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WORLDS IN COLLISION
IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY
First published in 1950
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from the following books: G. A.
Dorsey, The Pawnee: Mythology, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1906; Maimonides: The Guide for the Perplexed, translated M. Friedlander, E. P. Dutton, Inc., 1928; Clements R.
Markham, The Incas of Peru, E. P. Dutton, Inc., 1910; Sha\untala and other writings of Kalidasa, transl. A. W. Ryder, Everyman's Library, E. P. Dutton, Inc., 1912; James Moffatt, The Bible: A New Translation, copyright, 1935, Harper & Brothers; The Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press: Homer, The Iliad, transl. A. T. Murray, 1925; Hesiod, Theogony, transl. H.
Evelyn-White, 1914; Euripides, Electra, transl. A. S. Way, 1919; Plato, Timaeus, transl. R. C.
Bury, 1929, and The Statesman (Politicus), transl. H. N. Fowler, 1925; Apollodorus, The Library, transl. J. B. Frazer, 1921; Seneca, Thyestes, transl. F. J. Miller, 1917; Virgil, Georgics, transl. H. R. Fairclough, 1920; Ovid, Metamorphoses, transl. F. L. Miller, 1916; Philo, The Eternity of the World, transl. F. H. Colson, 1941; Plutarch, Life of Numa, transl. B. Perrin, 1914; Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, copyright, 1910, 1928, The Jewish Publication Society of America; L. de Cambrey, Lapland Legends, Yale University Press, 1926; The Philosophy of Spinoza, ed. J. Ratner, copyright, 1927, Modern Library, Random House, Inc.; R.
A. Daly, Our Mobile Earth, copyright, 1926, Charles Scribner's Sons; Evelyn Stefansson, Here Is Alaska, copyright, 1943, Charles Scribner's Sons; J. F. Fleming, Terrestrial Magnetism and Electricity, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1939.
Printed in the United States of America
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PREFACE
Worlds in Collision is a book of wars in the celestial sphere that took place in historical times. In these wars the planet earth participated too. This book describes two acts of a great drama: one that occurred thirty-four to thirty-five centuries ago, in the middle of the second millennium before the present era; the other in the eighth and the beginning of the seventh century before the present era, twenty-six centuries ago. Accordingly, this volume consists of two parts, preceded by a prologue.
Harmony or stability in the celestial and terrestrial spheres is the point of departure of the present-day concept of the world as expressed in the celestial mechanics of Newton and the theory of evolution of Darwin. If these two men of science are sacrosanct, this book is a heresy.
However, modern physics, of atoms and of the quantum theory, describes dramatic changes in the microcosm— the atom—the prototype of the solar system; a theory, then, that envisages not dissimilar events in the macrocosm—the solar system-brings the modern concepts of physics to the celestial sphere.
This book is written for the instructed and uninstructed alike. No formula and no hieroglyphic will stand in the way of those who set out to read it. If, occasionally, historical evidence does not square with formulated laws, it should be remembered that a law is but a deduction from experience and experiment, and therefore laws must conform with historical facts, not facts with laws.
The reader is not asked to accept a theory without question. Rather, he is invited to consider for himself whether he is reading a book of fiction or non-fiction, whether what he is reading is invention or historical fact. On one point alone, not necessarily decisive for the theory of cosmic catastrophism, I borrow credence: I use a synchronical scale of Egyptian and Hebrew histories which is not orthodox.
It was in the spring of 1940 that I came upon the idea that in the days of the Exodus, as evident from many passages of the Scriptures, there occurred a great physical catastrophe, and that such an event could serve in determining the time of the Exodus in Egyptian history or in establishing a synchronical scale for the histories of the peoples concerned. Thus I started Ages in Chaos, a reconstruction of the history of the ancient world from the middle of the second millennium before the present era to the advent of Alexander the Great. Already in the fall of that same year, 1940, I felt that I had acquired an understanding of the real nature and extent of that catastrophe, and for nine years I worked on both projects, the political and the natural histories. Although Ages in Chaos was finished first, in the order of publication it will follow this work.
Worlds in Collision comprises only the last two acts of the cosmic drama. A few earlier acts—
one of them known as the Deluge—will be the subject of another volume of natural history.
The historical-cosmological story of this book is based on the evidence of historical texts of many peoples around the globe, on classical literature, on epics of northern races, on sacred books of the peoples of the Orient and Occident, on traditions and folklore of primitive peoples, on old astronomical inscriptions and charts, on archaeological finds, and also on geological and paleontological material.
If cosmic upheavals occurred in the historical past, why does not the human race remember them, and why was it necessary to carry on research to find out about them? I discuss this problem in the Section "The Collective Amnesia." The task I had to accomplish was not unlike that faced by a psychoanalyst who, out of disassociated memories and dreams, reconstructs a forgotten traumatic experience in the early life of an individual. In an analytical experiment on mankind, historical inscriptions and legendary motifs often play the same role as recollections (infantile memories) and dreams in the analysis of a personality.
Can we, out of this polymorphous material, establish actual facts? We shall check one people against another, one inscription against another, epics against charts, geology against legends, until we are able to extract the historical facts.
In a few cases it is impossible to say with certainty whether a record or a tradition refers to one or another catastrophe that took place through the ages; it is also probable that in some traditions robin-bobin
various elements from different ages are fused together. In the final analysis, however, it is not so essential to segregate definitively the records of single world catastrophes. More important, it seems, is to establish (1) that there were physical upheavals of a global character in historical times; (2) that these catastrophes were caused by extraterrestrial agents; and (3) that these agents can be identified.
There are many implications that follow from these conclusions. I refer to them in the Epilogue, so that I can omit reference to them here.
A few readers went over this book in manuscript and made valuable suggestions and remarks. In chronological order of their reading they are:
Dr. Horace M. Kallen, formerly Dean of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, New York; John J. O'Neill, Science Editor of the New York Herald Tribune; James Putnam, Associate Editor of the Macmillan Company; Clifton Fadiman, literary critic and commentator; Gordon A. Atwater, Chairman and Curator of the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History, New York. The last two read the work at their own request after Mr. O'Neill had discussed it in an article in the Herald Tribune of August 11,1946. I am indebted to all of them but I alone am responsible for content and form.
Miss Marion Kuhn cleared the manuscript of grammatical weeds and helped in reading the proofs.
Many an author has dedicated his book to his wife or mentioned her in the preface. I have always felt this was somewhat ostentatious, but now that this work is being published, I feel I shall be most ungrateful if I fail to mention that my wife Elisheva spent almost as much time on it at our desk as I did. I dedicate this book to her.
The years when Ages in Chaos and Worlds in Collision were written were years of a world catastrophe created by man—of war that was fought on land, on sea, and in the air. During that time man learned how to take apart a few of the bricks of which the universe is built—the atoms of uranium. If one day he should solve the problem of the fission and fusion of the atoms of which the crust of the earth or its water and air are composed, he may perchance, by initiating a chain reaction, take this planet out of the struggle for survival among the members of the celestial sphere. New York, September 1949. Immanuel Velikovsky.
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CONTENTS
PAGE
Author's Preface vii PROLOGUE
Chapter 1 8
In an Immense Universe'The Celestial Harmony-The Origin of the Planetary System • The Origin of the Comets
Chapter 2 16
The Planet Earth-Ice Ages "The Mammoths-The Ice Age and the Antiquity of Man • The World Ages • The Sun Ages
PABT I
VENUS
Chapter 1 39
The Most Incredible Story-On the Other Side of the Ocean
Chapter 2 47
Fifty-Two Years Earlier-The Red World-The Hail of Stones • Naphtha • The Darkness •
Earthquake • "13"
Chapter 3 67
The Hurricane • The Tide-The Battle in the Sky-The Comet of Typhon-The Spark-The Collapsed Sky
Chapter 4 91
Boiling Earth and Sea-Mount Sinai • Theophany • Emperor Yahou
Chapter 5 105
East and West • The Reversed Polarity of the Earth • The Quarters of the World Displaced •
Changes in the Times and the Seasons
Chapter 6 126
The Shadow of Death • Ambrosia • Rivers of Milk and Honey • Jericho
Chapter 7 141
Stones Suspended in the Air • Phaethon • Atlantis • The Floods of Deucalion and Ogyges Chapter 8 153
The Fifty-Two-Year Period • Jubilee • The Birth of Venus • The Blazing Star • The Four-Planet System • One of the Planets is a Comet • The Comet Venus
Chapter 9 168
Pallas Athene • Zeus and Athene • Worship of the Morning Star • The Sacred Cow • Baal Zevuv (Beelzebub) • Venus in the Folklore of the Indians
Chapter 10 194
The Synodical Year of Venus ¦ Venus Moves Irregularly • Venus Becomes the Morning Star pabt n MARS
Chapter 1 207
Amos • The Year —747 • Isaiah • The Argive Tyrants • Again Isaiah • Maimonides and Spinoza, the Exegetes
Chapter 2 227
The Year -687 • Ignis e Coelo • March 23rd • The Worship of Mars • Mars Moves the Earth from Its Pivot
Chapter 3 244
What Caused Venus and Mars to Shift Their Orbits?' When Was the Iliad Created? •
Huitzilopochtli • Tao • Yuddha • The Bundahis • Lucifer Cut Down
Chapter 4 261
Sword-God • Fenris-Wolf • Sword-Time, Wolf-Time • Syn-odos • The Stormer of the Walls Chapter 5 279
The Steeds of Mars* The Terrible Ones-Samples from the Planets • The Archangels • Planet Worship in Judea in the Seventh Century
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Chapter 6 298
A Collective Amnesia • Folklore • Of "Preexisting Ideas" in the Souls of Peoples • The Pageants of the Sky • The Subjective Interpretation of the Events and Their Authenticity Chapter 7 312
Poles Uprooted • Temples and Obelisks-The Shadow Clock-The Water Clock-A Hemisphere Travels Southward
Chapter 8 330
The Year of 360 Days • Disarranged Months • Years of Ten Months • The Reforming of the Calendar
Chapter 9 360
The Moon and Its Craters • The Planet Mars • The Atmosphere of Mars • The Thermal Balance of Mars • The Gases of Venus • The Thermal Balance of Venus • The End
EPILOGUE Facing Many Problems 379
Index 391
— -----""---------
PROLOGUE
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CHAPTER 1
In an Immense Universe
Quota pars opens tanti nobis committitur?
—Seneca
IN AN immense universe a little globe revolves around a star; it is the third in the row—
Mercury, Venus, Earth—of the planetary family. It is of a solid core covered over most of its surface with liquid, and it has a gaseous envelope. Living creatures fill the liquid; other living creatures fly in the gas; and still others creep and walk upon the ground on the bottom of the gaseous ocean. Man, a being of erect stature, thinks himself the prince of creation. He felt like this long before he, by his own efforts, came to know how to fly on wings of metal around the globe. He felt godlike long before he could talk to his fellow-man on the other side of the globe.
Today he can see the microcosm in a drop and the elements in the stars. He knows the laws governing the living cell with its chromosomes, and the laws governing the macrocosm of the sun, moon, planets, and stars. He assumes that gravitation keeps the planetary system together, man and beast on their planet, the sea within its borders. For millions and millions of years, he maintains, the planets have rolled along on the same paths, and their moons around them, and man in these eons has arisen from a one-cell infusorium all the long way up the ladder to his status of Homo sapiens.
Is man's knowledge now nearly complete? Are only a few more steps necessary to conquer the universe: to extract the energy of
3
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the atom—since these pages were written this has already been done —to cure cancer, to control genetics, to communicate with other planets and learn if they have living creatures, too?
Here begins Homo ignoramus. He does not know what life is or how it came to be and whether it originated from inorganic matter. He does not know whether other planets of this sun or of other suns have life on them, and if they have, whether the forms of life there are like those around us, ourselves included. He does not know how this solar system came into being, although he has built up a few hypotheses about it. He knows only that the solar system was constructed billions of years ago. He does not know what this mysterious force of gravitation is that holds him and his fellow man on the other side of the planet with their feet on the ground, although he regards the phenomenon itself as "the law of laws." He does not know what the earth looks like five miles under his feet. He does not know how mountains came into existence or what caused the emergence of the continents, although he builds hypotheses about these, nor does he know from where oil came— again hypotheses. He does not know why, only a short time ago, a thick glacial sheet pressed upon most of Europe and North America, as he believes it did; nor how palms could grow above the polar circle, nor how it came about that the same fauna fill the inner lakes of the Old and the New World. He does not know where the salt in the sea came from.
Although man knows that he has lived on this planet for millions of years, he finds a recorded history of only a few thousand years. And even these few thousand years are not sufficiently well known.
Why did the Bronze Age precede the Iron Age even though iron is more widely distributed over the world and its manufacture is simpler than that of the alloy of copper and tin? By what mechanical means were structures of immense blocks built on the high mountains of the Andes?
What caused the legend of the Flood to originate in all the countries of the world? Is there any adequate meaning to the term "antediluvian"? From what experiences grew the eschatological pictures of the end of the world?
WORLDS IN COLLISION 5
In this work, of which the present book is the first part, some of these questions will be answered, but only at the cost of giving up certain notions now regarded as sacred laws in robin-bobin
science—the millions of years of the present constitution of the solar system and the harmonious revolution of the earth—with all their implications as regards the theory of evolution.
The Celestial Harmony
The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. The day consists of twenty-four hours. The year consists of 365 days, 5 hours, and 49 minutes. The moon circles around the earth, changing its phases-crescent, full, decrescent. The terrestrial axis points in the direction of the polar star.
After winter comes spring, then summer and fall. These are common facts. Are they invariable laws? Must it be so forever? Was it so always?
The sun has nine planets. Mercury has no satellites; Venus has no satellites; the earth has a moon; Mars has two small trabants, mere pieces of rock, and one of them completes its month before Mars ends its day; Jupiter has eleven moons and eleven different kinds of months to count; Saturn has nine moons, Uranus has five moons,1 Neptune one, Pluto none.2 Was it always so? Will it be so forever?
The sun rotates in an easterly direction. All planets revolve in their orbits in the same direction (counterclockwise if seen from the north) around the sun. Most of their moons revolve counterclockwise (in direct motion), but there are a few that revolve in the opposite direction (in retrograde motion).
No orbit is an exact circle; there is no regularity in the eccentrical shapes of the planetary orbits; each elliptical curve verges in a different direction.
It is not known for certain, but it is assumed that Mercury permanently shows the same face to the sun, as our moon does with respect
1 The fifth satellite of Uranus was discovered in 1948.
2 Due to the great distance of Neptune and Pluto from the earth, smaller satellites around these planets may have remained undiscovered.
Note: While this book was on the press another satellite of Neptune was discovered by G. P.
Kuiper.
6 WORLDS IN COLLISION
to the earth. Information obtained by different methods of observation of Venus is contradictory; it is not known whether Venus rotates so slowly that its day equals its year, or so rapidly that the night side is never sufficiently cooled. Mars rotates in 24 hours, 37 minutes, 22.6 seconds (mean period), a period comparable to the terrestrial day. Jupiter, which in volume is thirteen hundred times larger than the earth, completes a rotation in the short space of 9 hours and 50 minutes.
What causes this variability? It is not a law that a planet must rotate or have days and nights; still less that its day and night must return every twenty-four hours.
If Pluto rotates from east to west,3 it has the sun rising in the west. Uranus has the sun rising and setting neither in the east nor in the west. So it is not a law that a planet of the solar system must rotate from west to east and that the sun must rise in the east.
The equator of the earth is inclined to the plane of its ecliptic at an angle of 23M°; this causes the change of seasons during the annual revolution around the sun. The axes of other planets point in the directions of seemingly deliberate choice. It is not a general law for all planets that winter must follow fall and summer the spring.
The axis of Uranus is placed almost in the plane of its orbit; for about twenty years one of its polar regions is the hottest place on the planet. Then night gradually descends and twenty years later the other pole enters the tropics for an equal length of time.4
The moon has no atmosphere. It is not known whether Mercury has any atmosphere. Venus is covered with dense clouds, but not of water vapor. Mars has a transparent atmosphere, but almost without oxygen or water vapor, and its composition is unknown. Jupiter and Saturn have gaseous envelopes; it is not known whether they have solid cores. It is not a general law that a planet must have atmosphere or water.
Mars is 0.15 of the volume of the earth; the next planet, Jupiter, is about 8,750 times as large as Mars. There is no regularity of, or relation between, the size of the planets and their position in the system.
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On Mars are seen "canals" and polar caps; on the moon, craters; the 3 G. Gamow, Biography of the Earth (1941), p. 24.
4 The equator of Uranus is inclined at an angle of 82° to the plane of its orbit.
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earth has reflecting oceans; Venus has brilliant clouds; Jupiter has belts and a red spot; Saturn has rings.
The celestial harmony is composed of bodies different in size, different in form, different in the velocity of rotation, with differently directed axes of rotation, with different directions of rotation, with differently composed atmospheres or without atmospheres, with a varying number of moons or without moons, and with satellites revolving in either direction.
It appears then to be by chance that the earth has a moon, that we have day and night and that their combined length is equal to twenty-four hours, that we have a sequence of seasons, that we have oceans and water, atmosphere and oxygen, and probably also that our planet is placed between Venus at our left and Mars at our right.
The Origin of the Planetary System
All theories of the origin of the planetary system and the motive forces that sustain the motion of its members go back to the gravitational theory and the celestial mechanics of Newton. The sun attracts the planets, and if it were not for a second force, they would fall into the sun; but each planet is impelled by a motive force to proceed in a direction away from the sun, and as a result, an orbit is formed. Similarly, a satellite or a moon is subject to a force that drives it away from its primary, but the attraction of the primary bends the path on which the satellite would have proceeded if there had been no attraction between the bodies, and out of these forces a satellite orbit is traced. The inertia or persistence of motion implanted in planets and satellites was postulated by Newton, but he did not explain how or when the initial pull or push occurred.1
The theory of the origin of the planetary system which dominated the entire nineteenth century was proposed by Swedenborg, the theologian, and Kant, the philosopher. It was put into scientific terms by Laplace,2 although not explored by him quantitatively, and in brief is as follows:
1 Isaac Newton, Principia (Mathematical Principles) (1686), Bk. III.
2 P. S. Laplace, Exposition du susteme du monde (1796).
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Hundreds of millions of years ago the sun was nebulous and very large and had a form approaching that of a disc. This disc was as wide as the whole orbit of the farthest of the planets.
It rotated around its center. Owing to the process of compression caused by gravitation, a globular sun shaped itself in the center of the disc. Because of the rotating motion of the whole nebula, a centrifugal force was in action; parts of matter more on the periphery resisted the retracting action directed toward the center and broke up into rings which balled into globes—
these were the planets in the process of shaping. In other words, as a result of the shrinkage of the rotating sun, matter broke away and portions of this solar material developed into planets.
The plane in which the planets revolve is the equatorial plane of the sun.
This theory is now regarded as unsatisfactory. Three objections stand out above others. First, the velocity of the axial rotation of the sun at the time the planetary system was built could not have been sufficient to enable bands of matter to break away; but even if they had broken away, they would not have balled into globes. Second, the Laplace theory does not explain why the planets have larger angular velocity of daily rotation and yearly revolution than the sun could have imparted to them. Third, what made some of the satellites revolve retrogradely, or in a direction opposite to that of most of the members of the solar system?
