Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization

8 The Perils of Planetary Amnesia

As Evidence of Ancient Cataclysm Mounts, the Legacy of a Rejected Genius Is Reconsidered

Steve Parsons

At one time, Immanuel Velikovsky was known and respected as a world-class scholar. After studying at Edinburgh, Moscow, Zurich, Berlin, and Vienna, Velikovsky earned a reputation as an accomplished psychoanalyst and enjoyed close ties to Albert Einstein and Freud’s first pupil, Wilhelm Stekel.

But with the 1950 publication by the Macmillan Company of his bestselling book Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky’s reputation in the halls of science plummeted all the way to the basement. His stature as a researcher and scholar would not recover for the rest of his life. Overnight, Velikovsky became persona non grata on college campuses across the nation, and his work was vilified by mainstream astronomers.

How did this Russian-born Jewish scholar, educated at the world’s most respected centers of learning, bring such a firestorm of criticism upon himself? What caused powerful men of science to denounce Velikovsky as a liar and charlatan on the basis of hearsay, swearing never to read his popular book? Why have respected professionals lost their jobs for committing the crime of recommending an open investigation of Velikovsky’s conclusions?

After examining the ancient records of cultures around the world, Velikovsky made three unusual claims in Worlds in Collision. He postulated that (1) the planet Venus moved on a highly irregular course, passing very close to Earth within human history, (2) electromagnetic and electrostatic forces operate on a planetary scale, powerful enough to affect the motions and activity of planets, and (3) the planet Venus took the form of an immense comet in the ancient sky, inspiring great awe and fear in the hearts of our distant ancestors.

Velikovsky’s conclusions were controversial, but this alone cannot explain the intensity of the response from the halls of academe. Controversy alone cannot explain why, over many years, the popular Carl Sagan mounted a personal campaign to discredit Velikovsky. Normally, the marketplace of ideas will accommodate a broad range of thought, from the weird to the boring, but not this time.

The sheer novelty of Velikovsky’s work cannot explain why Dr. Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard Observatory, along with ranking astronomer Fred Whipple and other powerful scientists, would force Macmillan to cease publication and fire its own editor, James Putnam, even though Worlds in Collision had soared to the top of the best-seller lists. Some have speculated that only the power of truth touching the raw nerve of mass denial could cause grown men to go ballistic like this.

Only a deeply buried trauma in the mass consciousness could erupt with such irrational fury. In the case of the “Velikovsky affair,” the organized, frantic defense of entrenched belief produced one of the most pathological episodes in the history of science. Had Immanuel Velikovsky penetrated the veil of “planetary amnesia”?

As a psychoanalyst, Velikovsky was well qualified to recognize pathology in human behavior. In a later book, Mankind in Amnesia, he claims that the ancient sages exhibited a frightened state of mind, haunted by a particular fear based on terrible events their ancestors had experienced when the world was ripped apart by monstrous natural forces. He describes the means by which this deepest of collective traumas was gradually buried and forgotten over the years, but not eliminated.

Aristotle’s cosmology, which dominated scholastic thinking for two thousand years, acted with surprising precision to suppress all lingering fears of planetary disorder. Then in the 1800s, modern science agreed that the solar system, Earth, and all forms of life on Earth had absolutely never passed through any kind of wild or disorderly phase in the past. This idea, known as uniformitarianism, became established dogma in science. The tide of human thought has successfully driven the memory from conscious awareness, but the evidence indicates it is still alive in the collective human psyche.

Velikovsky understood our tendency to suppress trauma but also to express and repeat trauma in peculiar ways. For example, the early wars of conquest were deliberately conducted as a ritual exercise to reenact the havoc and destruction brought by the planetary gods of old.

In today’s world, we barely recognize our own violence and certainly don’t associate it with ancient roots. That’s the nature of buried trauma. One doesn’t see one’s own shadow.

Immanuel Velikovsky initially believed that the checks and balances of science would encourage others to examine his conclusions and perform their own investigations along the same lines. Unfortunately, however, by the time he passed away, in 1979, he had come to believe that his ideas would never be taken seriously by mainstream science. Though the early seventies saw a renewal of public interest in Velikovsky’s work, the doors of science have remained tightly shut on it to this day. Only the most highly motivated individuals with independent financial support have been able to continue the research where Velikovsky left off.

Interestingly, recent findings by the space program have confirmed much of what Velikovsky said. Consider the following Venusian puzzles.

Venus spins in a direction opposite that of the other planets and its temperature of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit is much hotter than expected for an object in its orbital position. The chemistry of Venus violates the established theory of planet formation. The upper atmosphere of Venus is marked by extreme, faster-than-rotation winds and the calm, lower atmosphere displays continuous lightning discharges. The body of the planet is covered with 100,000 volcanoes that have completely resurfaced the planet in recent geological time.

