À PROPOS DE CET ÉPISODE
Immanuel Velikovsky’s talk at Eastern Baptist College in Wayne, Pennsylvania, from the 1974 American Association for the Advancement of Science Symposium.
Velikovsky speaks for about fifty minutes, compressing his whole theory across psychology, the Old Testament, geology, paleontology, ocean science, archaeology, and astronomy before he opens the floor to questions. He frames the talk as an attempt to plant skepticism in young listeners. Every figure, date, and claim below belongs to Velikovsky as he delivered it.
Opening: planting a seed (00:10)
Velikovsky greets the audience, glad to see so many young faces, and notes that someone has already laid out his theory in a shorter span. He recalls the gentile who asked Rabbi Hillel to teach the wisdom of Judaism in the time a man could stand on one leg. Rabbi Shammai, stern and severe, drove the man from the premises; Hillel answered in a single sentence — love thy neighbor as yourself — and the gentile converted. Velikovsky sets a smaller goal for himself. He hopes to leave behind some seeds of skepticism and a fresh look at the universe and what fills it.
Where the work began (02:09)
Velikovsky tells the audience he will cross many fields of science in forty-five minutes, with questions to follow. He began with the Old Testament, and he credits his years in psychoanalysis for sharpening his eye. In his consulting room, he often heard a patient describe a situation so obvious in its meaning that only the patient stayed blind to it. He reads the Exodus the same way. The plagues, the passages in Numbers, the Psalms, the words of the prophets — Velikovsky argues that the Old Testament turns on a few catastrophic events, events a whole nation witnessed, with the population of Egypt caught up in them.
A global event, read across nations (04:00)
From the start, Velikovsky presses one point: people across the world witnessed these events. The long day in the Book of Joshua, with sun and moon halted, could not have hung over the valley of Ajalon alone. Wherever the sun still shone, the day would have stretched; wherever night had fallen, the night would have run long. He travels in imagination from book to book — which is to say from land to land — and finds the Mexicans, the Babylonians, the Persians, and the Chinese reporting the same occurrences.
He lingers on a detail. Joshua describes stones falling from the sky two verses before the sun stands still. Joshua could not have known the link between the Earth’s rotation and its passage through a cloud of meteorites. Native peoples on the American continent could not have known why the sun would climb, drop, climb again, and drop while the land burst into flame. Velikovsky argues that people who could not grasp the mechanism could not invent the story. Something happened. In China, at the same moment, the records describe disturbances of atmosphere and water — the consequences he expects when the earth’s rotation falters.
The seas, the prophets, and the Egyptian eyewitness (07:09)
Velikovsky turns to the seas. He cites accounts of gigantic tides and an ocean torn apart, and points to the Talmud’s claim that the seas of the world split together, the Sea of Passage among them. Read on these terms, he argues, the words of the prophets make plain sense — mountains skip like rams, hills melt like wax, the earth trembles, coals and dust fall from the sky, and rivers and seas turn red — language that means nothing if the days stay calm.
If those things happened, Velikovsky reasons, an Egyptian record should exist. He found one: a papyrus held for more than a century at the University of Leiden Museum in Holland, translated by Gardiner in 1909. The verses Gardiner rendered into modern English match the plague narrative in the King James Version, yet Gardiner did not notice. Velikovsky calls this scotoma, a blind spot, and finds it shared across centuries of readers and commentators who saw stone for stone and fire for fire and registered none of it.
Scotoma and overturned mountains (09:46)
He widens the blind spot to all of us. Readers translated a book into scores of languages and pored over it for generations, and still passed over its central drama. Even fundamentalists declined to picture a mountain turning over as a mountain turning over. Velikovsky says the mountains did turn over and moved from their roots. The Rocky Mountains shifted scores of miles. The Alps moved from northern Italy toward present-day Switzerland. The Matterhorn lies overturned, its younger formations and fossils at the bottom and the older above.
Young mountains (11:32)
Now, in geology, Velikovsky takes on the age of mountains. Geologists had placed their building in the Tertiary, sixty million to one million years ago. Investigators who climbed the Andes, the Alps, and the Himalayas returned with one verdict: the mountains are young. The Himalayas rose in the age of Neolithic and even Bronze Age people. Tilted ancient lake shores still hold the vestiges of historical men. Velikovsky points to a city high in the Andes, above twelve thousand feet, where no grain grows and no great population could have lived, its agricultural terraces climbing into permanent snow above fifteen thousand feet.