"It appears to be clearly established that, whatever structure we assign to a primitive sun, a planetary system cannot come into being merely as the result of the sun's rotation. If a sun, rotating alone in space, is not able of itself to produce its family of planets and satellites, it becomes necessary to invoke the presence and assistance of some second body. This brings us at once to the tidal theory." 8
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The tidal theory, which, in its earlier stage, was called the plane-tesimal theory,4 assumes that a star passed close to the sun. An immense tide of matter arose from the sun in the direction of the passing star and was torn from the body of the sun but remained in its
3 Sir James H. Jeans, Astronomy and Cosmogony (1929), p. 409.
4 The planetesimal hypothesis was developed by T. C. Chamberlin and F. R. Moulton.
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domain, being the material out of which the planets were built. In the planetesimal theory the mass that was torn out broke into small parts which solidified in space; some were driven out of the solar system, and some fell back into the sun, but the rest moved around it because of its gravitational pull. Sweeping in elongated orbits around the sun, they conglomerated, rounded out their orbits as a result of mutual collisions, and grew to form planets and satellites around the planets.
The tidal theory 5 does not allow the matter torn from the sun to disperse first and reunite later; the tide broke into a few portions that rather quickly changed from gaseous to fluid, and then to the solid state. In support of this theory it was indicated that such a tide, when broken into a number of "drops," would probably build the largest "drops" out of its middle portion, and small
"drops" from its beginning (near the sun) and its end (most remote from the sun). Actually, Mercury, nearest to the sun, is a small planet. Venus is larger; earth is a little larger than Venus; Jupiter is three hundred and twenty times as large as the earth (in mass); Saturn is somewhat smaller than Jupiter; Uranus and Neptune, though large planets, are not as large as Jupiter and Saturn. Pluto is quite as small as Mercury.
The first difficulty of the tidal hypothesis lies in the very point adduced in its support, the mass of the planets. Between the earth and Jupiter there revolves a small planet, Mars, a tenth part of the earth in mass, where, according to the scheme, a planet ten to fifty times as large as the earth should be expected. Again, Neptune is larger and not smaller than Uranus.
Another difficulty is the allegedly rare chance of an encounter between two stars. One of the authors of the tidal theory gave this estimate of its probability: 6
"At a rough estimate we may suppose that a given star's chance of forming a planetary system is one in 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 years." But since the life span of a star is much shorter than this figure, "only about one star in 100,000 can have formed a planetary system in the whole of its life." In the galactic system of one hundred million stars,
s The tidal theory was developed by J. H. Jeans and H. Jeffreys. 6 Jeans, Astronomy and Cosmogony, p. 409.
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planetary systems "form at the rate of about one per five billion years. . . . our own system, with an age of the order of two billion years, is probably the youngest system in the whole galactic system of stars."
The nebular and tidal theories alike regard the planets as derivatives of the sun, and the satellites as derivatives of the planets.
The problem of the origin of the moon can be regarded as disturbing to the tidal theory. Being smaller than the earth, the moon completed earlier the process of cooling and shrinking, and the lunar volcanoes had already ceased to be active. It is calculated that the moon possesses a lighter specific weight than the earth. It is assumed that the moon was produced from the superficial layers of the earth's body, which are rich in light silicon, whereas the core of the earth, the main portion of its body, is made of heavy metals, particularly iron. But this assumption postulates the origin of the moon as not simultaneous with the origin of the earth; the earth, being formed out of a mass ejected from the sun, had to undergo a process of leveling, which placed the heavy metals in the core and silicon at the periphery, before the moon parted from the earth by a new tidal distortion. This would mean two consecutive tidal distortions in a system where the chance of even one is held extremely rare. If the passing of one star near another happens among one hundred million stars once in five billion years, two occurrences like this for one and the same star seem quite incredible. Therefore, as no better explanation is available, the satellites are robin-bobin
supposed to have been torn from the planets by the sun's attraction on their first perihelion passage, when, sweeping along on stretched orbits, the planets came close to the sun.
The circling of the satellites around the planets also confronts existing cosmological theories with difficulties. Laplace built his theory of the origin of the solar system on the assumption that all planets and satellites revolve in the same direction. He wrote that the axial rotation of the sun and the orbital revolutions and axial rotations of the six planets, the moon, the satellites, and the rings of Saturn present forty-three movements, all in the same direction. "One finds by the analysis of the probabilities that there are more than four thousand billion chances to one that this arrangement is not the result of chance; this probability is considerably higher than that of the reality
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of historical events with regard to which no one would venture a doubt." 7 He deduced that a common and primal cause directed the movements of the planets and satellites.
Since the time of Laplace, new members of the solar system have been discovered. Now we know that though the majority of the satellites revolve in the same direction as the planets revolve and the sun rotates, the moons of Uranus revolve in a plane almost perpendicular to the orbital plane of their planet, and three of the eleven moons of Jupiter, one of the nine moons of Saturn, and the one moon of Neptune revolve retrogradely. These facts contradict the main argument of the Laplace theory: a rotating nebula could not produce satellites revolving in two directions.
In the tidal theory the direction of the planets' movements depended on the star that passed: it passed in the plane in which the planets now revolve and in a direction which determined their circling from west to east. But why should the satellites of Uranus revolve perpendicularly to that plane and some moons of Jupiter and Saturn in reverse directions? This the tidal theory fails to explain.
According to all existing theories, the angular velocity of the revolution of a satellite must be slower than the velocity of rotation of its parent. But the inner satellite of Mars revolves more rapidly than Mars rotates.
Some of the difficulties that confront the nebular and tidal theories also confront another theory that has been proposed in recent years.8 According to it, the sun is supposed to have been a member of a double star system. A passing star crushed the companion of the sun, and out of its debris planets were formed. In further development of this hypothesis, it is maintained that the larger planets were built out of the debris, and the smaller ones, the so-called "terrestrial" planets, were formed from the larger ones by a process of cleavage.
The birth of smaller, solid planets out of the larger, gaseous ones is conjectured in order to explain the difference in the relation of
7 Laplace. Theorie analytique des probabilites (3rd ed., 1820), p. lxi; cf. H. Faye, Sur I'Origine du monde (1884), pp. 131-132.
8 By Lyttleton and, independently, by Russell.
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weight to volume in the larger and smaller planets; but this theory is unable to explain the difference in the specific weights of the smaller planets and their satellites. By a process of cleavage, the moon was born of the earth; but since the specific weight of the moon is greater than that of the larger planets and smaller than that of the earth, it would seem to be more in accord with the theory that the earth was born of the moon, despite its smallness. This confuses the argument. The origin of the planets and their satellites remains unsolved. The theories not only contradict one another, but each of them bears within itself its own contradictions. "If the sun had been unattended by planets, its origin and evolution would have presented no difficulty."
•
The Origin of the Comets
The nebular and tidal theories endeavor to explain the origin of the solar system but do not include the comets in their schemes. Comets are more numerous than planets. More than sixty robin-bobin
comets are known to belong definitely to the solar system. These are the comets of short periods (less than eighty years); they revolve in stretched ellipses and all but one do not go beyond the line marked by the orbit of Neptune. It is estimated that, besides the comets of short periods, several hundred thousand comets visit the solar system; however, it is not known for certain that they return periodically. They are seen presently at an approximate rate of five hundred in a century, and are said to have an average period of tens of thousands of years.
A few theories of the origin of comets have been proposed, but aside from one attempt to see in them planetesimals that did not receive a side pull sufficiently strong to bring them into circular orbits,1 no scheme has been developed that explains the origin of the solar system in its entirety, with its planets and comets; yet no cosmic theory can persist which limits itself to the problem of either planets or comets exclusively.
9 Jeans, Astronomy and Cosmogony, p. 395.
1 An attempt to explain the comets, in the frame of the planetesimal theory, as scattered debris of a great wreck, was made by T. C. Chamberlin, The Two Solar Families (1928).
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13
One theory sees in the comets errant cosmic bodies arriving from interstellar space. After approaching the sun, they turn away on an open (parabolic) curve. But if they happen to pass close to one of the larger planets, they may be compelled to change their open curves to ellipses and become comets of short period.2 This is the theory of capture: comets of long periods or of no period are dislodged from their paths to become short-period comets. What the origin of the long-period comets is remains an unanswered question.
The short-period comets apparently have some relation to the larger planets. About fifty comets move between the sun and the orbit of Jupiter; their periods are under nine years. Four comets reach the orbit of Saturn; two comets revolve inside the circle described by Uranus; and nine comets, with an average period of seventy-one years, move within the orbit of Neptune. These comprise the system of the short-period comets as it is known at present. To the last group belongs the Halley comet, which, among the comets of short periods, has the longest period of revolution—about seventy-six years. Then there is a great gap, after which there are comets that require thousands of years before they return to the sun, if they return at all.
The distribution of the short-period comets suggested the idea that they were "captured" by the large planets. This theory has for its support the direct observation that comets are disturbed on their path by the planets.
Another theory of the comets supposes their origin to have been in the sun, but in a manner unlike that conceived of in the tidal theory of the origin of planets. Mighty whirls on the surface of the sun sweep ignited gases into great protuberances; these are observed daily. Matter is driven off from the sun and returns to the sun. It is calculated
2 That planets are able to change the path of a comet is not only known from observation but has even been calculated in advance. In 1758 Clairaut predicted the retardation of Halley's comet, on its first return foretold by Halley, for a period of 618 days, because it had to pass near Jupiter and Saturn. It was retarded for almost the computed length of time. Similarly, the orbits of other comets were occasionally distorted. LexelTs comet was disturbed by Jupiter in 1767 and in 1770
by the earth, D'Arest's comet was disturbed in 1860, Wolf's comet in 1875 and 1922. By an encounter with Jupiter in 1886, Brook's comet changed its period from 29 years to 7 years; the period of Jupiter was not altered by more than two or three minutes, and probably less.
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that if the velocity of the ejection were to exceed 384 miles per second, the speed of motion in a parabola, the matter would not return to the sun but would become a long-range comet. Then the path of the ejected mass might become perturbed as a result of its passage near one of the larger planets, and the comet would become one of a short period.
Birth of a comet in this manner has never been observed, and the probability that matter in explosion may reach a speed of 384 miles per second is highly questionable. It was therefore robin-bobin
supposed alternatively that millions of years ago, when the activity of their gaseous masses was more dynamic, the large planets expelled comets from their bodies. The speed required for the ejected mass to overcome the gravitational pull of the ejecting body is less in the case of the planets than in the case of the sun, owing to their smaller gravitational pull. It is calculated that a mass hurled from Jupiter at a speed of about 38 miles per second, or at only a little more than a third of this velocity in the case of Neptune, would become expelled.
This variant of the theory neglects the question of the origin of the long-period comets. However, an explanation was offered, according to which the large planets throw the comets that pass close to them from their short orbits into elongated ones, or even expel them entirely from the solar system.
When passing close to the sun, comets emit tails. It is assumed that the material of the tail does not return to the comet's head but is dispersed in space; consequently, the comets as luminous bodies must have a limited life. If Halley's comet has pursued its present orbit since late pre-Cambrian times, it must "have grown and lost eight million tails, which seems improbable." 3 If comets are wasted, their number in the solar system must permanently diminish, and no comet of short period could have preserved its tail since geological times.
But as there are many luminous comets of short period, they must have been produced or acquired at some time when other members of the system, the planets and the satellites, were already in their places. A theory has been offered that once the solar system moved through a nebula and obtained its comets there. 3H. N. Russell, The Solar System and Its Origin (1935), p.
40.
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Did the sun emit planets by shrinkage or by tide, and comets by explosion? Did the comets come from interstellar space and were they captured into the solar system by larger planets? Did the larger planets produce the smaller planets by cleavage, or did they expel the short-period comets from their bodies?
It is admitted that we cannot know the truth about the origin of the planetary and cometary systems billions of years ago. "The problem of the origin and development of the solar system suffers from the label 'speculative.' It is frequently said that as we were not there when the system was formed, we cannot legitimately arrive at any idea of how it was formed." * The most we can do, it is believed, is to investigate one planet, the one under our feet, in order to learn its past; and then, by the deductive method, to apply the results to other members of the solar system.
4 Harold Jeffreys, "The Origin of the Solar System" in Internal Constitution of the Earth, B.
Gutenberg, ed. (1939).
CHAPTER 2
The Planet Earth
THE PLANET earth has a stony shell—the lithosphere; it consists of igneous rock, like granite and basalt, with sedimentary rock on top. The igneous rock is the original crust of the earth; sedimentary rock is deposited by water.
The inner composition of the earth is not known. The propagation of seismic waves gives support to the assumption that the shell of the earth is over 2,000 miles thick; on the basis of the gravitational effect of mountain masses (the theory of isostasy), the shell is estimated to be only sixty miles thick.
The presence of iron in the shell or the migration of heavy metals from the core to the shell has not been sufficiently explained. For these metals to have left the core, they must have been ejected by explosions, and in order to remain spread through the crust, the explosions must have been followed immediately by cooling.
If, in the beginning, the planet was a hot conglomerate of elements, as the nebular as well as the tidal theories assume, then the iron of the globe should have become oxidized and combined with all available oxygen. But for some unknown reason this did not take place; thus the presence of oxygen in the terrestrial atmosphere is unexplained.
robin-bobin
The water of the oceans contains a large amount of soluble sodium chloride, common salt.
Sodium might have come from rocks eroded by rain; but rocks are poor in chlorine and the proportion of sodium and chlorine in sea water calls for fifty times more chlorine in the igneous rock than it actually contains.
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The deep strata of igneous rock contain no signs of fossil life. Incased in sedimentary rock are skeletons of marine and land animals, often in many layers one upon the other. Not infrequently igneous rock is found protruding into sedimentary rock or even covering it over large areas, pointing to successive eruptions of igneous rock that became heated and molten after there was life on the earth.
Upon strata which show no signs of fossil life are strata containing shells, and sometimes the shells are so numerous as to constitute the entire mass of the rock. They are often found in the hardest rock. Higher strata contain skeletons of land animals, often of extinct species, and not infrequently, above the strata with the remains of land animals are other strata with marine fauna.
The species of the animals, and even their genera, change with the strata. The strata often assume an oblique position, sometimes being almost vertical; frequently they are faulted and overturned in many ways.
Cuvier (1769-1832), the founder of vertebrate paleontology, or the science of petrified skeletons of animals possessing vertebrae, from fish to man, was much impressed by the picture presented by the sequence of the layers of earth.
"When the traveller passes over these fertile plains where gently flowing streams nourish in their course an abundant vegetation, and where the soil, inhabited by a numerous population, adorned with flourishing villages, opulent cities, and superb monuments, is never disturbed, except by the ravages of war, or by the oppression of the powerful, he is not led to suspect that Nature also has had her intestine wars, and that the surface of the globe has been broken up by revolutions and catastrophes. But his ideas change as soon as he digs into that soil which now presents so peaceful an aspect." 1
Cuvier thought that great catastrophes had taken place on this earth, repeatedly changing sea beds into continents and continents into sea beds. He held that genera and species were unchangeable since Creation; but, observing different animal remains in various levels of earth, he concluded that catastrophes must have annihilated
1 G. Cuvier, Essay on the Theory of the Earth (5th ed., 1827) (English transl. of Discours sur les revolutions de la surface du globe, et sur les changements qu'elles ont produits dans le resne animal).
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life in vast areas, leaving the ground for other forms of life. Where did these other genera come from? Either they were newly created or, more likely they migrated from other parts of the world, which were not at that time also visited by cataclysms.
He could not find the cause of these cataclysms. He saw in their traces "the problem in geology it is of most importance to solve," but he realized that "in order to resolve it satisfactorily, it would be necessary to discover the cause of these events—an undertaking which presents a difficulty of quite a different kind." He knew only of "many fruitless attempts" already made and he did not find himself able to offer a solution. "These ideas have haunted, I may almost say have tormented me during my researches among fossil bones." 2
Cuvier's theory of stabilized forms of life and of annihilating catastrophes was supplanted by a theory of evolution in geology (Lyell) and biology (Darwin). The mountains are what is left of plateaus eroded by wind and water in a very slow process. Sedimentary rock is detritus of igneous rock eroded by rain, then carried to sea, and there slowly deposited. Skeletons of birds and of land animals in these rocks are presumed to have belonged to animals that waded close to the shore of the sea in shallow water, died while wading, and were covered by sediment before fish destroyed the cadavers or the water separated the bones of their skeletons. No widespread robin-bobin
catastrophes disrupted the slow and steady process. The theory of evolution, which can be traced to Aristotle, and which was the teaching of Lamarck in the days of Cuvier and of Darwin after him, has been generally accepted as truth by natural sciences for almost a hundred years.
Sedimentary rock covers high mountains and the highest of all, the Himalayas. Shells and skeletons of sea animals are found there. This means that at some early time fish swam over these mountains. What caused the mountains to rise?
A force pushing from within or pulling from without or twisting on the sides must have elevated the mountains and lifted continents from the bottom of the sea and submerged other land masses.
If we do not know what these forces are, we cannot answer the problem of the origin of the mountains and of continents, wherever 3 Ibid., pp. 240-242.
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The process of raising the mountains is supposed to have been very slow and gradual. On the other hand, it is clear that igneous rock, already hard, had to become fluid in order to penetrate sedimentary rock or cover it. It is not known what initiated this process, but it is asserted that it must have happened long before man appeared on the earth. So when skulls of early man are found in late deposits, or skulls of modern man are found together with bones of extinct animals in early deposits, difficult problems are presented. Occasionally, also, during mining operations, a human skull is found in the middle of a mountain, under a thick cover of basalt or granite, like the Calaveras skull of California.
Human remains and human artifacts of bone, polished stone, or pottery are found under great deposits of till and gravel, sometimes under as much as a hundred feet.
The origin of clay, sand, and gravel on igneous and sedimentary rock, offers a problem. The theory of Ice Ages was put forth (1840) to explain this and other enigmatic phenomena. As far north as Spitzbergen, in the polar circle, at some time in the past, coral reefs were formed, which do not occur except in tropical regions; palms also grew on Spitzbergen. The continent of Antarctica, which today has not a single tree on it, must have been covered at one time by forests, since it has coal deposits.
As we see, the planet earth is full of secrets. We have not come closer to solving the problem of the origin of the solar system by investigating the planet under our feet; on the contrary, we have found many other unsolved problems concerning the lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere of the earth. Shall we be more fortunate if we try to understand the process that caused the changes on the globe in the most recent geological epoch, the time of the last glacial period, a period close to the time which is regarded as historical?
Ice Ages
Not many thousands of years ago, we are taught, great areas of Europe and of North America were covered with glaciers. Perpetual
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on the globe we are faced with it. Here is how the question is put concerning the eastern coast of North America.
"Not long ago in a geological sense, the flat plain from New Jersey to Florida was under the sea.
At that time the ocean surf broke directly on the Old Appalachian Mountains. Previously the southeastern part of the mountain structure had sunk below the sea and become covered with a layer of sand and mud, thickening seaward. The wedgelike mass of marine sediments was then uplifted and cut into by rivers, giving the Atlantic coastal plain of the United States. Why was it uplifted? To the westward are the Appalachians. The geologist tells us of the stressful times when a belt of rocks extending from Alabama to Newfoundland was jammed, thrust together, to make this mountain system. Why? How was it done? In former times the sea flooded the region of the great plains from Mexico to Alaska, and then withdrew. Why this change?" 3
The birth of the Cordilleras—"again the mystery of mountain-making clamors for solution."
