lucifer.
18 "The usage of the Egyptians is also similar: they often call Isis by the name of Athena, which expresses some such meaning as 'I came from myself,' and is indication of self-originated movement." Manetho, cited by Plutarch, Isis and Osiris (transl. Waddell), Chap. 62. But cf.
Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States, I, 258: "The meaning of the name remains unknown."
17 Cicero De nature deorum ii. 69. « The City of God, Bk. XVIII, Chap. 8.
19 Ibid., Bk. XVIII, Chap. 12.
20 Iliad xiv. 170 ff. In the Babylonian mythology Marduk cuts Tiamat in two and makes from one part a cover or veil for the sky.
21 T. Bergk, "Die Geburt der Athene" in Fleckeisen's lahrbiicher fur classische Philologie (1860), Chap. VI, refers to the relation of Athene to the "Quellen der Ambrosia" ("the sources of ambrosia"). Apollodorus (The Library) says that Athene "slayed Pallas and used his skin," which appears to refer to the envelope of Venus that previously formed the tail of the comet.
22 Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States, I, 290.
172 WORLDS IN COLLISION
robin-bobin
In the Babylonian calendar "the nineteenth day of all months is marked 'day of wrath' of goddess Gula (Ishtar). No work was done. Weeping and lamentation filled the land. . . . Any explanation of dies irae of Babylonia must be sought in some myth concerning the nineteenth of the first month. Why should the nineteenth day after the moon of the spring equinox be a day of wrath?
... It corresponds to the quinquatrus of the Boman farmer's calendar, the nineteenth of March, five days after the full moon. Ovid says that Minerva was born on that day, she being the Pallas Athene of the Greeks." 23 The nineteenth of March was Minerva's day. -.„ The first appearance of Athene-Minerva took place on the day the Israelites crossed the Bed Sea. The night between the thirteenth and the fourteenth days of the first month after the vernal equinox was the night of the great earthshock; six days later, on the last day of Passover week, according to the Hebrew tradition, the waters were heaped up like mountains and the fugitives crossed on the dry bed of the sea.
The birth of Pallas Athene or her first visit to earth was the cause of a cosmic disturbance, and the memory of that catastrophe was "a day of wrath in all the calendars of ancient Chaldea."
Zeus and Athene
If there was a problem in this research which caused prolonged deliberation on the part of the author, it was the question: Was it the planet Jupiter or Venus that caused the catastrophe of the time of Exodus? Some ancient mythological sources point to Venus, other sources point to Jupiter. In one group of legends Jupiter (Zeus) is the protagonist of the drama: he leaves his place in the sky, rushes to battle Typhon, and strikes him with thunderbolts. But other legends and historical sources, too, which I have quoted on previous pages indicate that it was the planet Venus, or Pallas Athene of the Greeks. Athene killed her father, Typhon-Pallas, the celestial mon-23 Langdon, Babylonian Menologies and the Semitic Calendars (1935), pp. 86-87.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 173
ster, and the description of this battle is not different from that of the battle in which Zeus killed Typhon.
Under the weight of many arguments, I came to the conclusion— about which I no longer have any doubt—that it was the planet Venus, at the time still a comet, that caused the catastrophe of the days of Exodus. Then why do a part of the legends tie up this event with Jupiter?
The cause of this duality in the mythological handling of an historical event lies in the fact that the ancients themselves did not know for certain which of the planets had caused the destruction.
Some saw the pillar of cloud—Typhon defeated by Jupiter, the ball of fire that emerged from the pillar and battled with it. Others interpreted the globe as a body different from Jupiter.
The Greek authors described the birth of Athene (planet Venus), saying she sprang from the head of Jupiter. "And mighty Olympus trembled fearfully . . . and the earth around shrieked fearfully, and the sea was stirred, troubled with its purple waves."x One or two authors thought that Athene was born of Cronus. But the consensus of ancient authors makes Athene-Venus the offspring of Jupiter: she sprang from his head, and this birth was accompanied by great disturbances in the celestial and terrestrial spheres. The comet rushed toward the earth, and it could not be very well distinguished whether the planet Jupiter or its offspring was approaching. I may divulge here something that belongs to the second book of this work; namely, that at an earlier time, Jupiter had already caused havoc in the planetary family, the earth included, and it was therefore only natural to see in the approaching body the planet Jupiter.