And finally, the traditional theory cannot account for the invisible remnant of a cometlike tail extending forty-five million kilometers into space. The Venusian tail was detected by the Earth-orbiting SOHO satellite and reported in the June 1997 issue of New Scientist. The Venusian puzzles make sense, it can be argued, if we believe what ancient people actually said about Venus. They said that Venus was a comet. They called Venus the long-haired star, the bearded star, and the witch star. They said Venus took the form of the goddess in both her beautiful aspect and her terrible aspect, that she was a fierce dragon who attacked the world. A newly arriving body that has not yet achieved thermal and electrical equilibrium with its environment could present such a display in the sky.

Apparently Velikovsky opened the door to our buried collective memories by regarding the testimony of ancient peoples as credible evidence for unusual natural events in our past.

His journey began when he studied the Egyptian and Hebrew accounts of the disasters and wonders that accompanied the Old Testament Exodus, dated at approximately 1500 B.C.E. He discovered close parallels in the historical writings of other cultures, suggesting that the same sequence of catastrophes beset the entire globe and was experienced by all people simultaneously.

In 1950, science was not yet ready to accept the testimony of ancient peoples as credible evidence for unusual planetary events. The physical sciences would not tolerate an intrusion by an outsider who drew conclusions that crossed academic boundaries. But nearly fifty years later, science has opened the door a crack.

Two innovative theorists in the scientific establishment have recently published a book bearing a distinctive Velikovskian tone. Dr. Victor Clube, dean of the department of astrophysics at Oxford, together with his colleague, Dr. William Napier, has developed a thesis of cometary catastrophe that draws upon mythical themes as primary evidence. Though Clube and Napier’s cometary visitor was not a planet, the story is surprisingly close to that of Worlds in Collision.

Other innovative theorists have thrown themselves even more wholeheartedly into this line of research. The comparative mythologist David Talbott and the physicist Wallace Thornhill independently recognized the power of Velikovsky’s discoveries and have followed up with forty-five years of combined research of their own.

OPENING THE MIND TO THE ELECTRIC UNIVERSE

By breaking from the pack and looking at observed facts with fresh eyes, Wallace Thornhill has become convinced that planets and stars function in an electrically dynamic environment. The Venusian tail, discovered last year, retains its ropelike or filamentary structure across forty-five million kilometers because it is a current carrying plasma. These plasma structures, Birkeland currents, are well known to plasma physicists but remain unrecognized by astronomers. The very existence of Birkeland currents in the solar system demonstrates the existence of a flow of electric current in the plasma that fills the solar system. And this opens up a whole new way of seeing things.

Thornhill says that stars do not produce all of their light and heat by thermonuclear processes. Instead, our Sun and all other stars resemble great spheres of lightning. These spheres receive energy externally rather than from nuclear fusion at their core, he says. The accepted theory that stars produce energy by nuclear fusion suits the mind-set of the atomic era but does not conform to actual observations.

Sadly, the general public has no way of knowing that the behavior of our Sun does not fit the conventional theory. We observe a lack of neutrinos; temperature reductions rather than gains as one approaches the surface; accelerated solar wind; strange rotation behavior and holes in the surface that reveal a cooler, rather than hotter, interior.

“You have to observe what nature actually does,” he says, “not what you think it should do.” Thornhill’s empirical approach does allow ancient human testimony to count as credible evidence. Fables, legends, and myths don’t prove Thornhill’s ideas, but they provide clues.

For instance, the mythical gods hurled great thunderbolts at each other when they battled in the heavens. The flashing thunderbolt was their weapon of choice. And the earliest written records of the ancient sages and stargazers confirm that the gods who battled in the sky were named with the same names as our most familiar planets.

If (1) the mythical gods were the planets, and if (2) the planets moved so close to each other in the sky that they exchanged colossal electrical bolts, and if (3) this took place within human memory, then where are the scars and the craters?

Actually, the scars of colossal electric strikes literally cover the Moon and most of the planets. These scars are fresh and abundant, just waiting to be studied from a new perspective. Specific patterns in these scars bear a remarkable similarity to the patterns left behind by natural lightning strikes and arcs produced in laboratories on Earth.

Planetary geologists speculate that the long, tapering “sinuous rilles” found on the moon and Mars, which travel both uphill and downhill for hundreds of kilometers, are collapsed lava tubes or dry riverbeds or cracks in the crust. But conventional experts are grasping at straws on this one. The electrical signature is unmistakable.

Such hard evidence is dangerous to science. What if Thornhill’s claims are taken seriously? What if the glass collected from the bottom of small craters of the moon and brought back by the astronauts were really heated and melted by electrical discharge rather than meteor impact? What if the Valles Marineris was actually caused by a giant thunderbolt that ripped across the face of Mars, leaving a gaping chasm that could swallow a thousand Grand Canyons?

If thousands of marks and scars on the planets were caused by powerful electrical discharges—the thunderbolts of the gods—then astronomy is left with more than egg on its face. We’re talking about an omelet!