And so on all over the world. The Himalayas were under the sea. Now Eurasia is three miles or more above the bottom of the Pacific. Why?
robin-bobin
"The problem of mountain-making is a vexing one: many of them [mountains] are composed of tangentially compressed and over-thrust rocks that indicate scores of miles of circumferential shortening in the Earth's crust. Radial shrinkage is woefully inadequate to cause the observed amount of horizontal compression. Therein lies the real perplexity of the problem of mountain-making. Geologists have not yet found a satisfactory escape from this dilemma." *
Even authors of textbooks confess their ignorance. "Why have sea floors of remote periods become the lofty highlands of today? What generates the enormous forces that bend, break, and mash the rocks in mountain zones? These questions still await satisfactory answers."5
3 R. A. Daly; Our Mobile Earth (1926), p. 90.
4 F. K. Mather, Review of Biography of the Earth by G. Gamovr, Science, Jan. 16, 1942.
5 C. R. Longwell, A. Knopf, and R. F. Flint, A Textbook of Geology (1939), p. 405.
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ice lay not only on the slopes of high mountains, but loaded itself in heavy masses upon continents even in moderate latitudes. Where today the Hudson, the Elbe, and the upper Dnieper flow, there were then frozen deserts. They were like the immense glacier of Greenland that covers that island. There are signs that a retreat of the glaciers was interrupted by a new massing of ice, and that their borders differed at various times. Geologists are able to find the boundaries of the glaciers. Ice moves very slowly, pushing stones before it, and accumulations of stones or moraines remain when the glacier retreats melting away.
Traces have been found of five or six consecutive displacements of the ice sheet during the Ice Age, or of five or six glacial periods. Some force repeatedly pushed the ice sheet toward moderate latitudes. Neither the cause of the ice ages nor the cause of the retreat of the icy desert is known; the time of these retreats is also a matter of speculation.
Many ideas were offered and guesses made to explain how the glacial epochs originated and why they terminated. Some supposed that the sun at different times emits more or less heat, which causes periods of heat and cold on the earth; but no evidence that the sun is such a "variable star"
was adduced to support this hypothesis.
Others conjectured that cosmic space has warmer and cooler areas, and that when our solar system travels through the cooler areas, ice descends upon latitudes closer to the tropics. But no physical agents were found responsible for such hypothetical cold and warm areas in space.
A few wondered whether the precession of the equinoxes or the slow change in the direction of the terrestrial axis might cause periodic variations in the climate. But it was shown that the difference in insolation could not have been great enough to have been responsible for the glacial ages.
Still others thought to find the answer in the periodic variations in the eccentricity of the ecliptic (terrestrial orbit), with glaciation at the maximal eccentricity. Some of them supposed that winter in aphelion, the remotest part of the ecliptic, would cause glaciation; and some thought that summer in aphelion would produce that effect.
22 WORLDS IN COLLISION
Some scholars thought about the changes in the position of the terrestrial axis. If the planet earth is rigid, as it is regarded to be (L. Kelvin), the axis could not have shifted in geological times by more than three degrees (George Darwin); if it were elastic, it could have shifted up to ten or fifteen degrees in a very slow process.
The cause of the ice ages was seen by a few scholars in the decrease of the original heat of the planet; the warm periods between the ice ages were attributed to the heat set free by a hypothetical decomposition of organisms in the strata close to the surface of the ground. The increase and decrease in the action of warm springs were also considered.
Others supposed that dust of volcanic origin filled the terrestrial atmosphere and hindered insolation, or, contrariwise, that an increased content of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere obstructed the reflection of heat rays from the surface of the planet. A decrease in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would cause a fall of temperature (Arrhenius), but calculations were made to show that this could not be the real cause of the glacial ages (Angstrom).
robin-bobin
Changes in the direction of warm currents in the Atlantic Ocean were brought into the discussion, and the Isthmus of Panama was theoretically removed to allow the Gulf Stream to pass into the Pacific at the time of the glacial periods. But it was proved that the two oceans were already divided in the Ice Age; besides, a part of the Gulf Stream would have remained in the Atlantic anyway. The periodic retreats of ice between the glacial periods would have required periodic removal and replacement of the Isthmus of Panama.
Other theories of equally hypothetical nature were proposed; but the phenomena held responsible for the changes have not been proved to have existed, or to have been able to produce the effect.
All the above-mentioned theories and hypotheses fail if they cannot meet a most important condition: In order for ice masses to have been formed, increased precipitation must have taken place. This requires an increased amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, which is the result of increased evaporation from the surface of
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oceans; but this could be caused by heat only. A number of scientists pointed out this fact, and even calculated that in order to produce a sheet of ice as large as that of the Ice Age, the surface of all the oceans must have evaporated to a depth of many feet. Such an evaporation of oceans followed by a quick process of freezing, even in moderate latitudes, would have produced the ice ages. The problem is: What could have caused the evaporation and immediately subsequent freezing? As the cause of such quick alternation of heating and freezing of large parts of the globe is not apparent, it is conceded that "at present the cause of excessive ice-making on the lands remains a baffling mystery, a major question for the future reader of earth's riddles." 1
Not only are the causes of the appearance and later disappearance of the glacial sheet unknown, but the geographical shape of the area covered by ice is also a problem. Why did the glacial sheet, in the southern hemisphere, move from the tropical regions of Africa toward the south polar region and not in the opposite direction, and, similarly, why, in the northern hemisphere, did the ice move in India from the equator toward the Himalaya mountains and the higher latitudes? Why did the glaciers of the Ice Age cover the greater part of North America and Europe, while the north of Asia remained free? In America the plateau of ice stretched up to latitude 40° and even passed across this line; in Europe it reached latitude 50°; while northeastern Siberia, above the polar circle, even above latitude 75°, was not covered with this perennial ice. All hypotheses regarding increased and diminished insolation due to solar alterations or the changing temperature of the cosmic space, and other similar hypotheses, cannot avoid being confronted with this problem.
Glaciers are formed in the regions of eternal snow; for this reason they remain on the slopes of the high mountains. The north of Siberia is the coldest place in the world. Why did not the Ice Age touch this region, whereas it visited the basin of the Mississippi and all Africa south of the equator? No satisfactory solution to this question has been proposed.
1 R. A. Daly, The Changing World of the Ice Age (1934), p. 16.
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The Mammoths
Northeast Siberia, which was not covered by ice in the Ice Age, conceals another enigma. The climate there has apparently changed drastically since the end of the Ice Age, and the yearly temperature has dropped manv degrees below its previous level. Animals once lived in this region that do not live there now, and plants grew there that are unable to grow there now. The change must have occurred quite suddenly. The cause of this Klimasturz has not been explained.
In this catastrophic change of climate and under mysterious circumstances, all the mammoths of Siberia perished.
The mammoth belonged to the family of elephants. Its tusks were sometimes as much as ten feet long. Its teeth were highly developed and their "density" was greater than in any other stage in the evolution of the elephants; apparently they did not succumb in the struggle for survival as an robin-bobin
unfit product of evolution. The extinction of the mammoth is thought to have coincided with the end of the last glacial period.
Tusks of mammoths have been found in large numbers in northeast Siberia; this well-preserved ivorv has been an object of export to China and Europe ever since the Russian conquest of Siberia and was exploited in even earlier times. In modern times the ivory market of the world still found its main source of supply in the tundras of northeast Siberia.
In 1799 the frozen bodies of mammoths were found in these tundras. The corpses were well preserved, and the sledge dogs ate the flesh unharmed. "The flesh is fibrous and marbled with fat" and 'looks as fresh as well frozen beef." 1
What was the cause of their death and the extinction of their race?
Cuvier wrote of the extinction of the mammoths: "Repeated irruptions and retreats of the sea have neither all been slow nor gradual; on the contrary, most of the catastrophes which have occasioned them have been sudden; and this is especially easy to be proved with regard to the last of these catastrophes, that which, by a twofold
1 Observation of D. F. Hertz in B. Digby, The Mammoth (1926), p. 9.
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motion, has inundated, and afterwards laid dry, our present continents, or at least a part of the land which forms them at the present day. In the northern regions it has left the carcasses of large quadrupeds which became enveloped in the ice, and have thus been preserved even to our own times, with their skin, their hair, and their flesh. If they had not been frozen as soon as killed, they would have been decomposed by putrefaction. And, on the other hand, this eternal frost could not previously have occupied the places in which they have been seized by it, for they could not have lived in such a temperature. It was, therefore, at one and the same moment that these animals were destroyed and the country which they inhabited became covered with ice.
This event has been sudden, instantaneous, without any gradation, and what is so clearly demonstrated with respect to this last catastrophe, is not less so with reference to those which have preceded it." 2
The theory of repeated catastrophes annihilating life on this planet and repeated creations or restorations of life, offered by Deluc 3 and expanded by Cuvier, did not convince the scientific world. Like Lamarck before Cuvier, Darwin after him thought that an exceedingly slow evolutional process governs genetics, and that there were no catastrophes interrupting this process of infinitesimal changes. According to the theory of evolution, these minute changes came as a result of adaptation to living conditions in the struggle of the species for survival.
Like the theories of Lamarck and Darwin, which postulate slow changes in animals, with tens of thousands of years required for a minute step in evolution, the geological theories of the nineteenth century, and of the twentieth as well, regard the geological processes as exceedingly slow and dependent on erosion by rain, wind, and tides.
Darwin admitted that he was unable to find an explanation for the extermination of the mammoth, an animal better developed than
2 Cuvier, Essay on the Theory of the Earth, pp. 14-15.
SJ. A. Deluc (1727-1817), Letters on the Physical History of the Earth
(1831).
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the elephant which survived.* But in conformity with the theory of evolution, his followers supposed that a gradual sinking of the land forced the mammoths to the hills, where they found themselves isolated by marshes. However, if geological processes are slow, the mammoths would not have been trapped on the isolated hills. Besides, this theory cannot be true because the animals did not die of starvation. In their stomachs and between their teeth undigested grass and leaves were found. This, too, proves that they died from a sudden cause. Further investigations showed that the leaves and twigs found in their stomachs do not now grow in the regions where the animals died, but far to the south, a thousand or more miles away. It is apparent that the robin-bobin
climate has changed radically since the death of the mammoths; and as the bodies of the animals were found not decomposed but well preserved in blocks of ice, the change in temperature must have followed their death very closely or even caused it.
There remains to be added that after storms in the Arctic, tusks of mammoths are washed up on the shores of arctic islands; this proves that a part of the land where the mammoths lived and were drowned is covered by the Arctic Ocean.
The Ice Age and the Antiquity of Man
The mammoth lived in the age of man. Man pictured it on the walls of caves; remains of men have repeatedly been found in Central Europe together with remains of mammoths; occasionally the settlements of the neolithic man of Europe are found strewn with the bones of mammoths.1
Man moved southward when Europe was covered with ice and returned when the ice retreated.
Historical man witnessed great variation in climate. The mammoth of Siberia, the meat of which is still fresh, is supposed to have been destroyed at
4 See G. F. Kunz, Ivory and the Elephant in Art, in Archaeology, and in Science (1916), p. 236.
1 In Predmost in Moravia a settlement has been excavated in which remnants of a human culture and remains of men were found together with skeletons of eight hundred to one thousand mammoths. Shoulder blades of mammoths were used in the construction of human graves.
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the end of the last glacial period, simultaneously with the mammoths of Europe and Alaska. If this is so, the Siberian mammoth was also the contemporary of a rather modern man. At a time when in Europe, close to the ice sheet, man was still in the later stages of neolithic culture, in the Near and Middle East—the region of the great cultures of antiquity—he may already have progressed well into the metal age. There exists no chronological table of neolithic culture because the art of writing was invented approximately at the advent of the copper—the early—
period of the Bronze Age. It is presumed that the neolithic man of Europe left pictures but no inscriptions, and consequently there are no means of determining the end of the Ice Age in terms of chronology.
Geologists have tried to find the time of the end of the last glacial period by measuring the detritus carried by rivers from the glaciers and the deposits of detritus in lakes. The quantity carried by the Rhone from the glaciers of the Alps and the amount on the bottom of the Lake of Geneva, through which the Rhone flows, were calculated, and from the figures obtained the time and velocity of the retreat of the glacial sheet of the last glacial period were estimated. According to the Swiss scholar Francois Forel, twelve thousand years have passed since the time the ice sheet of the last glacial period began to melt, an unexpectedly low figure, as it was thought that the ice age ended thirty to fifty thousand years ago.
Such calculations suffer from being only indirect evaluations; and since the velocity at which the glacial mud had been deposited in the lakes was not constant and the amount varied, the mud must have assembled on the bottom of a lake at a faster rate in the beginning when the glaciers were larger; and if the Ice Age terminated suddenly,'the deposition of detritus would have been much heavier at first, and there would be little analogy to the accumulation of detritus from the seasonal melting of snow in the Alps. Therefore, the time that has elapsed since the end of the last glacial period must have been even shorter than reckoned.
Geologists regard the Great Lakes of America as having been formed at the end of the Ice Age when the continental glacier retreated and the depressions freed from the glacier became lakes.
In
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the last two hundred years Niagara Falls has retreated from Lake Ontario toward Lake Erie at the rate of five feet annually, washing lown the rocks of the bed of the falls.2 If this process has been going m at the same rate since the end of the last glacial period, about seven thousand years were needed to move Niagara Falls from the mouth of the gorge at Queenston to its present position.
The assumption that the quantity of water moving through the gorge has been uniform since the robin-bobin
end of the Ice Age is the basis of this calculation, and therefore, it was concluded, seven thousand years may constitute "the maximum length of time since the birth of the falls." 3 In the beginning, when immense masses of water were released by the retreat of the continental glacier, the rate of movement of Niagara Falls must have been much more rapid; the time estimate "may need significant reduction," and is sometimes lowered to five thousand years.4 The erosion and sedimentation on the shores and the bottom of Lake Michigan also suggest a lapse of time counted in thousands, but not in tens of thousands, of years. Also the result of paleontological research in America carries evidence which constitutes "a guarantee that before the last period of glaciation, modern man, in the form of that highly developed race, the American Indian, was living on the eastern seaboard of North America" (A. Keith).5 It is assumed that with the advent of the last glacial period the Indians retreated southward, returning to the north when the ice uncovered the ground and when the Great Lakes emerged, the basin of the St. Lawrence was formed, and Niagara Falls began its retreat toward Lake Erie.
If the end of the last glacial period occurred only a few thousand years ago, in historical times or at a time when the art of writing may
2 The recession has been 5 feet per year since 1764; at present it is 2.3 feet on the sides of the horseshoe cataract, but substantially more in the center.
3 G. F. Wright, "The Date of the Glacial Period," The Ice Age in North America and Its Bearing upon the Antiquity of Man (5th ed., 1911).
4 Ibid., p. 539. Cf. also W. Upham in American Geologist, XXVIII, 243, and XXXVI, 28S. He dates the uprise of the St. Lawrence basin 6,000 to 7,000 years ago; the St. Lawrence must have been freed from ice before Niagara Falls could come into full action. Not dissimilar figures were obtained from the retreat of the Falls of St. Anthony on the Mississippi at Minneapolis.
5 Keith thinks that the development of the human skull went through a process of advance and retrogression during exceedingly long ages.
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have been already employed in the centers of ancient civilization, the records written in rocks by nature and the records written by man must give a coordinated picture. Let us, therefore, investigate the traditions and the literary records of ancient man, and compare them with the records of nature.
The World Ages
A conception of ages that were brought to their end by violent changes in nature is common all over the world. The number of ages differs from people to people and from tradition to tradition.
The difference depends on the number of catastrophes that the particular people retained in its memory, or on the way it reckoned the end of an age.
In the annals of ancient Etruria, according to Varro, were records of seven elapsed ages.
Censorinus, an author of the third Christian century and compiler of Varro, wrote that "men thought that different prodigies appeared by means of which the gods notified mortals at the end of each age. The Etruscans were versed in the science of the stars, and after having observed the prodigies with attention, they recorded these observations in their books."*
The Greeks had similar traditions. "There is a period," wrote Censorinus, "called 'the supreme year' by Aristotle, at the end of which the sun, moon, and all the planets return to their original position. This 'supreme year' has a great winter, called by the Greeks kata-klysmos, which means deluge, and a great summer, called by the Greeks ekpyrosis, or combustion of the world. The world, actually, seems to be inundated and burned alternately in each of these epochs."
Anaximenes and Anaximander in the sixth pre-Christian century, and Diogenes of Apollonia in the fifth century, assumed the destruction of the world with subsequent recreation. Heraclitus (-
540 to -475) taught that the world is destroyed in conflagration after every period of 10,800
years. Aristarchus of Samos in the third century be-
1 Censorinus Liber de die natali xviii.
30 WORLDS IN COLLISION
robin-bobin
fore the present era taught that in a period of 2,484 years the earth undergoes two destructions—
of combustion and deluge. The Stoics generally believed in periodic conflagrations by which the world was consumed, to be shaped anew. "This is due to the forces of ever-active fire which exists in things and in the course of long cycles of time resolves everything into itself and out of it is constructed a reborn world" —so Philo presented the notion of the Stoics that our world is refashioned in periodic conflagrations.2 In one such catastrophe the world will meet its ultimate destruction; colliding with another world, it will fall apart into atoms out of which, in a long process, a new earth will be created somewhere in the universe. "Democritus and Epicurus,"
explained Philo, "postulate many worlds, the origin of which they ascribe to the mutual impacts and interlacing of atoms, and their destruction to the counterblows and collisions by the bodies so formed." As this earth goes to its ultimate destruction, it passes through recurring cosmic catastrophes and is re-formed with all that lives on it.
Hesiod, one of the earliest Greek authors, wrote about four ages and four generations of men that were destroyed by the wrath of the planetary gods. The third age was the age of bronze; when it was destroyed by Zeus, a new generation repeopled the earth, and using bronze for arms and tools, they began to use iron, too. The heroes of the Trojan War were of this fourth generation.
Then a new destruction was decreed, and after that came "yet another generation, the fifth, of men who are upon the bounteous earth"—the generation of iron.3 In another work of his, Hesiod described the end of one of the ages. "The life-giving earth crashed around in burning ... all the land seethed, and the Ocean's streams ... it seemed even as if Earth and wide Heaven above came together; for such a mighty crash would have arisen if Earth were being hurled to ruin, and Heaven from on high were hurling her down." 4
Analogous traditions of four expired ages persist on the shores of
2 Philo, On the Eternity of the World (transl. F. H. Colson, 1941), Sec. 8. s Hesiod, Works and Days (transl. H. G. Evelyn-White, 1914), 1. 169. 4 Hesiod, Theogony (transl. Evelyn-White, 1914), 11. 693 ff.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 31
the Bengal Sea and in the highland of Tibet—the present age is the fifth.5
The sacred Hindu book Bhagavata Purana tells of four ages and of pralayas or cataclysms in which, in various epochs, mankind was nearly destroyed; the fifth age is that of the present. The world ages are called Kalpas or Yugas. Each world age met its destruction in catastrophes of conflagration, flood, and hurricane. Ezour Vedam and Bhaga Vedam, sacred Hindu books, keeping to the scheme of four expired ages, differ only in the number of years ascribed to each.6
In the chapter, "World Cycles," in Visuddhi-Magga, it is said that "there are three destructions: the destruction by water, the destruction by fire, the destruction by wind," but that there are seven ages, each of which is separated from the previous one by a world catastrophe.7
Reference to ages and catastrophes is found in Avesta (Zend-Avesta), the sacred scriptures of Mazdaism, the ancient religion of the Persians.8 "Bahman Yast," one of the books of Avesta, counts seven world ages or millennia.9 Zarathustra (Zoroaster), the prophet of Mazdaism, speaks of "the signs, wonders, and perplexity which are manifested in the world at the end of each millennium."10
The Chinese call the perished ages kis and number ten kis from the beginning of the world until Confucius.11 In the ancient Chinese encyclopedia, Sing-li-ta-tsiuen-chou, the general convulsions of na-5E. Moor, The Hindu Pantheon (1810), p. 102; A. von Humboldt, Vues des CordilUres (1816), English transl.: Researches Concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America (1814), Vol. II, pp. 15 ff.