I referred in the introductory part of this work to the modern theory which ascribes the birth of the terrestrial planets to the process of expulsion by larger ones. This appears to be true in the case of Venus. The other modern theory, which ascribes the origin of comets of short period to expulsion by large planets, is also correct: Venus was expelled as a comet and then changed to a planet after contact with a number of members of the solar system.
1 "The Homeric Hymn to Minerva" (transl. Buckley) in The Odyssey of Homer with the Hymns.
Cf. the translation on p. 168.
174 WORLDS IN COLLISION
robin-bobin
Venus, being an offspring of Jupiter, bore all the characteristics known to men from early cataclysmic encounters. When a ball of fire tore the pillar of cloud and pelted the pillar with thunderbolts, the imagination of the people saw in this the planet-god Jupiter-Marduk rushing to save the earth by killing the serpent-monster Typhon-Tiamat.
It is not strange, therefore, that, in places as remote from Greece as the islands of Polynesia, it is related that "the planet Jupiter suppressed the tail of the great storm." 2 But we are told that in the same places, notably on the Harvey Islands, "Jupiter was often mistaken for the Morning Star." 3 On other islands of Polynesia, "the planets Venus and Jupiter seem to have been confused with each other." Explorers found "that the name Fauma or Paupiti was given to Venus
. . . and that the same names were given to Jupiter." *
Early astronomy shared Ptolemy's opinion that "Venus has the same powers" and also the nature of Jupiter,5 an opinion reflected also in the astrological belief that "Venus, when she becomes sole ruler of the event, in general brings about results similar to those of Jupiter." •
In one local cult in Egypt the name of Isis, as I shall show in the next volume, originally belonged to Jupiter, Osiris being Saturn. In another local cult Amon was the name for Jupiter.
Horus originally was also Jupiter.7 But when a new planet was born of Jupiter and became supreme in the sky, the onlookers could not readily recognize the exact nature of this change.
They gave the name of Isis to the planet Venus, and sometimes the name of Horus. This must have caused confusion. "One is confused by the various relations which exist between mother and son (Isis and Horus). Now he is her consort, now her brother; now a youth . . . now an infant fed at her
2 Williamson, Religious and Cosmic Beliefs of Central Polynesia, I, 123.
8 Ibid., p. 132. See also W. W. Gill, Myths and Songs from the South Pacific (1876), p. 44, and his Historical Sketches of Savage Life in Polynesia (1880).
p. 38.
4 Williamson, I, 122. See also J. A. Moerenhut, Voyages aux isles du Grand
Ocean (1837), II, p. 181.
B Ptolemy, Tetrabyblos (transl. F. E. Robbins, 1940), I, 4. «Ibid., II, 8.
t S. A. B. Mercer, Horus, Royal God of Egypt (1942).
WORLDS IN COLLISION 175
breast." 8 "A noteworthy representation shows her [Isis] in association with Horus as the Morning Star, and thus in a strange relation . . . which we cannot yet explain from the texts." 9
Also Ishtar of Assyria-Babylonia was in early times the name of the planet Jupiter; later it was transferred to Venus, Jupiter retaining the name of Mardulc.
Baal, still another name for Jupiter, was an earlier name for Saturn, and later on became the name of Venus, sometimes the feminine form Baalath or Belith being used.10 Ishtar, also, was at first a male planet, subsequently becoming a female planet.11
Worship of the Morning Star
Now that it has been shown it was Venus which, at an interval of fifty-two years, caused two cosmic catastrophes in the fifteenth century before the present era, we understand also the different historical connections between Venus and these catastrophes.
In numerous biblical and rabbinical passages it is said that when the Israelites went from Mount Sinai into the desert, they were covered by clouds. These clouds were illuminated by the pillar of fire, so that they gave a pale light.1 With this should be connected a statement of Isaiah: "The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, the light of Noga was upon them." 2 Noga is Venus; it is, in fact, the usual name of this planet in Hebrew,3 and it is therefore an omission not to translate it so.
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
Бот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)
Поиск книг
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
О психологии, саморазвитии и личностном росте
Саморазвитие
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
Детективы
Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки
Фантастика
Отборные классические книги
Классика
ВКОНТАКТЕБиблиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории
Любовные романы
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
Самые популярные книги в формате фб2
Топ фб2
книги