Fortunately for Thornhill, he has not suffered persecution for his unusual views, at least not yet. Perhaps this is because the views of this unassuming Aussie have not received much exposure. But that will change soon.

UNLOCKING AMNESIA THROUGH MYTH

David Talbott has already found himself the subject of a ninety-minute documentary, titled “Remembering the End of the World.” Unlike Thornhill’s work in the physical sciences, Talbott’s work rests upon unusual and unexpected patterns found in human memory. And what a memory!

Imagine a global event of extreme drama, experienced by the entire human race, involving great wonders in the sky. Imagine the intensity of the experience and its memory to be so great as to alter the course of human development. For the first time ever, entire nations began to erect grand monuments to the gods and perform passionate rituals in a futile effort to relive the earlier experience, to magically restore life to the way it was before the great collapse.

At the dawn of civilization, perhaps five thousand years ago, says Talbott, every dimension of civilized life pointed to the earlier time when things were better, when heaven was close to Earth, before the gods went away. The arts, the songs, the stories, the architecture, the religious beliefs, the military affairs, and the meaning of words and symbols all provide us with lasting evidence of what people experienced then. And according to Talbott, people used every device known to keep alive the memory of a glory that once was. That glory and its violent collapse involved catastrophic displays in the heavens as planets moved close to Earth and appeared huge in the sky.

But just as the fabled gods had gone away, the memory of the golden time would eventually go away. The memory of the violent collapse of the golden time would also go away, but its scars would not. Those scars of massive collective trauma, of doomsday, dwell within every human being alive today and powerfully affect how we relate to the world and to each other.

Velikovsky understood the way by which an individual suppresses the painful memory of trauma in the psyche. He reasoned that the entire human race has collectively suppressed the trauma of its expulsion from the womb-like golden time. Yet that suppressed trauma keeps expressing itself as human violence and alienation. We accept the background pain as a normal state of existence, because that’s what everyone has always felt, going back as far as anybody can remember. But Velikovsky would say that this state is not “normal.” We collectively suffer a distorted view of life because of this greatest of all traumas, when the Time of Perfect Virtue (as the Chinese call it) came to a cold and bitter end.

Talbott has extended Velikovsky’s work by showing, in exquisite detail, the way that Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Venus were intimately tied to human experience during primordial times. These planets traveled very close to Earth, actually assuming a stable and symmetrical, colinear configuration immediately prior to the myth-making epoch. The “Age of the Gods,” according to Talbott’s astonishing story, harkens both to the stable/peaceful period and to the violent/dramatic period when the colinear configuration destabilized and collapsed completely.

Throughout the world, people have drawn images and symbols bearing a distinctive crescent. Laypeople and experts alike always assume that the crescent represents the Moon. Sometimes the crescent has been drawn with a star in its center, but think about it. No star will ever be seen within the crescent of the Moon, as the body of the moon occupies that space. And no orb sits squarely in front of the Moon that we see today.

Talbott could speak for hours on this symbol alone to show that we are confronting an image whose imprint is far deeper in human consciousness and far more awesome than our familiar Moon. In fact, Talbott found no astronomical records of a moon prior to about 500 B.C.E., even though the people of early times were nearly obsessed with observing the activity in the sky.

The crescent was cast by our Sun on Saturn when Saturn occupied the pole position in the sky so close as to subtend up to 20 degrees of arc or more. The small orb in the center was Venus in her dormant phase. Venus appeared as a shining star when in her radiant phase.

Wallace Thornhill’s understanding of plasma-discharge phenomena allows even the nontechnical mind to visualize the way a young Venus might have produced the radiating luminous streamers found in ancient representations of the planet.

Using research methods borrowed from Velikovsky, Talbott examined the mythology of every major culture in the world. Since mythical stories become more locally embellished with the passage of time, he traced the stories back to their oldest and purest forms. This led him to the earliest writings from the cradle of civilization in the Middle East and ancient Egypt.

The great pyramids, according to Talbott, are filled with human writings that describe a world that we do not see today, a sky that we do not see today. That’s why the meaning of the hieroglyphs bewilders our best experts. These inscriptions don’t answer to our world. This is an important clue.

With support from Thornhill and a growing number of accomplished scholars, David Talbott is mounting a heresy even more radical than Velikovsky’s. He claims, with complete assurance, that Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter traveled very close to Earth within human memory. He says that together these planets presented a stupendous form in the sky, at times peaceful and at times violent.

The people alive during this “Age of the Gods” felt a deep kinship with these familiar forms. That’s why the battles of the gods in the sky and the departure of these gods caused such confusion and trauma. The emotional climate for those people might have resembled that of innocent children whose reliable and loving parents suddenly turned into capricious tyrants before finally abandoning them. For the first time, people began to experience the illusion of separation and all forms of human violence. The rest is history.