• See C. F. Volney, New Researches on Ancient History (1856), p. 157.
'H. C. Warren, Buddhism in Translations (1896), pp. 320 ff.
8 F. Cumont, "La Fin du monde selon les mages occidentaux," Revue de Vhistoire des religions (1931), p. 50; H. S. Nyberg, Die Religionen des alten Iran (1938), pp. 28 ff.
robin-bobin
» "Bahman Yast" (transl. E. W. West), in Pahlavi Texts (The Sacred Books of the East, ed. F. M. Muller, V [1880]), 191. See W. Bousset, "Die Himmelsreise der Seele," Archiv fiir Religionswissenschaft, IV (1901).
10 "Dinkard," Bk. VIII, Chap. XIV (transl. West), in Pahlavi Texts (The Sacred Books of the East, XXXVII [1892]), 33.
11 H. Murray, J. Crawfurd, and others, An Historical and Descriptive Account of China (2nd ed., 1836), I, 40.
32 WORLDS IN COLLISION
ture are discussed. Because of the periodicity of these convulsions, the span of time between two catastrophes is regarded as a "great year." As during a year, so during a world age, the cosmic mechanism winds itself up and "in a general convulsion of nature, the sea is carried out of its bed, mountains spring out of the ground, rivers change their course, human beings and everything are ruined, and the ancient traces effaced." 12
An old tradition, and a very persistent one, of world ages that went down in cosmic catastrophes was found in the Americas among the Incas,13 the Aztecs, and the Mayas.14 A major part of stone inscriptions found in Yucatan refer to world catastrophes. "The most ancient of these fragments [katuns or calendar stones of Yucatan] refer, in general, to great catastrophes which, at intervals and repeatedly, convulsed the American continent, and of which all nations of this continent have preserved a more or less distinct memory."15 Codices of Mexico and Indian authors who composed the annals of their past give a prominent place to the tradition of world catastrophes that decimated humankind and changed the face of the earth.
In the chronicles of the Mexican kingdom it is said: "The ancients knew that before the present sky and earth were formed, man was already created and life had manifested itself four times."
16
A tradition of successive creations and catastrophes is found in the Pacific—on Hawaii17 and on the islands of Polynesia: there were nine ages and in each age a different sky was above the earth.18 Icelanders, too, believed that nine worlds went down in a succession of ages, a tradition that is contained in the Edda.19
12 G. Schlegel, Uranographie chinoise (1875), p. 740, with reference to Wou-foung.
13 H. B. Alexander, Latin American Mythology (1920), p. 240.
14 Humboldt, Researches, II, 15.
15 C. E. Brasseur de Bourbourg, S'il existe des Sources de Vhistoire primitive du Mexique dans les monuments 4gyptiens, etc. (1864), p. 19.
16 Brasseur, Histoire des nations civilisSes du Mexique (1857-1859), I, 53. « B. B. Dixon, Oceanic Mythology (1916), p. 15.
18 B. W. Williamson, Religious and Cosmic Beliefs of Central Polynesia (1933), I, 89.
19 The Poetic Edda: Voluspa (transl. from the Icelandic by H. A. Bellows, 1923), 2nd stanza.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 33
The rabbinical conception of ages crystallized in the post-Exilic period. Already before the birth of our earth, worlds had been shaped and brought into existence, only to be destroyed in time.
"He made several worlds before ours, but He destroyed them all." This earth, too, was not created at the beginning to satisfy the Divine Plan. It underwent reshaping, six consecutive remoldings. New conditions were created after each of the catastrophes. On the fourth earth lived the generation of the Tower of Babel; we belong to the seventh age. Each of the ages or "earths"
has a name.
Seven heavens were created and seven earths were created: the most removed, the seventh, Eretz; the sixth, Adamah; the fifth, Arka; the fourth, Harabah; the third, Yabbashah; the second, Tevel; and "our own land called Heled, and like the others, it is separated from the foregoing by abyss, chaos, and water."20 Great catastrophes changed the face of the earth. "Some perished by deluge, others were consumed by conflagration," wrote the Jewish philosopher Philo.21
According to the rabbinical authority Rashi, ancient tradition knows of periodic collapses of the firmament, one of which occurred in the days of the Deluge, and which repeated themselves at robin-bobin
intervals of 1,656 years.22 The duration of the world ages varies in Armenian and Arabian traditions.23
The Sun Ages
An oft-repeated occurrence in the traditions of the world ages is the advent of a new sun in the sky at the beginning of every age. The word "sun" is substituted for the word "age" in the cosmogonical traditions of many peoples all over the world.
The Mayas counted their ages by the names of their consecutive suns. These were called Water Sun, Earthquake Sun, Hurricane Sun, Fire Sun. "These suns mark the epochs to which are attributed the various catastrophes the world has suffered."1
Ixtlilxochitl (circa 1568-1648), the native Indian scholar, in his
20 Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews (1925), I. 4, 9-10, 72; V, 1, 10.
21 Philo, Moses, II, x, 53. 22 Commentary to Genesis 11 : 1.
23 See R. Eisler, Weltmantel und Himmelszelt (1910), II, 451. 1 Brasseur, Sources de I'histoire primitive du Mexique, p. 25.
34
WORLDS IN COLLISION
annals of the kings of Tezcuco, described the world ages by the names of "suns." 2 The Water Sun (or Sun of Waters) was the first age, terminated by a deluge in which almost all creatures perished; the Earthquake Sun or age perished in a terrific earthquake when the earth broke in many places and mountains fell. The world age of the Hurricane Sun came to its destruction in a cosmic hurricane. The Fire Sun was the world age that went down in a rain of fire.3
"The nations of Culhua or Mexico," Humboldt quoted G6mara, the Spanish writer of the sixteenth century, "believe according to their hieroglyphic paintings, that, previous to the sun which now enlightens them, four had already been successively extinguished. These four suns are as many ages, in which our species has been annihilated by inundations, by earthquakes, by a general conflagration, and by the effect of destroying tempests." * Every one of the four elements participated in each of the catastrophes; deluge, hurricane, earthquake, and fire gave their names to the catastrophes because of the predominance of one of them in the upheavals.
Symbols of the successive suns are painted on the pre-Columbian literary documents of Mexico.5
"Cinco soles que son edades," or "five suns that are epochs," wrote G6mara in his description of the conquest of Mexico.8 An analogy to this sentence of Gomara may be found in Lucius Ampelius, a Roman author, who, in his book Liber memorialis, wrote: 7 "Soles fuere quinque"
(There were five suns): It is the same belief that Gomara found in the New World.
The Mexican Annals of Cuauhtitlan, written in Nahua-Indian (circa 1570) and based on ancient sources, contains the tradition of seven sun epochs. Chicon-Tonatiuh or "the Seven Suns" is the designation for the world cycles or acts in the cosmic drama.8
The Buddhist sacred book of Visuddhi-Magga contains a chapter
2 Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Obras Histdricas (1891-1892), Vol. II, Historia Chichimeca.
3 Alexander, Latin American Mythology, p. 91.
4 Humboldt, Researches, II, 16. 5 Codex Vaticanus A, plates vii-x. «F. L. de G6mara, Conquista de Mexico (1870 ed.), II, 261.
7 Liber memorialis ix.
8 Brasseur, Histoire des nations civilisies du Mexique, I, 206.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 35
on "World Cycles."9 "There are three destructions: the destruction by water, the destruction by fire, the destruction by wind." After the catastrophe of the deluge, "when now a long period has elapsed from the cessation of the rains, a second sun appeared." In the interim the world was enveloped in gloom. "When this second sun appears, there is no distinction of day and night,"
but "an incessant heat beats upon the world." When the fifth sun appeared, the ocean gradually dried up; when the sixth sun appeared, "the whole world became filled with smoke." "After the robin-bobin
lapse of another long period, a seventh sun appears, and the whole world breaks into flames."
This Buddhist book refers also to a more ancient "Discourse on the Seven Suns."10
The Brahmans called the epochs between two destructions "the great days."11
The Sibylline books recite the ages in which the world underwent destruction and regeneration.
"The Sibyl told as follows: 'The nine suns are nine ages. . . . Now is the seventh sun.'" The Sibyl prophesied two ages yet to come—that of the eighth and of the ninth sun.12
The aborigines of British North Borneo, even today, declare that the sky was originally low, and that six suns perished, and at present the world is illuminated by the seventh sun.13
Seven solar ages are referred to in Mayan manuscripts, in Buddhist sacred books, in the books of the Sibyl. In all quoted sources the "suns" are explained (by the sources themselves) as signifying consecutive epochs, each of which went down in a great, general destruction.
Did the reason for the substitution of the word "sun" for "epoch" by the peoples of both hemispheres lie in the changed appearance of the luminary and in its changed path across the sky in each world age?
9 Warren, Buddhism in Translations, p. 322. 10 Ibid.
11 In the Talmud the "God's day" is equal to a millennium, so also in II Peter 3 : 8.
12 J. Schleifer, "Die Erzahlung der Sibylle. Ein Apokryph nach den karshuni-schen, arabischen und athiopischen Handschriften zu London, Oxford, Paris und Rom," Denkschrijt der Kaiserl.
Akademie der Wiss., Philos.-hist. Klasse (Vienna), LIII (1910).
13 Cf. Dixon, Oceanic Mythology, p. 178.
PART I
Venus
No book, or collection of books, in the history of mankind has had a more attentive reading, a wider circulation, or more diligent investigation than the Old Testament. —R. H. Pfeiffer, Introduction to the Old Testament
CHAPTER 1
The Most Incredible Story
T'HE MOST incredible story of miracles is told about Joshua ben Nun who, when pursuing the Canaanite kings at Beth-horon, implored the sun and the moon to stand still. "And he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day" (Joshua 10:12-13).
This story is beyond the belief of even the most imaginative or the most pious person. Waves of stormy sea may have drowned one host and been merciful to another. The earth could crack asunder and swallow up human beings. The Jordan could be blocked by a slice of its bank falling into the bed of the river. Jericho's walls—not by the blast of trumpets, but by an incidental earthquake—could have been breached.
But that the sun and the moon should halt in their movement across the firmament—this could be only the product of fancy, a poetic image, a metaphor;1 a hideous implausibility when imposed as a subject for belief;2 a matter for scorn—it manifests even a want of reverence for the Supreme Being.
1 "Certainly one could not conceive a more effective flight of fancy, or one more fitted for the heights of one heroic and lyrical composition." G. Schiaparelli, Astronomy in the Old Testament (1905), p. 40.
2 W. Whiston wrote in his New Theory of the Earth (6th ed., 1755), pp. 19-21, 39
40 WORLDS IN COLLISION
According to the knowledge of our age—not of the age when the Book of Joshua or of Jasher was written—this could have happened if the earth had ceased for a time to roll along its robin-bobin
prescribed path. Is such a disturbance conceivable? No record of the slightest confusion is registered in the present annals of the earth. Each year consists of 365 days, 5 hours, and 49
minutes.
A departure of the earth from its regular rotation is thinkable, but only in the very improbable event that our planet should meet another heavenly body of sufficient mass to disrupt the eternal path of our world.
It is true that aerolites or meteorites reach our earth continually, sometimes by the thousands and tens of thousands. But no dislocation of our precise turning round and round has ever been perceived.
This does not mean that a larger body, or a larger number of bodies, could not strike the terrestrial sphere. The large number of asteroids between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter suggests that at some unknown time another planet revolved there; now only these meteorites follow approximately the path along which the destroyed planet circled the sun.
Possibly a comet ran into it and shattered it.
That a comet may strike our planet is not very probable, but the idea is not absurd. The heavenly mechanism works with almost absolute precision; but unstable, their way lost, comets by the thousands, by the millions, revolve in the sky, and their interference may disturb the harmony.
Some of these comets belong to our system. Periodically they return, but not at very exact intervals, owing to the perturbations caused by gravitation toward the larger planets when they fly too close to them. But innumerable other comets, often seen only through the telescope, come flying in from immeasurable spaces of the universe at very great speed, and disappear—possibly forever. Some comets are visible only for hours, some for days or weeks or even months.
concerning the wonder of the sun standing still: "The Scripture did not intend to teach men philosophy, or accommodate itself to the true and Pythagoric system of the world." And again:
"The prophets and holy penmen themselves . . . being seldom or never philosophers, were not capable of representing these things otherwise than they, with the vulgar, understood them."
WORLDS IN COLLISION 41
Might it happen that our earth, the earth under our feet, would roll toward perilous collision with a huge mass of meteorites, a trail of stones flying at enormous speed around and across our solar system? This probability was analyzed with fervor during the last century. From the time of Aristotle, who asserted that a meteorite, which fell at Aegospotami when a comet was glowing in the sky, had been lifted from the ground by the wind and carried in the air and dropped over that place, until the year 1803 when, on April 26, a shower of meteorites fell at 1'Aigle in France and was investigated by Biot for the French Academy of Sciences, the scholarly world—and in the meantime there lived Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Kepler, Newton, and Huygens—did not believe that such a thing as a stone falling from the sky was possible at all. And this despite many occasions when stones fell before the eyes of a crowd, as did the aerolite in the presence of Emperor Maximilian and his court in Ensisheim, Alsace, on November 7, 1492.3
Only shortly before 1803, the Academy of Sciences of Paris refused to believe that, on another occasion, stones had fallen from the sky. The fall of meteorites on July 24, 1790 in southwest France was pronounced "un phenomene physiquement impossible." 4 Since the year 1803, however, scholars have believed that stones fall from the sky. If a stone can collide with the earth, and occasionally a shower of stones, too, cannot a full-sized comet fly into the face of the earth? It was calculated that such a possibility exists but that it is very unlikely to occur.5
If the head of a comet should pass very close to our path, so as to effect a distortion in the career of the earth, another phenomenon besides the disturbed movement of the planet would probably occur:
3 C. P. Olivier, Meteors (1925), p. 4.
4 P. Bertholon, Vubhlicazionl della specola astronomica Vaticana (1913).
5 D. F. Arago computed on some occasion that there is one chance in 280 million that a comet will hit the earth. Nevertheless, a hole one mile in diameter in Arizona is a sign of an actual headlong collision of the earth with a small comet or asteroid. On June 30, 1908, a calculated robin-bobin
forty-Uiousand-ton mass of iron fell in Siberia at 60° 56' north latitude and 101° 57' east longitude. In 1946 the small Giacobini-Zinner comet passed within 131,000 miles of the point where the earth was eight days later.
While investigating whether an encounter between the earth and a comet had
42 WORLDS IN COLLISION
a rain of meteorites would strike the earth and would increase to a torrent. Stones scorched by flying through the atmosphere would be hurled on home and head.
In the Book of Joshua, two verses before the passage about the sun that was suspended on high for a number of hours without moving to the Occident, we find this passage:
>"As they [the Canaanite kings] fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to Beth-horon ... the Lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: they were more which died with hail stones [stones of barad] than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword." 6
The author of the Book of Joshua was surely ignorant of any connection between the two phenomena. He could not be expected to have had any knowledge about the nature of aerolites, about the forces of attraction between celestial bodies, and the like. As these phenomena were recorded to have occurred together, it is improbable that the records were invented.
The meteorites fell on the earth in a torrent. They must have fallen in very great numbers for they struck down more warriors than the swords of the adversaries. To have killed persons by the hundreds or thousands in the field, a cataract of stones must have fallen. Such been the subject of a previous discussion, I found that W. Whiston, Newton's successor at Cambridge and a contemporary of Halley, in his New Theory of the Earth (the first edition of which appeared in 1696) tried to prove that the comet of 1680, to which he (erroneously) ascribed a period of 575K years, caused the biblical Deluge on an early encounter.
G. Cuvier, who was unable to offer his own explanation of the causes of great cataclysms, refers to the theory of Whiston in the following terms: "Whiston fancied that the earth was created from the atmosphere of one comet, and that it was deluged by the tail of another. The heat which remained from its first origin, in his opinion, excited the whole antediluvian population, men and animals, to sin, for which they were all drowned in the deluge, excepting the fish, whose passions were apparently less violent."
I. Donnelly, author, reformer, and member of the United States House of Representatives, tried in his book Ragnarok (1883) to explain the presence of till and gravel on the rock substratum in America and Europe by hypothesizing an encounter with a comet, which rained till on the terrestrial hemisphere facing it at that moment. He placed the event in an indefinite period, but at a time when man already populated the earth. Donnelly did not show any awareness that Whiston was his predecessor. His assumption that there is till only in one half of the earth is arbitrary and wrong. 6 Joshua 10: 11.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 43
a torrent of great stones would mean that a train of meteorites or a comet had struck our planet.
The quotation in the Bible from the Book of Jasher is laconic and may give the impression that the phenomenon of the motionless sun and moon was local, seen only in Palestine between the valley of Ajalon and Gibeon. But the cosmic character of the prodigy is pictured in a thanksgiving prayer ascribed to Joshua:
Sun and moon stood still in heaven,
and Thou didst stand in Thy wrath against our oppressors. . . .
All the princes of the earth stood up,
the kings of the nations had gathered themselves together. . . .
Thou didst destroy them in Thy fury, and Thou didst ruin them in Thy rage.
Nations raged from fear of Thee,
kingdoms tottered because of Thy wrath. . . .
Thou didst pour out Thy fury upon them. . . . Thou didst terrify them in Thy wrath. . . .
The earth quaked and trembled from the noise of Thy thunders.
robin-bobin
Thou didst pursue them in Thy storm,
Thou didst consume them in the whirlwind. . . .
Their carcasses were like rubbish.7
The wide radius over which the heavenly wrath swept is emphasized in the prayer: "All the kingdoms tottered. . . ."
A torrent of large stones coming from the sky, an earthquake, a whirlwind, a disturbance in the movement of the earth—these four phenomena belong together. It appears that a large comet must have passed very near to our planet and disrupted its movement; a part of the stones dispersed in the neck and tail of the comet smote the surface of our earth a shattering blow.
Are we entitled, on the basis of the Book of Joshua, to assume that at some date in the middle of the second millennium before the present era the earth was interrupted in its regular rotation by a comet? Such a statement has so many implications that it should not
1 Ginzberg, Legends, IV, 11-12.
44 WORLDS IN COLLISION
be made thoughtlessly. To this I say that though the implications are great and many, the present research in its entirety is an interlinked sequence of documents and other evidence, all of which in common carry the weight of this and other statements in this book.
The problem before us is one of mechanics. Points on the outer layers of the rotating globe (especially near the equator) move at a higher linear velocity than points on the inner layers, but at the same angular velocity. Consequently, if the earth were suddenly stopped (or slowed down) in its rotation, the inner layers might come to rest (or their rotational velocity might be slowed) while the outer layers would still tend to go on rotating. This would cause friction between the various liquid or semifluid layers, creating heat; on the outermost periphery the solid layers would be torn apart, causing mountains and even continents to fall or rise.
As I shall show later, mountains fell and others rose from level ground; the earth with its oceans and continents became heated; the sea boiled in many places, and rock liquefied; volcanoes ignited and forests burned. Would not a sudden stop by the earth, rotating at a little over one thousand miles an hour at its equator, mean a complete destruction of the world? Since the world survived, there must have been a mechanism to cushion the slowing down of terrestrial rotation, if it really occurred, or another escape for the energy of motion besides transformation into heat, or both. Or if rotation persisted undisturbed, the terrestrial axis may have tilted in the presence of a strong magnetic field, so that the sun appeared to lose for hours its diurnal movement.8 These problems are kept in sight and are faced in the Epilogue of this volume.
On the Other Side of the Ocean
> The Book of Joshua, compiled from the more ancient Book of Jasher, relates the order of events. "Joshua . . . went up from Gilgal all night." In the early morning he fell upon his enemies unawares at Gibeon, and "chased them along the way that goes up to Beth-8 This explanation was suggested to me by M. Abramovich of Tel Aviv.
WORLDS IN COLLISION
45
horon." As they fled, great stones were cast from the sky. That same day ("in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites") the sun stood still over Gibeon and the moon over the valley of Ajalon. It has been noted that this description of the position of the luminaries implies that the sun was in the forenoon position.1 The Book of Joshua says that the luminaries stood in the midst of the sky.
Allowing for the difference in longitude, it must have been early morning or night in the Western Hemisphere.
We go to the shelf where stand books with the historical traditions of the aborigines of Central America.
The sailors of Columbus and Cortes, arriving in America, found there literate peoples who had books of their own. Most of these books were burned in the sixteenth century by the Dominican monks. Very few of the ancient manuscripts survived, and these are preserved in the libraries of robin-bobin
Paris, the Vatican, the Prado, and Dresden; they are called codici, and their texts have been studied and partly read. However, among the Indians of the days of the conquest and also of the following century there were literary men who had access to the knowledge written in pictographic script by their forefathers.2
In the Mexican Annals of Cuauhtitlan 3—the history of the empire of Culhuacan and Mexico, written in Nahua-Indian in the sixteenth century—it is related that during a cosmic catastrophe that occurred in the remote past, the night did not end for a long time.
The biblical narrative describes the sun as remaining in the sky for an additional day ("about a whole day"). The Midrashim, the books of ancient traditions not embodied in the Scriptures, relate that the sun and the moon stood still for thirty-six itim, or eighteen hours,*
1 H. Holzinger, Josua (1901), p. 40, in "Hand-commentar zum Alten Testament," ed. K. Marti.
R. Eisler, "Joshua and the Sun," American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literature, XLH
(1926), 83: "It would have had no sense early in the morning of a battle, with a whole day ahead, to have prayed for the lengthening of the sunlight even into the night time."
2 The Mayan tongue is still spoken by about 300,000 people, but of the Mayan hieroglyphics only the characters employed in the calendar are known for certain.
3 Known also as Codex Chimalpopoca. "This manuscript contains a series of annals of very ancient date, many of which go back to more than a thousand years before the Christian era"
(Brasseur).
*Sefer Ha-Yashar, ed. L. Goldschmidt (1923); Pirkei Rabbi Elieser (Hebrew
46 WORLDS IN COLLISION
and thus from sunrise to sunset the day lasted about thirty hours.
In the Mexican annals it is stated that the world was deprived of light and the sun did not appear for a fourfold night. In a prolonged day or night time could not be measured by the usual means at the disposal of the ancients.5
Sahagun, the Spanish savant who came to America a generation
fter Columbus and gathered the traditions of the aborigines, wrote
that at the time of one cosmic catastrophe the sun rose only a little
way over the horizon and remained there witiiout moving; the moon
also stood still.8
I am dealing with the Western Hemisphere first, because the biblical stories were not known to its aborigines when it was discovered. Also, the tradition preserved by Sahagun bears no trace of having been introduced by the missionaries: in his version there is nothing to suggest Joshua ben Nun and his war against the Canaanite kings; and the position of the sun, only a very little above the eastern horizon, differs from the biblical text, though it does not contradict it.
We could follow a path around the earth and inquire into the various traditions concerning the prolonged night and prolonged day, with sun and moon absent or tarrying at different points along the zodiac, while the earth underwent a bombardment of stones in a world ablaze. But we must postpone this journey. There was more than one catastrophe when, according to the memory of mankind, the earth refused to play the chronometer by undisturbed rotation on its axis. First, we must differentiate the single occurrences of cosmic catastrophes, some of which took place before the one described here, some after it; some of which were of greater extent, and some of lesser.
sources differ as to how long the sun stood still); the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Aboda Zara 25a; Targum Habakkuk 3:11.
B With the exception of the water clock.
6 Bernardino de Sahagun (1499P-1590), Historia general de las cosas de Nueva Espana, new ed. 1938 (5 vols.) and 1946 (3 vols.). French transl. D. Jourdanet and R. Simeon (1880), p. 481.
CHAPTER 2
Fifty-two Years Earlier
robin-bobin
THE PRE-COLUMBIAN written traditions of Central America tell us that fifty-two years before the catastrophe that closely resembles that of the time of Joshua, another catastrophe of world dimensions had occurred.1 It is therefore only natural to go back to the old Israelite traditions, as narrated in the Scriptures, to determine whether they contain evidence of a corresponding catastrophe. i»The time of the Wandering in the Desert is given by the Scriptures as forty years.
Then, for a number of years before the day of the disturbed movement of the earth, the protracted conquest of Palestine went on.2 It seems reasonable, therefore, to ask whether a date fifty-two years before this event would coincide with the time of the Exodus.
In the work Ages in Chaos, I describe at some length the catastrophe that visited Egypt and Arabia. In that work it is explained that the Exodus took place amid a great natural upheaval that terminated the period of Egyptian history known as the Middle Kingdom. There I endeavor to show that contemporary Egyptian documents describe the same disaster accompanied by "the plagues of Egypt," and that the traditions of the Arabian Peninsula relate similar occurrences in this land and on the shores of the Red Sea. In that work I refer also to Beke's idea that Mt. Sinai was a smoking volcano. However, I reveal that "the scope of the catastrophe must 1 These sources will be cited on subsequent pages.
2 According to rabbinical sources, the war of conquest in Palestine lasted fourteen years.
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48 WORLDS IN COLLISION
have exceeded by far the measure of the disturbance which could be caused by one active volcano," and I promise to answer the question: "Of what nature and dimension was this catastrophe, or this series of catastrophes, accompanied by plagues?" and to publish an investigation into the nature of great catastrophes of the past. Both works—the reconstruction of history and the reconstruction of natural history—were conceived within the short interval of half a year; the desire to establish a correct historical chronology before fitting the acts of nature into the periods of human history impelled me to complete Ages in Chaos first.3
I shall employ some of the historical material from the first chapters of Ages in Chaos. There I use it for the purpose of synchronizing events in the histories of the countries around the eastern Mediterranean; here I shall use it to show that the same events took place all around the world, and to explain the nature of these events.
The Red World
^ In the middle of the second millennium before the present era, as I intend to show, the earth underwent one of the greatest catastrophes in its history. A celestial body that only shortly before had become a member of the solar system—a new comet—came very close to the earth. The account of this catastrophe can be reconstructed from evidence supplied by a large number of documents.
The comet was on its way from its perihelion and touched the earth first with its gaseous tail.
Later in this book I shall show that it was about this comet that Servius wrote: "Non igneo sed sanguineo rubore fuisse" (It was not of a flaming but of a bloody redness).
One of the first visible signs of this encounter was the reddening of the earth's surface by a fine dust of rusty pigment. In sea, lake, and river this pigment gave a bloody coloring to the water.
Because of these particles of ferruginous or other soluble pigment, the world turned red.
The Manuscript QuichS of the Mayas tells that in the Western Hemisphere, in the days of a great cataclysm, when the earth quaked
3 In order of publication it will follow the present volume.
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and the sun's motion was interrupted, the water in the rivers turned to blood.1
Aipuwer, the Egyptian eyewitness of the catastrophe, wrote his lament on papyrus: 2 "The river is blood," and this corresponds with the Book of Exodus (7 :20): "All the waters that were in the river were turned to blood." The author of the papyrus also wrote: 'Tlague is throughout the land.
Blood is everywhere," and this, too, corresponds with the Book of Exodus (7 : 21): "There was blood throughout all the land of Egypt."
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vThe presence of the hematoid pigment in the rivers caused the death of fish followed by decomposition and smell. "And the river stank" (Exodus 7:21). "And all the Egyptians digged round about the river for water to drink; for they could not drink of the water of the river"
(Exodus 7:24). The papyrus relates: "Men shrink from tasting; human beings thirst after water,"
and "That is our water! That is our happiness! What shall we do in respect thereof? All is ruin."
. The skin of men and of animals was irritated by the dust, which caused boils, sickness, and the death of cattle— "a very grievous murrain." 3 Wild animals, frightened by the portents in the sky, came close to the villages and cities.4
The summit of mountainous Thrace received the name "Haemus," and Apollodorus related the tradition of the Thracians that the summit was so named because of the "stream of blood which gushed out on the mountain" when the heavenly battle was fought between Zeus and Typhon, and Typhon was struck by a thunderbolt.5 It is said that a city in Egypt received the same name for the same reason.6
1 Brasseur, Histoire des nations civilisees du Mexique, I, 130.
2 A. H. Gardiner, Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage from a hieratic papyrus in Leiden (1909). Its author was an Egyptian named Ipuwer. Hereafter the text will be cited as "Papyrus Ipuwer."
In Ages in Chaos I shall develop evidence to show that this papyrus describes events contemporaneous with the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt and the Exodus. It must have been composed shortly following the catastrophe.
3 Exodus 9 : 3; cf. Papyrus Ipuwer 5:5. 4 Ginzberg, Legends, V, 430. 5 Apollodorus, The Library (transl. J. G. Frazer, 1921), VI.
* Frazer's comment to Apollodorus' Library, I, 50.
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The mythology which personified the forces of the cosmic drama described the world as colored red. In one Egyptian myth the bloody hue of the world is ascribed to the blood of Osiris, the mortally wounded planet god; in another myth it is the blood of Seth or Apopi; in the Babylonian myth the world was colored red by the blood of the slain Tiamat, the heavenly monster.7
The Finnish epos of Kalevala describes how, in the days of the cosmic upheaval, the world was sprinkled with red milk.8 The Altai Tatars tell of a catastrophe when "blood turns the whole world red," and a world conflagration follows.9 The Orphic hymns refer to the time when the heavenly vault, "mighty Olympus, trembled fearfully . . . and the earth around shrieked fearfully, and the sea was stirred [heaped], troubled with its purple waves." 10
v An old subject for debate is: Why is the Red Sea so named? If a sea is called Black or White, that may be due to the dark coloring of the water or to the brightness of the ice and snow. The Red Sea has a deep blue color. As no better reason was found, a few coral formations or some red birds on its shores were proposed as explanations of its name.11
Like all the water in Egypt, the water on the surface of the Sea of the Passage was of a red tint. It appears that Raphael was not mistaken when, in painting the scene of the passage, he colored the water red.
It was, of course, not this mountain or that river or that sea exclusively that was reddened, thus earning the name Red or Bloody, as distinguished from other mountains and seas. But crowds of men, wherever they were, who witnessed the cosmic upheaval and escaped with their lives, ascribed the name Haemus or Red to particular places.
* The Seven Tablets of Creation, ed. L. W. King (1902). 8 Kalevala, Rune 9. 0 U. Holmberg, Finno-Ugric, Siberian Mythology (1927), p. 370.
10 "To Minerva" in Orphic Hymns (transl. A. Buckley), ed. with the Odyssey of Homer (1861).
11 H. S. Palmer, Sinai (1892). Probably at that time the mountainous land of Seir, upon which the Israelites wandered, received the name Edom (Red), and Erythrea (erythraios—red in Greek) its name; Erythrean Sea was in antiquity the name of the Arabian Gulf of the Indian Ocean, applied also to the Red Sea.
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robin-bobin
The phenomenon of "blood" raining from the sky has also been observed in limited areas and on a small scale in more recent times. One of these occasions, according to Pliny, was during the consulship of Manius Acilius and Gaius Porcius.12 Babylonians, too, recorded red dust and rain falling from the sky;13 instances of "bloody rain" have been recorded in divers countries.14 The red dust, soluble in water, falling from the sky in water drops, does not originate in clouds, but must come from volcanic eruptions or from cosmic spaces. The fall of meteorite dust is a phenomenon generally known to take place mainly after the passage of meteorites; this dust is found on the snow of mountains and in polar regions.15
The Hail of Stones
Following the red dust, a "small dust," like "ashes of the furnace," fell "in all the land of Egypt"
(Exodus 9:8), and then a shower of meteorites flew toward the earth. Our planet entered deeper into the tail of the comet. The dust was a forerunner of the gravel. There fell "a very grievous hail, such as has not been in Egypt since its foundations" (Exodus 9 : 18). Stones of "barad," here translated "hail," is, as in most places where mentioned in the Scriptures, the term for meteorites.
We are also informed by Midrashic and Tal-mudic sources that the stones which fell on Egypt were hot;J this fits only meteorites, not a hail of ice.2 In the Scriptures it is said that 12 Pliny. Natural History, ii, 57. Another instance, according to Plutarch, occurred in the reign of Romulus.
13 F. X. Kugler, "Babylonische Zeitordnung" (Vol. II of his Sternkunde und Sterndienst in Babel) (1909-1910), p. 114.
14 D. F. Arago, Astronomie populaire (1854-1857), IV, 209 f.; Abel-Remusat, Catalogue des bolides et des a4rolith.es observes d la Chine et dans les pays voisins (1819), p. 6.
15 It is estimated that approximately one ton of meteorite dust falls daily on the globe.
1 The Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Berakhot 54b; other sources in Ginzberg, Legends, VI, 178.
2 In the Book of Joshua it is said that "great stones" fell from the sky, and then they are referred to as "stones of barad."
"The ancient Egyptian word for 'hail,' ar, is also applied to a driving shower of sand and stones; in the contest between Horus and Set, Isis is described as
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these stones fell "mingled with fire" (Exodus 9 :24), the meaning of which I shall discuss in the following section, and that their fall was accompanied by "loud noises" (kolot), rendered as
"thunder-ings," a translation which is only figurative, and not literally correct, because the word for "thunder" is raam, which is not used here. The fall of meteorites is accompanied by crashes or explosion-like noises, and in this case they were so "mighty," that, according to the Scriptural narrative, the people in the palace were terrified as much by the din of the falling stones as by the destruction they caused (Exodus 9:28).
^>The red dust had frightened the people, and a warning to keep men and cattle under shelter had been issued: "Gather thy cattle and all that thou hast in the field; for upon every man and beast which shall be found in the field, and shall not be brought home, the hailstones shall come down upon them, and they shall die" (Exodus 9 : 19). "And he that regarded not the word of the Lord left his servants and his cattle in the field" (Exodus 9 : 21). >Similarly, the Egyptian eyewitness: "Cattle are left to stray, and there is none to gather them together. Each man fetches for himself those that are branded with his name." 3 Falling stones and fire made the frightened cattle flee.
--»Ipuwer also wrote: "Trees are destroyed," "No fruits, no herbs are found," "Grain has perished on every side," "That has perished which yesterday was seen. The land is left to its weariness like the cutting of flax." 4 In one day fields were turned to wasteland. In the Book of Exodus (9 : 25) it is written: "And the hail [stones of barad] smote every herb of the field, and brake every tree of the field."
The description of such a catastrophe is found in the Visuddhi-Magga, a Buddhist text on the world cycles. "When a world cycle is destroyed by wind . . . there arises in the beginning a cycle-destroying great cloud. . . . There arises a wind to destroy the world cycle, and first it raises a robin-bobin
fine dust, and then coarse dust, and then fine sand, and then coarse sand, and then grit, stones, up to boulders as large
sending upon the latter ar n sa, 'a hail of sand.'" A. Macalister, "Hail," in Hastings, Dictionary of the Bible (1901-1904).
« Papyrus Ipuwer 9 : 2-3. * Ibid., 4 : 14; 6 : 1; 6 : 3; 5 : 12.
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53
... as mighty trees on the hill tops." The wind "turns the ground upside down," large areas "crack and are thrown upwards," "all the mansions on earth" are destroyed in a catastrophe when
"worlds clash with worlds." 5
The Mexican Annals of Cuauhtitlan describe how a cosmic catastrophe was accompanied by a hail of stones; in the oral tradition of the Indians, too, the motif is repeated time and again: In some ancient epoch the sky "rained, not water, but fire and red-hot stones," 8 which is not different from the Hebrew tradition.
Naphtha
Crude petroleum is composed of two elements, carbon and hydrogen. The main theories of the origin of petroleum are:
1. The inorganic theory: Hydrogen and carbon were brought together in the rock formations of the earth under great heat and pressure.
2. The organic theory: Both the hydrogen and carbon which compose petroleum come from the remains of plant and animal life, in the main from microscopic marine and swamp life.
The organic theory implies that the process started after life was already abundant, at least at the bottom of the ocean.1
The tails of comets are composed mainly of carbon and hydrogen gases. Lacking oxygen, they do not burn in flight, but the inflammable gases, passing through an atmosphere containing oxygen, will be set on fire. If carbon and hydrogen gases, or vapor of a composition of these two elements, enter the atmosphere in huge masses, a part of them will burn, binding all the oxygen available at the moment; the
6 "World Cycles," Visuddhi-Magga, in Warren, Buddhism in Translations, p. 328. 6 Alexander, Latin American Mythology, p. 72.
1 Even before Plutarch the problem of the origin of petroleum was much discussed. Speaking of the visit of Alexander to the petroleum sources of Iraq, Plutarch said: 'There has been much discussion about the origin of [this naphtha]." But in the extant text of Plutarch a sentence containing one of two rival views is missing. The remaining text reads: ". . . or whether rather the liquid substance that feeds the flame flows out from the soil which is rich and productive of fire."
Plutarch, Lives (transl. B. Perrin, 1919), "The Life of Alexander," xxv.
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rest will escape combustion, but in swift transition will become liquid. Falling on the ground, the substance, if liquid, would sink into the pores of the sand and into clefts between the rocks; falling on water, it would remain floating if the fire in the air is extinguished before new supplies of oxygen arrive from other regions.
The descent of a sticky fluid which came earthward and blazed with heavy smoke is recalled in the oral and written traditions of the inhabitants of both hemispheres.
Popol-Vuh, the sacred book of the Mayas, narrates: 2 "It was ruin and destruction . . . the sea was piled up ... it was a great inundation . . . people were drowned in a sticky substance raining from the sky. . . . The face of the earth grew dark and the gloomy rain endured days and nights. . . .
And then there was a great din of fire above their heads." The entire population of the land was annihilated.
The Manuscript Quiche perpetuated the picture of the population of Mexico perishing in a downpour of bitumen: 3 "There descended from the sky a rain of bitumen and of a sticky substance. . . . The earth was obscured and it rained day and night. And men ran hither and thither and were as if seized by madness; they tried to climb to the roofs, and the houses crashed robin-bobin
down; they tried to climb the trees, and the trees cast them far away; and when they tried to escape in caves and caverns, these were suddenly closed."
A similar account is preserved in the Annals of Cuauhtitlan.* The age which ended in the rain of fire was called Quiauh-tonatiuh, which means "the sun of fire-rain." 5
And far away, in the other hemisphere, in Siberia, the Voguls carried down through the centuries and millennia this memory: "God sent a sea of fire upon the earth. . . . The cause of the fire they call 'the fire-water.'" 6
Half a meridian to the south, in the East Indies, the aboriginal
2 Popol-Vuh, le livre sacrS, ed. Brasseur (1861), Chap. Ill, p. 25.
3 Brasseur, Histoire des nations civilis6es du Mexique, I, 55.
4 Brasseur, Sources de I'histoire primitive du Mexique, p. 28.
5 E. Seler, Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur amerikanischen Sprach- und Alter-tumsgeschichte (1902-1923), II, 798.
6 Holmberg, Finno-Ugric, Siberian Mythology, p. 368.
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tribes relate that in the remote past Sengle-Das or "water of fire" rained from the sky; with very few exceptions, all men died.7 NThe eighth plague as described in the Book of Exodus was
"harad [meteorites] and fire mingled with the barad, very grievous, such as there was none like it in all the land of Egypt since it became a nation" (Exodus 9 : 24). There were "thunder [correct: loud noises] and barad, and the fire ran along upon the ground" (Exodus 9 : 23).
The Papyrus Ipuwer describes this consuming fire: "Gates, columns, and walls are consumed by fire. The sky is in confusion."8 The papyrus says that this fire almost "exterminated mankind."
The Midrashim, in a number of texts, state that naphtha, together with hot stones, poured down upon Egypt. "The Egyptians refused to let the Israelites go, and He poured out naphtha over them, burning blains [blisters]." It was "a stream of hot naphtha." 9 Naphtha is petroleum in Aramaic and Hebrew.
The population of Egypt was "pursued with strange rains and hails and showers inexorable, and utterly consumed with fire: for what was most marvelous of all, in the water which quencheth all things the fire wrought yet more mightily," 10 which is the nature of burning petroleum; in the register of the plagues in Psalms 105 it is referred to as "flaming fire," and in Daniel (7 :10) as
"river of fire" or "fiery stream."
- In the Passover Haggadah it is said that "mighty men of Pul and Lud [Lydia in Asia Minor]
were destroyed with consuming conflagration on the Passover."
In the valley of the Euphrates the Babylonians often referred to "the rain of fire," vivid in their memory.11
All the countries whose traditions of fire-rain I have cited actually
7 Ibid., p. 369. Also A. Nottrott, Die Gosnerische Mission unter den Kohls (1874). p. 25. See R.
Andree, Die Flutsagen (1891).
8 Papyrus Ipuwer 2 : 10; 7 : 1; 11 : 11; 12 : 6.
9 Midrash Tanhuma, Midrash Psikta Raboti, and Midrash Wa-Yosha. For other sources see Ginzberg, Legends, II, 342-343, and V, 426.
10 The Wisdom of Solomon (transl. Holmes. 1913) in The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, ed. R. H. Charles.
11 See A. Schott, "Die Vergleiche in den Akkadischen Konigsinschriften," Mitt. d. Vorderasiat.
Ges., XXX (1925), 89, 106.
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have deposits of oil: Mexico, the East Indies, Siberia, Iraq, and
Egypt.
For a span of time after the combustive fluid poured down, it may well have floated upon the surface of the seas, soaked the surface of the ground, and caught fire again and again. "For seven winters and summers the fire has raged ... it has burnt up the earth," narrate the Voguls of Siberia.12
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The story of the wandering in the desert contains a number of references to fire springing out of the earth. The Israelites traveled three days' journey away from the Mountain of the Lawgiving, and it happened that "the fire of the Lord burnt among them, and consumed them that were in the uttermost parts of the camp" (Numbers 11:1). The Israelites continued on their way. Then came the revolt of Korah and his confederates. "And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up. . . . And all Israel that were round about them fled at the cry of them. . . . And there came out a fire from the Lord, and consumed the two hundred and fifty men that offered incense." 13
When they kindled the fire of incense, the vapors which rose out of the cleft in the rock caught the flame and exploded.
Unaccustomed to handling this oil, rich in volatile derivatives, the Israelite priests fell victims to the fire. The two elder sons of Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, "died before the Lord, when they offered strange fire before the Lord, in the wilderness of Sinai."14 The fire was called strange because it had not been known before and because it was of foreign origin.
If oil fell on the desert of Arabia and on the land of Egypt and burned there, vestiges of conflagration must be found in some of the tombs built before the end of the Middle Kingdom, into which the oil or some of its derivatives might have seeped.
We read in the description of the tomb of Antefoker, vizier of Sesostris I, a pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom: "A problem is set us
12 Holmberg, Finno-Ugric, Siberian Mythology, p. 369. 18 Numbers 16 : 32-35. Cf. Psalms 106
: 17-18. 14 Numbers 3 : 4; cf. Numbers 26 : 61.
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by a conflagration, clearly deliberate, which has raged in the tomb, as in many another. . . . The combustible material must not only have been abundant, but of a light nature; for a fierce fire which speedily spent itself seems alone able to account for the fact that tombs so burnt remain absolutely free from blackening, except in the lowest parts; nor are charred remains found as a rule. The conditions are puzzling."15
"And what does natural history tell us?" asked Philo in his On the Eternity of the World,16 and answered: "Destructions of things on earth, destructions not of all at once but of a very large number, are attributed by it to two principal causes, the tremendous onslaughts of fire and water.
These two visitations, we are told, descend in turns after very long cycles of years. When the agent is the conflagration, a stream of heaven-sent fire pours out from above and spreads over many places and overruns great regions of the inhabited earth."
The rain of fire-water contributed to the earth's supply of petroleum; rock oil in the ground appears to be, partly at least, "star oil" brought down at the close of world ages, notably the age that came to its end in the middle of the second millennium before the present era.
The priests of Iran worshiped the fire that came out of the ground. The followers of Zoroastrianism or Mazdaism are also called fire worshipers. The fire of the Caucasus was held in great esteem by all the inhabitants of the adjacent lands. Connected with the Caucasus and originating there is the legend of Prometheus.17 He was chained to a rock for bringing fire to man. The allegorical character of this legend gains meaning when we consider Augustine's words that Prometheus was a contemporary of Moses.18
Torrents of petroleum poured down upon the Caucasus and were consumed. The smoke of the Caucasus fire was still in the imaginative
15 N. de Garis Davies, The Tomb of Antefoker, Vizier of Sesostris I (1920), p. 5.
i« On the Eternity of the World, Vol. IX of Philo (transl. F. H. Colson, 1941), Sect. 146-147.
17 See A. Olrik, Ragnarok (German ed., 1922).
is The City of God, Bk. XVIII, Chap. 8. (transl. M. Dods, ed. P. Schaff, 1907).
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sight of Ovid, fifteen centuries later, when he described the burning of the world.
robin-bobin
The continuing fires in Siberia, the Caucasus, in the Arabian desert, and everywhere else were blazes that followed the great conflagration of the days when the earth was caught in vapors of carbon and hydrogen.
In the centuries that followed, petroleum was worshiped, burned in holy places; it was also used for domestic purposes. Then many ages passed when it was out of use. Only in the middle of the last century did man begin to exploit this oil, partly contributed by the comet of the time of the Exodus. He utilized its gifts, and today his highways are crowded with vehicles propelled by oil.
Into the heights rose man, and he accomplished the age-old dream of flying like a bird; for this, too, he uses the remnants of the intruding star that poured fire and sticky vapor upon his ancestors.
The Darkness
The earth entered deeper into the tail of the onrushing comet and approached its body. This approach, if one is to believe the sources, was followed by a disturbance in the rotation of the earth. Terrific hurricanes swept the earth because of the change or reversal of the angular velocity of rotation and because of the sweeping gases, dust, and cinders of the comet.
Numerous rabbinical sources describe the calamity of darkness; the material is collated as follows: x
An exceedingly strong wind endured seven days. All the time the land was shrouded in darkness.
"On the fourth, fifth, and sixth days, the darkness was so dense that they [the people of Egypt]
could not stir from their place." "The darkness was of such a nature that it could not be dispelled by artificial means. The light of the fire was either extinguished by the violence of storm, or else it was made invisible and swallowed up in the density of the darkness. . . . Nothing could be discerned. . . . None was able to speak or to hear, nor could anyone venture to take food, but they lay themselves down 1 Ginzberg, Legends, II, 360.
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, . . their outward senses in a trance. Thus they remained, overwhelmed by the affliction."
The darkness was of such kind that "their eyes were blinded by it and their breath choked"; 2 it was "not of ordinary earthy kind." 3 The rabbinical tradition, contradicting the spirit of the Scriptural narrative, states that during the plague of darkness the vast majority of the Israelites perished and that only a small fraction of the original Israelite population of Egypt was spared to leave Egypt. Forty-nine out of every fifty Israelites are said to have perished in this plague.4 wA shrine of black granite found at el-Arish on the border of Egypt and Palestine bears a long inscription in hieroglyphics. It reads: "The land was in great affliction. Evil fell on this earth. . . .
There was a great upheaval in the residence. . . . Nobody could leave the palace [there was no exit from the palace] during nine days, and during these nine days of upheaval there was such a tempest that neither men nor gods [the royal family] could see the faces of those beside them." 5
This record employs the same description of the darkness as Exodus 10 : 22: "And there was a thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days. They saw not one another, neither rose any from his place for three days."
The difference in the number of the days (three and nine) of the darkness is reduced in the rabbinical sources, where the time is given as seven days. The difference between seven and nine days is negligible if one considers the subjectivity of the time estimation under such conditions.
Appraisal of the darkness with respect to its impenetrability is also subjective; rabbinical sources say that for part of the time there was a very slight visibility, but for the rest (three days) there was no visibility at all.
2 Josephus, Jewish Antiquities (transl. H. St. J. Thackeray, 1930), Bk. II, xiv. 5.
3 Ginzberg, Legends, II, 359.
4 Targum Yerushalmi, Exodus 10 : 23; Mekhilta (Frabbi Simon ben Jokhai (1905), p. 38.
5 F. L. Griffith. The Antiquities of Tel-el-Yahudiyeh and Miscellaneous Work in Lower Egypt in 1887-88 (1890); G. Goyon, '"Les Travaux de Chou et les tribulations de Geb d'apres Le Naos 2248 d'Ismailia," Kemi, Revue de Philol. et d'arch. egypt. (1936).
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robin-bobin
It should be kept in mind that, as in the case I have already discussed, a day and a night of darkness or light can be described as one day or as two days.
^ That both sources, the Hebrew and the Egyptian, refer to the same event can be established by another means also. Following the prolonged darkness and the hurricane, the pharaoh, according to the hieroglyphic text of the shrine, pursued the "evil-doers" to "the place called Pi-Khiroti."
The same place is mentioned in Exodus 14:9: "But the Egyptian pursued after them, all the horses and chariots of Pharaoh . . . and overtook them encamping by the sea, beside Pi-ha-khiroth." •
*VThe inscription on the shrine also narrates the death of the pharaoh during this pursuit under exceptional circumstances: "Now when the Majesty fought with the evil-doers in this pool, the place of the whirlpool, the evil-doers prevailed not over his Majesty. His Majesty leapt into the place of the whirlpool." This is the same apotheosis described in Exodus 15 :19: "For the horse of Pharaoh went in with his chariots and with his horsemen into the sea, and the Lord brought again the waters of the sea upon them." *-If "the Egyptian darkness" was caused by the earth's stasis or tilting of its axis, and was aggravated by a thin cinder dust from the comet, then the entire globe must have suffered from the effect of these two concurring phenomena; in either the eastern or the western parts of the world there must have been a very extended, gloomy day.
Nations and tribes in many places of the globe, to the south, to the north, and to the west of Egypt, have old traditions about a cosmic catastrophe during which the sun did not shine; but in some parts of the world the traditions maintain that the sun did not set for a period of time equal to a few days.
Tribes of the Sudan to the south of Egypt refer in their tales to a time when the night would not come to an end.7
Kalevala, the epos of the Finns, tells of a time when hailstones of
8 The syllable ha is the definite article in Hebrew and in this case belongs between "Pi" and
"Khiroth." 7 L. Frobenius, Dichten und Denken im Sudan (1925), p. 38.
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iron fell from the sky, and the sun and the moon disappeared (were stolen from the sky) and did not appear again; in their stead, after a period of darkness, a new sun and a new moon were placed in the sky.8 Caius Julius Solinus writes that "following the deluge which is reported to have occurred in the days of Ogyges, a heavy night spread over the globe." 9
In the manuscripts of Avila and Molina, who collected the traditions of the Indians of the New World, it is related that the sun did not appear for five days; a cosmic collision of stars preceded the cataclysm; people and animals tried to escape to mountain caves. "Scarcely had they reached there when the sea, breaking out of bounds following a terrifying shock, began to rise on the Pacific coast. But as the sea rose, filling the valleys and the plains around, the mountain of Ancasmarca rose, too, like a ship on the waves. During the five days that this cataclysm lasted, the sun did not show its face and the earth remained in darkness." 10
Thus the traditions of the Peruvians describe a time when the sun did not appear for five days. In the upheaval, the earth changed its profile, and the sea fell upon the land.11
East of Egypt, in Babylonia, the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh [Gilgamish] refers to the same events. From out the horizon rose a dark cloud and it rushed against the earth; the land was shriveled by the heat of the flames. "Desolation . . . stretched to heaven; all that was bright was turned into darkness. . . . Nor could a brother distinguish his brother. . . . Six days . . . the hurricane, deluge, and tempest continued sweeping the land . . . and all human back to its clay was returned." 12
The Iranian book Anugita reveals that a threefold day and three-
8 Kalevala (transl. J. M. Crawford, 1888), p. xiii.
* Caius Julius Solinus, Polyhistor. French transl. by M. A. Agnant, 1847, Chap, xi, reads: "a heavy night spread over the globe for nine consecutive days." Other translators render: "nine consecutive months."
10 Brasseur. Sources de Vhistoire primitive du Mexique, p. 40.
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11 Andree, Die Flutsagen, p. 115.
12 The Epic of Gilgamish (transl. R. C. Thompson, 1928).
62 WORLDS IN COLLISION
fold night concluded a world age,13 and the book Bundahis, in a context that I shall quote later and that shows a close relation to the events of the cataclysm I describe here, tells of the world being dark at midday as though it were in deepest night: it was caused, according to the Bundahis, by a war between the stars and the planets.14
A protracted night, deepened by the onrushing dust sweeping in from interplanetary space, enveloped Europe, Africa, and America, the valleys of the Euphrates and the Indus also. If the earth did not stop rotating but slowed down or was tilted, there must have been a longitude where a prolonged day was followed by a prolonged night. Iran is so situated that, if one is to believe the Iranian tradition, the sun was absent for a threefold day, and then it shone for a threefold day. Farther to the east there must have been a protracted day corresponding to the protracted night in the west.
According to "Bahman Yast," at the end of a world age in eastern Iran or in India the sun remained ten days visible in the sky.
In China, during the reign of the Emperor Yahou, a great catastrophe brought a world age to a close. For ten days the sun did not set.15 The events of the time of the Emperor Yahou deserve close examination; I shall return to the subject shortly.16
Earthquake
-- The earth, forced out of its regular motion, reacted to the close approach of the body of the comet: a major shock convulsed the lithosphere, and the area of the earthquake was the entire globe. -. Ipuwer witnessed and survived this earthquake. "The towns are destroyed. Upper Egypt has become waste. . . . All is ruin." "The
13 "The Anugita" (transl. K. T. Telang, 1882) in Vol. VIII of The Sacred Books of the East.
" "The Bundahis" in Pahlavi Texts (transl. E. W. West) (The Sacred Books of the East, V
[1880]), Pt. I, p. 17. is Cf. "Yao," Universal Lexicon (1732-1754), Vol. LX.
i6 The way the Egyptians estimated the time the sun was not in the sky must have been similar to the Chinese method of estimation. It is very probable that these peoples reckoned the disturbance as lasting five days and five nights (because a ninefold or tenfold period elapsed from one sunrise or sunset to the other).
WORLDS IN COLLISION 63
residence is overturned in a minute."1 Only an earthquake could have overturned the residence in a minute. The Egyptian word for "to overturn" is used in the sense of "to overthrow a wall." 2
This was the tenth plague. "And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead" (Exodus 12:30). Houses fell, smitten by one violent blow. "[The angel of the Lord] passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, when he smote the Egyptians, and delivered our houses" (Exodus 12:27). Nogaf, meaning "smote," is the word used for a very violent blow, as, for instance, goring by the horns of an ox. The Passover Haggadah says: "The firstborn of the Egyptians didst Thou crush at midnight."
. The reason why the Israelites were more fortunate in this plague than the Egyptians probably lies in the kind of material of which their dwellings were constructed. Occupying a marshy district and working on clay, the captives must have lived in huts made of clay and reeds, which are more resilient than brick or stone. "The Lord will pass over the door, and will not suffer the destroyer to come and smite your houses." 3 An example of the selective action of a natural agent upon various kinds of construction is narrated also in Mexican annals. During a catastrophe accompanied by hurricane and earthquake, only the people who lived in small log cabins remained uninjured; the larger buildings were swept away. "They found that those who lived in small houses had escaped, as well as the newly-married couples, whose custom it was to live for a few years in cabins in front of those of their fathers-in-law."4
robin-bobin
In Ages in Chaos (my reconstruction of ancient history), I shall show that "first-born" (bkhor) in the text of the plague is a corruption of "chosen" (bchor). All the flower of Egypt succumbed in the catastrophe.
1 Papyrus Ipuwer 2 : 11; 3 : 13.
2 Gardiner's commentary to Papyrus Ipuwer.
3 Exodus 12 : 23. The King James version, "will not suffer the destroyer to come in unto your houses to smite you," is not correct.
4 Diego de Landa. Yucatan, before and after the Conquest (transl. W. Gates, 1937), p. 18.
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-VTorsooth: The children of princes are dashed against the walls . . . the children of princes are cast out in the streets"; "the prison is ruined," wrote Ipuwer,5 and this reminds us of princes in palaces and captives in dungeons who were victims in the disaster (Exodus 12:29).
To confirm my interpretation of the tenth plague as an earthquake, which should be obvious from the expression, "to smite the houses," I find a corroborating passage of Artapanus in which he describes the last night before the Exodus, and which is quoted by Eusebius: There was "hail and earthquake by night, so that those who fled from the earthquake were killed by the hail, and those who sought shelter from the hail were destroyed by the earthquake. And at that time all the houses fell in, and most of the temples." 6
Also, Hieronymus (St. Jerome) wrote in an epistle that "in the night in which Exodus took place, all the temples of Egypt were destroyed either by an earthshock or by the thunderbolt." 7
Similarly in the Midrashim: "The seventh plague, the plague of barad [meteorites] : earthquake, fire, meteorites." 8 It is also said that the structures which were erected by the Israelite slaves in Pithom and Ramses collapsed or were swallowed by the earth.9 An inscription which dates from the beginning of the New Kingdom refers to a temple of the Middle Kingdom that was
"swallowed by the ground" at the close of the Middle Kingdom.10
The head of the celestial body approached very close, breaking through the darkness of the gaseous envelope, and according to the Midrashim, the last night in Egypt was as bright as the noon on the day of the summer solstice.11
5 Papyrus Ipuwer 5:6; 6 : 12.
• Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel (transl. E. H. Gifford, 1903), Bk. IX, Chap, xxvii.
?Cf. S. Bochart, Hierozoicon (1675), I, 344.
8 The Mishna of Rabbi Eliezer, ed. H. G. Enelow (1933).
9 Ginzberg, Legends, II, 241. Pithom was excavated by E. Naville (The Store-City of Pithom and the Route of the Exodus [1885]), but he did not dig beneath the layer of the New Kingdom.
10 The inscription of Queen Hatshepsut at Speos Artemidos, J. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Vol. II, Sec. 300.
ii Zohar ii, 38a-38b.
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/XThe population fled. "Men flee. . . . Tents are what they make like the dwellers of hills," wrote Ipuwer.12 The population of a city destroyed by an earthquake usually spends the nights in the fields. The Book of Exodus describes a hurried flight from Egypt on the night of the tenth plague; a "mixed multitude" of non-Israelites left Egypt together with the Israelites, who spent their first night in Sukkoth (huts).13
^"The lightnings lightened the world: the earth trembled and shook. . . . Thou leddest thy people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron." 14 They were brought out of Egypt by a portent which looked like a stretched arm—"by a stretched out arm and by great terrors," or "with a mighty hand, and with an outstretched arm, and with great terribleness, and with signs, and with wonders." 15
"13"
"At midnight" all the houses of Egypt were smitten; "there was not a house where there was not one dead." This happened on the night of the fourteenth of the month Aviv (Exodus 12:6; 13:4).
robin-bobin
This is the night of Passover. It appears that the Israelites originally celebrated Passover on the eve of the fourteenth of Aviv.
The month Aviv is called "the first month" (Exodus 12:18). Thout was the name of the first month of the Egyptians. What, for the Israelites, became a feast, became a day of sadness and fasting for the Egyptians. "The thirteenth day of the month Thout [is] a very bad day. Thou shalt not do anything on this day. It is the day of the combat which Horus waged with Seth."1
The Hebrews counted (and still count) the beginning of the day from sunset; 2 the Egyptians reckoned from sunrise.3 As the catastrophe took place at midnight, for the Israelites it was the fourteenth day of the (first) month; for the Egyptians it was the thirteenth day.
12 Papyrus Ipuwer 10 : 2. 13 Exodus 12 : 37-38. " Psalms 77 : 18, 20. 15 Deuteronomy 4
: 34; 26 : 8.
!\V. Max Miiller, Egyptian Mythology (1918), p. 126. 2 Leviticus 23 : 32. 3 K. Sethe, "Die agyptische Zeitrechnung" (Gottingen Ges. d. Wiss., 1920), pp. 130 ff.
66
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An earthquake caused by contact or collision with a comet must be felt simultaneously all around the world. An earthquake is a phenomenon that occurs from time to time; but an earthquake accompanying an impact in the cosmos would stand out and be recalled as a memorable date by survivors.
In the calendar of the Western Hemisphere, on the thirteenth day of the month, called olin,
"motion" or "earthquake," 4 a new sun is said to have initiated another world age.5 The Aztecs, like the Egyptians, reckoned the day from sunrise.6
Here we have, en passant, the answer to the open question concerning the origin of the superstition which regards the number 13, and especially the thirteenth day, as unlucky and inauspicious. It is still the belief of many superstitious persons, unchanged through thousands of years and even expressed in the same terms: "The thirteenth day is a very bad day. You shall not do anything on this day."
I do not think that any record of this belief can be found dating from before the time of the Exodus. The Israelites did not share this superstition of the evil-working number thirteen (or fourteen).
* See Codex Vaticanus No. 3773 (B), elucidated by E. Seler (1902-1903). 5 Seler, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, II, 798, 800.
8 L. Ideler, Historische Untersuchungen iiber die astronomischen Beobachtungen der Alien (1806), p. 26.
CHAPTER 3
The Hurricane
THE SWIFT shifting of the atmosphere under the impact of the gaseous parts of the comet, the drift of air attracted by the body of the comet, and the rush of the atmosphere resulting from inertia when the earth stopped rotating or shifted its poles, all contributed to produce hurricanes of enormous velocity and force and of worldwide dimensions.
Manuscript Troano and other documents of the Mayas describe a cosmic catastrophe during which the ocean fell on the continent, and a terrible hurricane swept the earth 1 The hurricane broke up and carried away all towns and all forests.2 Exploding volcanoes, tides sweeping over mountains, and impetuous winds threatened to annihilate humankind, and actually did annihilate many species of animals. The face of the earth changed, mountains collapsed, other mountains grew and rose over the onrushing cataract of water driven from oceanic spaces, numberless rivers lost their beds, and a wild tornado moved through the debris descending from the sky. The end of the world age was caused by Hurakan, the physical agent that brought darkness and swept away houses and trees and even rocks and mounds of earth. From this name is derived
"hurricane," the word we use for a strong wind. Hurakan destroyed the major part of the human race. In the darkness swept by wind, resinous stuff fell
1 Brasseur, Manuscrit Troano (1869), p. 141.
robin-bobin
2 In the documents of the collection of Kingsborough. the writings of G6mara, Mitolinia, Sahagun, Landa, Cogolludo, and other authors of the early postcon-quest time, the cataclysm of deluge, hurricane, and volcanoes is referred to ir numerous passages. See, e.g., Gomara, Conquista de Mexico, II, pp. 261 ff.
67
68 WORLDS IN COLLISION
from the sky and participated with fire and water in the destruction of the world.3 For five days, save for the burning naphtha and burning volcanoes, the world was dark, since the sun did not appear.
The theme of a cosmic hurricane is reiterated time and again in the Hindu Vedasand in the Persian Avesta* and diluvium venti, the deluge of wind, is a term known from many ancient authors.5 In the Section, "The Darkness," I quoted rabbinical sources on the "exceedingly strong west wind" that endured for seven days when the land was enveloped in darkness, and the hieroglyphic inscription from el-Arish about "nine days of upheaval" when "there was such a tempest" that nobody could leave the palace or see the faces of those beside him, and the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh which says that "six days and a night . . . the hurricane, deluge, and tempest continued sweeping the land," and mankind perished almost altogether. In the battle of the planet-god Marduk with Tia-mat, "he [Marduk] created the evil wind, and the tempest, and the hurricane, and the fourfold wind, and the sevenfold wind, and the whirlwind, and the wind which had no equal." 6
The Maoris narrate7 that amid a stupendous catastrophe "the mighty winds, the fierce squalls, the clouds, dense, dark, fiery, wildly drifting, wildly bursting," rushed on creation, in their midst Tawhiri-ma-tea, father of winds and storms, and swept away giant forests and lashed the waters into billows whose crests rose high like mountains. The earth groaned terribly, and the ocean fled.
"The earth was submerged in the ocean but was drawn by Tefaafa-nau," relate the aborigines of Paumotu in Polynesia. The new isles "were bated by a star." In the month of March the Polynesians celebrate a god, Taafanua.8 "In Arabic, Tyfoon is a whirlwind and Tufan is the Deluge; and the same word occurs in Chinese as
3 Popol-Vuh, Chap. III. * Cf. A. J. Carnoy, Iranian Mythology (1917).
5 Cf. Eisler, Weltmantel und Himmelszelt, II, 453. The Talmud also occasionally uses the notion of "cosmic wind." The Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Berakhot, 13.
6 Seven Tablets of Creation, the fourth tablet.
* E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (1929), I, 322 ff.
8 Williamson, Religious and Cosmic Beliefs of Central Polynesia, I, 36, 154, 237.
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Ty-fong." 9 It appears as though the noise of the hurricane was over-toned by a sound not unlike the name Typhon, as if the storm were calling him by name.
* The cosmic upheaval proceeded with a "mighty strong west wind," 10 but before the climax, in the simple words of the Scriptures, "the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided." u
-The Israelites were on the shore of the Sea of Passage at the climax of the cataclysm. The name Jam Suf is generally rendered as Red Sea; the Passage is supposed to have taken place either at the Gulf of Suez or at Akaba Gulf of the Red Sea, but sometimes the site of the Passage is identified as one of the inner lakes on the route from Suez to the Mediterranean. It is argued that suf means "reed" (papyrus reed), and since papyrus reed does not grow in salt water, Jam Suf must have been a lagoon of fresh water.12 We will not enter here into a discussion where the Sea of the Passage was. The inscription on the shrine found in el-Arish may provide some indication where the Pharaoh was engulfed by the whirlpool;13 in any event, the topographical distribution of sea and land did not remain the same as before the cataclysm of the days of the Exodus. But the name of the Sea of the Passage—Jam Suf—is derived not from "reed," but from "hurricane,"
robin-bobin
suf, suf a, in Hebrew. In Egyptian the Red Sea is called shari, which signifies the sea of percussion (mare percussionis) or the sea of the stroke or of the disaster.14
The Haggadah of Passover says: "Thou didst sweep the land of Moph and Noph ... on the Passover."15
The hurricane that brought to an end the Middle Kingdom in Egypt—"the blast of heavenly displeasure" in the language of Mane-tho—swept through every corner of the world. In order to distinguish, in the traditions of the peoples, this diluvium venti of cosmic dimensions from local disastrous storms, other cosmic disturbances like
» G. Rawlinson, The History of Herodotus (1858-1862), II, 225 note.
io Exodus 10 : 19. « Exodus 14 : 21. « Cf. Isaiah 19 : 6. " See p. 60.
"Akerblad, Journal asiatique, XIII (1834), 349; F. Fresnel, ibid., 4e Serie, XI (1848); cf. Peyron, Lexicon linguae copticae (1835), p. 304.
16 Moph and Noph refer to Memphis.
70 WORLDS IN COLLISION
disappearance of the sun or change of the sky must be found accompanying the hurricane.
In the Japanese cosmogonical myth, the sun goddess hid herself for a long time in a heavenly cave in fear of the storm god. "The source of light disappeared, the whole world became dark,"
and the storm god caused monstrous destruction. Gods made terrible noise so that the sun should reappear, and from their tumult the earth quaked.16 In Japan and in the vast extent of the ocean hurricanes and earthquakes are not rare occurrences; but they do not disturb the day-night succession, nor is there any resulting permanent change in the sky and its luminaries. "The sky was low," relate the Polynesians of Takaofo Island, and "then the winds and waterspouts and the hurricanes came, and carried up the sky to its present height." «
"When a world cycle is destroyed by wind," says the Buddhist text on the "World Cycles," the wind also turns "the ground upside down, and throws it into the sky," and "areas of one hundred leagues in extent, two hundred, three hundred, five hundred leagues in extent, crack and are thrown upward by the force of the wind" and do not fall again but are "blown to powder in the sky and annihilated." "And the wind throws up also into the sky the mountains which encircle the earth . . . [they] are ground to powder and destroyed." The cosmic wind blows and destroys
"a hundred thousand times ten million worlds." 18
The Tide
The ocean tides are produced by the action of the sun and to a larger extent by that of the moon.
A body larger than the moon or one nearer to the earth would act with greater effect. A comet with a head as large as the earth, passing sufficiently close, would raise
W Nihongi, "Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times" (transl. W. G. Aston), Transactions and Proceedings of the Japanese Society, I (1896), 37 f., 47. 1T Williamson, Religious and Cosmic Beliefs of Central Polynesia, I, 44. 18 Warren, "World Cycles," Buddhism, p. 328.
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the waters of the oceans miles high.1 The slowing down or stasis of the earth in its rotation would cause a tidal recession of water toward the poles,2 but the celestial body near by would disturb this poleward recession, drawing the water toward itself.
The traditions of many peoples persist that seas were torn apart and their water heaped high and thrown upon the continents. In order to establish that these traditions refer to one and the same event, or at least to an event of the same order, we must keep to this guiding sequence: the great tide followed a disturbance in the motion of the earth.
The Chinese annals, which I have mentioned and which I intend to quote more extensively in a subsequent section, say that in the time of Emperor Yahou the sun did not go down for ten davs.
The world was in flames, and "in their vast extent" the waters "overtopped the great heights, threatening the heavens with their floods." The water of the ocean was heaped up and cast upon the continent of Asia; a great tidal wave swept over the mountains and broke in the middle of the Chinese Empire. The water was caught in the valleys between the mountains, and the land was flooded for decades.
robin-bobin
The traditions of the people of Peru tell that for a period of time equal to five days and five nights the sun was not in the sky, and then the ocean left the shore and with a terrible din broke over the continent; the entire surface of the earth was changed in this catastrophe.3
The Choctaw Indians of Oklahoma relate: "The earth was plunged in darkness for a long time."
Finally a bright light appeared in the north, "but it was mountain-high waves, rapidly coming nearer."4
In these traditions there are two concurrent elements: a complete darkness that endured a number of days (in Asia, prolonged day)
1 Cf. J. Lalande, AbrSge cTastronomie (1795), p. 340, who computed that a comet with a head as large as the earth, at a distance of 13,290 lieues, or about four diameters of the earth, would raise ocean tides 2,000 toises or about four kilometers high.
2 P. Kirchenberg, La Theorie de la relativite (1922), pp. 131-132.
3 Andree, Die Flutsagen, p. 115.
* H. S. Bellamy, Moons, Myths and Man (1938), p. 277.
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and, when the light broke through, a mountain-high wave that brought destruction.
>-The Hebrew story of the passage of the sea contains the same elements. There was a prolonged and complete darkness (Exodus 10:21). The last day of the darkness was at the Red Sea.5 When the world plunged out of darkness, the bottom of the sea was uncovered, the waters were driven apart and heaped up like walls in a double tide.6 The Septuagint translation of the Bible says that the water stood "as a wall," and the Koran, referring to this event, says 'like mountains." In the old rabbinical literature it is said that the water was suspended as if it were "glass, solid and massive." 7
The commentator Rashi, guided by the grammatical structure of the sentence in the Book of Exodus, explained in accordance with Mechilta: "The water of all oceans and seas was divided."
8
The Midrashim contain the following description: "The waters were piled up to the height of sixteen hundred miles, and they could be seen by all the nations of the earth." 9 The figure in this sentence intends to say that the heap of water was tremendous. According to the Scriptures, the waters climbed the mountains and stood above them, and they mounted to the heavens.10
A sea rent apart was a marvelous spectacle and could not have been forgotten. It is mentioned in numerous passages in the Scriptures. "The pillars of heaven tremble. . . . He divideth the sea with his power." u "Marvelous things did he in the sight of their fathers. . . . He divided the sea, and caused them to pass through; and he made the waters to stand as a heap."12 "He gathereth the waters of
5 Exodus 14 : 20; Ginzberg, Legends, II, 359.
* "The waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left." Exodus 14 : 22.
7 A. Calmet, Commentaire, I'Exode (1708), p. 159: "Les eaux demeurent sus-pendues, comme une glace solide et massive."
8 Rashfs Commentary to Pentateuch (English transl. by M. Rosenbaum and A. M. Silberman, 1930).
9 Ginzberg, Legends, III, 22; Targum Yerushalmi, Exodus 14 : 22.
i« Psalms 104 : 6-8; 107 : 25-26. " Job 26 : 11-12. i2 Psalms 78 : 12-13.
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the sea together as a heap ... let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him." 1S
Then the Great Sea (the Mediterranean) broke into the Red Sea in an enormous tidal wave.14
It was an unusual event, and because it was unusual, it became the most impressive recollection in the very long history of this people. All peoples and nations were blasted by the same fire and shattered in the same fury. The tribes of Israel on the shore of a sea found in this annihilation their salvation from bondage. They escaped destruction but their oppressors perished before their eyes. They extolled the Creator, took upon themselves the burden of moral rules, and considered themselves chosen for a great destiny.
robin-bobin
When the Spaniards conquered Yucatan, Indians versed in their ancient literature related to the conquerors the tradition handed down to them by their ancestors: their forefathers were delivered from pursuit by some other people when the Lord opened for them a way in the midst of the sea.18
This tradition is so similar to the Jewish tradition of the Passage that some of the friars who came to America believed that the Indians of America were of Jewish origin. Friar Diego de Landa wrote: "Some old men of Yucatan say that they have heard from their ancestors that this country was peopled by a certain race who came from the east, whom God delivered by opening for them twelve roads through the sea. If this is true, all the inhabitants of the Indies must be of Jewish descent." 16
It may have been an echo of what happened at the Sea of Passage, or a description of a similar occurrence at the same time but in another place.
According to the Lapland cosmogonic story," "when the wickedness increased among the human beings," the midmost of the earth
13 Psalms 33 : 7-8.
14 Mekhilta Beshalla 6, 33a; other sources in Ginzberg, Legends, VI, 10.
15 Antonio de Herrera, Historia general de las Indias Occidentales, Vol. IV, Bk. 10, Chap. 2; Brasseur, Histoire des nations civilisees du Mexique, I, 66.
16 De Landa, Yucatan, p. 8.
it Leonne de Cambrey, Lapland Legends (1926).
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"trembled with terror so that the upper layers of the earth fell away and many of the people were hurled down into those caved-in places to perish." "And Jubmel, the heaven-lord himself, came down. . . . His terrible anger flashed like red, blue, and green fire-serpents, and people hid their faces, and the children screamed with fear. . . . The angry god spoke: 1 shall reverse the world. I shall bid the rivers flow upward; I shall cause the sea to gather together itself up into a huge towering wall which I shall hurl upon your wicked earth-children, and thus destroy them and all life.'"
Jubmel set a storm-wind blowing, and the wild air-spirits raging. . . . Foaming, dashing, rising sky-high came the sea-wall, crushing all things. Jubmel, with one strong upheaval, made the earth-lands all turn over; then, the world again he righted. Now the mountains and the highlands could no more be seen by Beijke [sun]. Filled with groans of dying people, was the fair earth, home of mankind. No more Beijke shone in heaven.
According to the Lapland epic, the world was overwhelmed by the hurricane and the sea, and almost all human beings perished. After the sea-wall fell on the continent, gigantic waves continued to roll and dead bodies were dashed about in dark waters.
The great earthquake and the chasms that opened in the ground, the appearance of a celestial body with serpentlike flashes, rivers flowing upward, a sea-wall that crushed everything, mountains that became leveled or covered with water, the world that was turned over and then righted, the sun that no more shone in the sky—all these are motifs which we found in the description of the calamities of the time of the Exodus.
In many places of the world, and especially in the north, large boulders are found in a position which proves that a great force must have lifted them up and carried them long distances before depositing them where they are found today. Sometimes these large loose
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rocks are of entirely different mineral composition than the local rocks, but are akin to formations many miles away. Thus, occasionally an erratic boulder of granite perches on top of a high ridge of dolerite, whereas the nearest outcrops of granite lie far away. These erratic boulders may weigh as much as ten thousand tons, about as much as one hundred thirty thousand people.18
To explain these facts, the scholars of the first half of the nineteenth century assumed that enormous tides had swept over the continents and carried with them masses of stone. The robin-bobin
transfer of the rocks was explained by the tides, but what could have caused those billows to rise high over the continents?
"It was conceived that somehow and somewhere in the far north a series of gigantic waves was mysteriously propagated. These waves were supposed to have precipitated themselves upon the land, and then swept madly on over mountain and valley alike, carrying along with them a mighty burden of rocks and stones and rubbish. Such deluges were styled 'waves of translation'; and the till was believed to represent the materials which they hurried along with them in their wild course across the country." 10 The stones and boulders on the hilltops and the mounds of sand and gravel in the lowlands were explained by this theory. Critics, however, maintained that
"it was unfortunate for this view that it violated at the very outset the first principles of science, by assuming the former existence of a cause which there was little in nature to warrant . . .
spasmodic rushes of the sea across a whole country had fortunately never been experienced within the memory of man." 20 That the correctness of the last sentence is questionable is shown by references to the traditions of a number of peoples.
Wherever possible, the movement of stones was attributed to the progress of the ice sheet in the glacial ages and to glaciers on the mountain slopes.
18 The Madison boulder near Conway, New Hampshire, measures 90 by 40 by 38 feet, and weighs almost 10,000 tons. "It is composed of granite, quite unlike the bedrock beneath it; hence the boulder is typically 'erratic'" Daly, The Changing World of the Ice Age, p. 16.
19 J. Geikie, The Great Ice Age and Its Relation to the Antiquity of Man (1894), pp. 25-26.
20 Ibid.
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Agassiz, in 1840, assumed that just as the Alpine moraines were left behind by the retreating glaciers, so the moraines in the flat-lands of northern Europe and America could have been caused by the movement of great continental ice sheets (and thus introduced the theory of ice ages). Although this is correct to some extent, the analogy is not exact, as the glaciers of the Alps push the stones down, not up the slope. Meeting an upward motion of the ice, large boulders would probably sink into the ice.
The problem of the migration of the stones must be regarded as only partially connected with the progress and retreat of the ice sheet, if at all. Billows miles high traveled over the land, originating in causes described in this book.
It can be established by the extent of denudation of the rocks under the erratic boulders that the latter were deposited at their places during human history. So, for instance, in Wales and Yorkshire, where this effect was evaluated in terms of time, the "amount of denudation of limestone rocks on which boulders lie" is a "proof that a period of no more than six thousand years has elapsed since the boulders were left in their positions." 21
The fact that accumulations of stones were transferred from the equator toward the higher latitudes, an enigmatic problem in the ice theory, can be explained by the poleward recession of the equatorial waters at the moment the velocity of rotation of the earth was reduced or its poles were shifted. In the Northern Hemisphere, in India, the moraines were carried from the equator not only toward higher latitudes, but also toward the Himalaya Mountains, and in the Southern Hemisphere from the equatorial regions of Africa toward the higher latitudes, across the prairies and deserts and forests of the black continent.
The Battle in the Sky
At the same time that the seas were heaped up in immense tides, a pageant went on in the sky which presented itself to the horrified onlookers on earth as a gigantic battle. Because this battle was seen
21 Upham, The Glacial Lake Agassiz (1895), p. 239.
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from almost all parts of the world, and because it impressed itself very strongly upon the imagination of the peoples, it can be reconstructed in some detail.
robin-bobin
When the earth passed through the gases, dust, and meteorites of the tail of the comet, disturbed in rotation, it proceeded on a distorted orbit. Emerging from the darkness, the Eastern Hemisphere faced the head of the comet. This head only shortly before had passed close to the sun and was in a state of candescence. The night the great earthquake shook the globe was, according to rabbinical literature, as bright as the day of the summer solstice. Because of the proximity of the earth, the comet left its own orbit and for a while followed the orbit of the earth.
The great ball of the comet retreated, then again approached the earth, shrouded in a dark column of gases which looked like a pillar of smoke during the day and of fire at night, and the earth once more passed through the atmosphere of the comet, this time at its neck. This stage was accompanied by violent and incessant electrical discharges between the atmosphere of the tail and the terrestrial atmosphere. There was an interval of about six days between these two close approaches. Emerging from the gases of the comet, the earth seems to have changed the direction of its rotation, and the pillar of smoke moved to the opposite horizon.1 The column looked like a gigantic moving serpent.
When the tidal waves rose to their highest point, and the seas were torn apart, a tremendous spark flew between the earth and the globe of the comet, which instantly pushed down the miles-high billows. Meanwhile, the tail of the comet and its head, having become entangled with each other by their close contact with the earth, exchanged violent discharges of electricity. It looked like a battle between the brilliant globe and the dark column of smoke. In the exchange of electrical potentials, the tail and the head were attracted one to the other and repelled one from the other. From the serpentlike tail extensions grew, and it lost the form of a column. It looked now like a furious animal with legs and with many heads. The discharges tore the column to pieces, a process that was accompanied by a rain of
1 Cf. Exodus 14 : 19.
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meteorites' upon the earth. It appeared as though the monster were defeated by the brilliant globe and buried in the sea, or wherever the meteorites fell. The gases of the tail subsequently enveloped the earth.
The globe of the comet, which lost a large portion of its atmosphere as well as much of its electrical potential, withdrew from the earth but did not break away from its attraction.
Apparently, after a six-week interval, the distance between the earth and the globe of the comet again diminished. This new approach of the globe could not be readily observed because the earth was shrouded in the clouds of dust left by the comet on its former approach as well as by dust ejected by the volcanoes. After renewed discharges, the comet and the earth parted.
This behavior of the comet is of great importance in problems of celestial mechanics. That a comet, encountering a planet, can become entangled and drawn away from its own path, forced into a new course, and finally liberated from the influence of the planet is proved by the case of Lexell's comet, which in 1767 was captured by Jupiter and its moons. Not until 1779 did it free itself from this entanglement. A phenomenon that has not been observed in modern times is an electrical discharge between a planet and a comet and also between the head of a comet and its trailing part.
The events in the sky were viewed by the peoples of the world as a fight between an evil monster in the form of a serpent and the light-god who engaged the monster in battle and thus saved the world. The tail of the comet, leaping back and forth under the discharges of the flaming globe, was regarded as a separate body, inimical to the globe of the comet.
A full survey of the religious and folklore motifs which mirror this event would require more space than is at my disposal here; it is difficult to find a people or tribe on the earth that does not have the same motif at the very focus of its religious beliefs.2
Since the descriptions of the battle between Marduk and Tiamat, the dragon, or Isis and Seth, or Vishnu and the serpent, or Krishna
2 I intend to handle a portion of this material in an essay on The Dragon.
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robin-bobin
and serpent, or Ormuzd and Ahriman follow an almost identical pattern and have many details in common with the battle of Zeus and Typhon, I shall give here Apollodorus' description of this battle.3
Typhon "out-topped all the mountains, and his head often brushed the stars. One of his hands reached out to the west and the other to the east, and from them projected a hundred dragons'
heads. From the thighs downward he had huge coils of vipers which . . . emitted a long hissing. .
. . His body was all winged . . . and fire flashed from his eyes. Such and so great was Typhon when, hurling kindled rocks, he made for the very heaven with hissing and shouts, spouting a great jet of fire from his mouth." To the sky of Egypt Zeus pursued Typhon "rushing at heaven."
"Zeus pelted Typhon at a distance with thunderbolts, and at close quarters struck him down with an adamantine sickle, and as he fled pursued him closely as far as Mount Casius, which overhangs Syria. There, seeing the monster sore wounded, he grappled with him. But Typhon twined about him and gripped him in his coils. . . ." "Having recovered his strength Zeus suddenly from heaven riding in a chariot of winged horses, pelted Typhon with thunderbolts. ...
So being again pursued he [Typhon] came to Thrace and in fighting at Mount Haemus he heaved whole mountains ... a stream of blood gushed out on the mountain, and they say that from that circumstance the mountain was called Haemus [bloody]. And when he started to flee through the Sicilian sea, Zeus cast Mount Etna in Sicily upon him. That is a huge mountain, from which down to this day they say that blasts of fire issue from the thunderbolts that were thrown."
The struggle left deep marks on the entire ancient world. Some districts were especially associated with the events of this cosmic fight. The Egyptian shore of the Red Sea was called Typhonia.* Strabo narrates also that the Arimi (Aramaeans or Syrians) were terrified witnesses of the battle of Zeus with Typhon. And Typhon, "who, they add, was a dragon, when struck by the bolts of lightning, fled in search of a descent underground," 5 and not only did he cut 3 Apollodorus, The Library, Epitome II (transl. Frazer).
4 Strabo, The Geography (transl. H. L. Jones, 1924), vii, 3, 8. 5 Ibid.
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furrows into the earth and form the beds of the rivers, but descending underground, he made fountains break forth.
Similar descriptions come from various places of the ancient world, in which the nations relate the experience of their ancestors who witnessed the great catastrophe of the middle of the second millennium.
-At that time the Israelites had not yet arrived at a clear monotheistic concept and, like other peoples, they saw in the great struggle a conflict between good and evil. The author of the Book of Exodus, suppressing this conception of the ancient Israelites, presented the portent of fire and smoke moving in a column as an angel or messenger of the Lord. However, many passages in other books of the Scriptures preserved the picture as it impressed itself upon eyewitnesses.
Rahab is the Hebrew name for the contester with the Most High. "O Lord God of hosts, who is a strong Lord like unto thee? . . . Thou hast broken Rahab in pieces. . . . The heavens are thine, the earth also is thine: as for the world and the fulness thereof, thou hast founded them. The north and the south thou hast created them."6 Deutero-Isaiah prayed: "Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art thou not it that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon? Art thou not it which hath dried the sea, the waters of the great deep; that hath made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?" 7
From these passages it is clear that the battle of the Lord with Rahab was not a primeval battle before Creation, as some .scholars think.8
Isaiah prophesied for the future: "In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea." 9
The "crooked serpent" is shown in many ancient pictures from
6 Psalms 89 : 10-12. * Isaiah 51 : 9-10.
* See S. Reinach, Cults, Myths and Religion (1912), pp. 42 ff; H. Gunkel,
robin-bobin
Schbpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (1895); J. Pedersen, Israel, Its Life and Culture (1926), pp. 472 ff.
» Isaiah 27 : 1.
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bound Israelites saw the upheaval of nature: darkness, hurricane, mountains of water, fire and smoke, recorded in the Greek legend as the circumstances in which the battle of Zeus with the dragon Typhon was fought. In the same pit of the sea lie the pharaoh and his hosts.3 s Up to now I have identified Rahab-Typhon as a comet. But if Typhon lies on the bottom of the sea, is he not the pharaoh? This would mean that in the legend of Typhon two elements were welded together: the pharaoh, who perished in the catastrophe, and the outrageous rebel against Zeus, the lord of the sky.4 \ In Pliny's Natural History, the ninety-first section of the second book reads: 5 "A terrible comet was seen by the people of Ethiopia and Egypt, to which Typhon, the king of that period, gave his name; it had a fiery appearance and was twisted like a coil, and it was very grim to behold: it was not really a star so much as what might be called a ball of fire."
The visit of a disastrous comet, so many times referred to in this book, is told in plain words, not in disguise. However, I must find support for my assumption that the comet of the days of King Typhon was the comet of the days of the Exodus.
I investigated the writings of the old chronographers, and in Cometographia of Hevelius (1688) I found references to the works of Calvisius, Helvicus, Herlicius, and Rockenbach, all of whom used manuscripts for the most part and not printed sources, as they lived only a little over one century after the invention of movable characters and the printing press. ^ Hevelius wrote (in Latin): "In the year of the world 2453 (1495 b.c), according to certain authorities, a comet was seen in Syria,
3 In Ages in Chaos, evidence will be presented to identify the pharaoh of the Exodus as Taui Thom, the last king of the Middle Kingdom. He is Tau Timaeus (Tutimaeus) of Manetiio, in whose days "a blast of God's displeasure" fell upon Egypt and terminated the period at present known as the Middle Kingdom. The name of his queen is given in the naos of el-Arish as Tephnut.
Ra-uah-ab is a name met among the Egyptian kings of that period (W.M.F. Petrie, A History of Egypt, I, 227); it could have served as origin for the Hebrew word for dragon, Rahab. See note 4.
4 Actually, "dragon" became the appellation of Egyptian pharaohs in the prophetic literature. Cf.
Ezekiel 32 : 2.
5 Pliny, Natural History, ii, 91 (transl. Rackham, 1938).
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China to India, to Persia, to Assyria, to Egypt, to Mexico. With the rise of the monotheistic concept, the Israelites regarded this crooked serpent, the contester with the Most High, as the Lord's own creation.
"He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing. . . . The pillars of heaven tremble. . . . He divideth the sea with his power ... his hand hath formed the crooked serpent." 10 The Psalmist also says: " "God is my King of old. . . . Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength. . . . Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces. . . . Thou didst cleave the fountain and the flood: Thou driedst up mighty rivers."
The sea was cleft, the earth was cut with furrows, great rivers disappeared, others appeared. The earth rumbled for many years, and the peoples thought that the fiery dragon that had been struck down had descended underground and was groaning there.
The Comet of Typhon
Of all the mysterious phenomena which accompanied the Exodus, this mysterious Pillar seems the first to demand explanation.
—W. Phythian-Adams The Call of Israel
One of the places of the heavenly combat between elementary forces of nature—as narrated by Apollodorus and Strabo—was on the way from Egypt to Syria.1 According to Herodotus, the final act of the fight between Zeus and Typhon took place at Lake Serbon on the coastal route robin-bobin
from Egypt to Palestine.2 On the way from Egypt to Palestine the Israelites, after a night of terror and strong east wind, witnessed the upheaval of the day of the Passage. These parallel circumstances lead to a conclusion that will sound somewhat strange. Typhon (Typheus) lies on the bottom of the sea where the spell-w> Job 26 : 7-13. « Psalms 74 : 12-15.
1 Mount Casius, mentioned by Apollodorus, is the name of Mount Lebanon as well as of Mount Sinai. Cf. Pomponius Mela De situ orbis.
2 Herodotus iii, 5. Also Apollonius Rhodius in the Argonautica, Bk. ii, says that Typhon
"smitten by the bolt of Zeus . . . lies whelmed beneath the waters of the Serbonian lake."
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Babylonia, India, in the sign Jo, in the form of a disc, at the very time when the Israelites were on their march from Egypt to the Promised Land. So Rockenbach. The Exodus of the Israelites is placed by Calvisius in the year of the world 2453, or 1495 b.c." 6
I was fortunate enough to locate one copy of Rockenbach's De cometis tractatus novus methodicus in the United States.7 This book was published in Wittenberg in 1602. Its author was professor of Greek, mathematics, and law, and dean of philosophy at Frankfort. He wrote his book using old sources which he did not name: "ex pro-batissimis ir antiquissimis veterum scriptoribus" (from the most trustworthy and the most ancient of the early writers). As a result of his diligent gathering of ancient material, he made the following entry:
"In the year of the world two thousand four hundred and fifty-three—as many trustworthy authors, on the basis of many conjectures, have determined—a comet appeared which Pliny also mentioned in his second book. It was fiery, of irregular circular form, with a wrapped head; it was in the shape of a globe and was of terrible aspect. It is said that King Typhon ruled at that time in Egypt. . . . Certain [authorities] assert that the comet was seen in Syria, Babylonia, India, in the sign of Capricorn, in the form of a disc, at the time when the children of Israel advanced from Egypt toward the Promised Land, led on their way by the pillar of cloud during the day and by the pillar of fire at night." 8
Rockenbach did not draw any conclusion on the relation of the comet of the days of Exodus to the natural phenomena of that time; his intent was only to fix the date of the comet of Typhon.
Among the early authors, Lydus, Servius (who quotes Avienus),
6J. Hevelius, Cometographia (1688), pp. 794 f.
7 In the library of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.
8 "Anno mundi, bis millesimo, quadrigentesimo quinquagesimo tertio, Cometa (ut multi probati autores. de tempore hoc statuunt, ex conjecturis multis) cuius Plinius quoque lib. 2 cap. 25
mentionem facit, igneus, formam imperfecti circuli, & in se convoluti caputq; globi repraesentans, aspectu terribilis apparuit, Typhonq; a rege, tune temporis ex Aegypto imperium tenente, dictus est, qui rex, ut homines fide digni asserunt, auxilio gigantum. reges Aegyptoru devicit. Visus quoq; est, ut aliqui volut, in Siria, Babylonia, India, in signo capricomi, sub forma rotae, eo tempore, quando filii Israel ex Aegypto in terram promissam, duce ac viae monstratore, per diem columna nubis, noctu vero columna ignis, ut cap. 7.8.9.10 legitur profecti sunt."
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Hephaestion, and Junctinus, in addition to Pliny, mention the Typhon comet.9 It is depicted as an immense globe (globus immodicus) of fire, also as a sickle, which is a description of a globe illuminated by the sun, and close enough to be observed thus. Its movement was slow, its path was close to the sun. Its color was bloody: "It was not of fiery, but of bloody redness." It caused destruction "in rising and setting." Servius writes that this comet caused many plagues, evils, and hunger.
To discover what were the manuscript sources of Abraham Rocken-bach that led him to the same conclusion at which we have arrived, namely, that the Typhon comet appeared in the time of the Exodus, is a task not yet accomplished. Servius says that more information about the calamities caused by this comet is to be found in the writings of the Roman astrologer Campester and in the works of the Egyptian astrologer Petosiris.10 It is possible that copies of works of some authors robin-bobin
containing citations from the writings of these ancient astrologers, preserved in the libraries of Europe, were Rockenbach's manuscript sources.
Campester, as quoted by Lydus, was certain that should the comet Typhon again meet the earth, a four-day encounter would suffice to destroy the world.11 This implies also that the first encounter with the comet Typhon brought the earth to the brink of destruction.
But even without this somber prognostication of Campester, we have a very imposing and quite inexhaustible array of references to Typhon and its destructive action against the world: almost every Greek author referred to it. The real nature of Typhon being that of a comet, as explained by Pliny and others, all references to the disas-9 Johannis Laurentii Lydi Liber de ostentis et calendaria Craeca omnia (ed. by C. Wachsmuth, 1897), p. 171. In this work Wachsmuth also printed excerpts from Hephaestion, Avienus apud Servium, and Junctinus.
10 The time when Campester flourished is not Known, but it is assumed to have been in the third or fourth century of the present era. See Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopddie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, s.v. The time of Petosiris is tentatively dated in the second pre-Christian era (Pauly-Wissowa, s.v.). But he is mentioned in The Danaides of Aristophanes (—448 to—
388). See also E. Riess, Nechepsonis et Petosiridis fragmenta magica (1890).
11 Campester in Lydus Liber de ostentis; cf. Handworterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens (1932-1933), Vol. V, s.v. "Komet."
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ters caused by Typhon must be understood as descriptions of natural catastrophes in which the earth and the comet were involved. As is known, Pallas of the Greeks was another name for Typhon; also Seth of the Egyptians was an equivalent of Typhon.12 Thus the number of references to the comet Typhon can be enlarged by references to Pallas and Seth.
It was not only Abraham Rockenbach who synchronized the appearance of the comet Typhon with the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. Looking for authors who might have done likewise, I found that Samuel Bochart, a scholarly writer of the seventeenth century, in his book Hierozoicon,13 has a passage in which he maintains that the plagues of the days of the Exodus resemble the calamities that Typhon brought in his train, and that therefore "the flight of Typhon is the Exodus of Moses from Egypt."14 In this he actually follows the passage transmitted by Plutarch.15 But since Typhon, according to Pliny and others, was a comet, Samuel Bochart was close to the conclusions at which we arrive, traveling along another route.
The Spark
A phenomenon of great significance took place. The head of the comet did not crash into the earth, but exchanged major electrical discharges with it. A tremendous spark sprang forth at the moment of the nearest approach of the comet, when the waters were heaped at their highest above the surface of the earth and before they fell down, followed by a rain of debris torn from the very body and tail of the comet.
"And the Angel of God, which went before the camp of Israel,
12 "The Egyptians regularly call Typhon 'Seth'; it means 'overmastering' and 'overpowering,' and in very many instances 'turning back,' and again 'overpassing'." Plutarch, Isis and Osiris (transl.
F. C. Babbitt, 1936), 41 and 49.
13 Bochart, Hierozoicon, I, 343.
14 "Fuga Typhonis est Mosis ex Egypto excessus." Ibid., p. 341.
15 "Those who relate that Typhon's flight from the battle [with Horus] was made on the back of an ass and lasted seven days, and that after he had made his escape, he became the father of sons, Hierosolymus [Jerusalem] and Judaeus, are manifestly, as the very names show, attempting to drag the Jewish traditions into the legend." Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, 32.
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removed and went behind them; and the pillar of the cloud went from before their face, and stood behind them . . . and it was a cloud and darkness but it gave light by night." An exceedingly strong wind and lightnings rent the cloud. In the morning the waters rose as a wall robin-bobin
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