The mass death of animals (14:00)
The whole antiplano around Lake Titicaca, Velikovsky says, rose thousands of feet at once. He recalls Darwin at Valparaiso, puzzled by decayed shells thousands of feet above the sea and by the bones of vanished giant animals, writing in his diary that the entire frame of the globe must have shaken to destroy so many creatures from Tierra del Fuego to the Bering Strait. Velikovsky reports the same wholesale destruction on all five continents. Gold-digging machines in Alaska slice through muck packed with animals torn limb from limb. Islands north of Siberia stand built of splintered trees and the bones of mammoths, horses, buffaloes, and rhinoceroses. He asks how hippopotami reached England, how corals once grew off Spitsbergen and Greenland, and how ostriches, crocodiles, polar bears, seals, and arctic foxes came to lie buried together, animals that could never have shared a habitat.
Origin of species, fossils, and shifting ground (17:02)
From destruction Velikovsky moves to origin. He doubts that competition alone, working on one simple ancestral form, can explain how a crocodile, a bird, a worm, a man, and a many-legged insect all came to be, or how so many species vanished without descendants. He presses the puzzle of fossilization: the textbook account asks animals to die in shallow water and lie covered before predators reach them, in a process so slow it runs across tens of thousands of years as the land subsides, and he asks who has ever seen a cat wading in the shallows. A faster process did the work. The sea erupted; sea and land traded places. Velikovsky says the fixed outline of continents and oceans, a dogma in geology, has no basis in fact.
Ancient climates and two dated catastrophes (19:35)
Velikovsky turns at once to climate. Ancient climates differed sharply from today’s. Corals could not have grown where he found their traces unless the earth once traveled a different orbit on a differently tilted axis — try raising corals at the North Pole, he says. He notes that the climate changed hard around 1500 BC and again in the eighth century BC, a finding Scandinavian researchers established before he took up the problem. Those two windows frame his first book, Worlds in Collision: the catastrophe of the Exodus, the catastrophe in the time of Joshua fifty-two years later, and a second series in the days of the prophets Isaiah, Amos, and Hosea. He points the audience to that week’s issue of Time magazine, where oceanographers report that the volcanic island of Thera, north of Crete, erupted with terrific force around 1500 BC and again about fifty years on — the same interval he had assigned to the Exodus and Joshua, and the same interval recorded in Mesoamerican sources from the Maya and the Aztec, with the Toltecs before them.
Volcanism, earthquakes, and the ocean ridge (23:06)
Why so much volcanism in the past, and so many earthquakes? Velikovsky cites a single year of the Punic War when some fifty dispatches reached Rome reporting earthquakes — the residue, he says, of the time the earth twisted out of position. Several fields point to that twisting. One is the ocean floor, where a ridge runs twice around the globe with a deep chasm along its length, charted only seven or eight years before the talk.
Ash, nickel, reversed magnetism, and the tablets (24:53)
On the ocean bottom Velikovsky finds a layer of ash, the Worzel ash, of even thickness beneath the Pacific and, by Maurice Ewing’s reckoning, beneath other oceans too — enough for him to conclude that the ash fell from beyond the earth. In the deep clay lies nickel that he traces to immense meteorite showers. In ancient rocks and lava the magnetic field reverses and runs a thousand times stronger than the earth could have imposed. Then he turns to the cuneiform archives. Tens of thousands of tablets from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, destroyed in 612 BC, preserve dry, mathematical astronomical observations. Babylonian scholars judge the tablets from before the seventh century BC wrong, yet Velikovsky asks why scribes would labor to press false figures into clay for no reason, and why the manuals of that period record a different length of day, a different polar star, a different course of moon and planets. Everything, he says, ran differently before 700 BC.
Planetary gods and a solar system with a history (28:43)
Velikovsky turns to astronomy. If the earth changed, other members of the solar system changed with it. He reads the myth of the Theomachy, the battle of the gods, as a memory of that upheaval, and he keeps asking why the ancients worshipped the planetary gods — Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn, or Zeus, Ares, and Kronos to the Greeks, along with Mercury, or Hermes — and ranked them above the life-bringing sun. Babylonians, Hindus, and Chinese raised their hands to those planets and offered human sacrifice to them; American Indians still gave such sacrifice to the planet Venus within the last century. He says these practices demand a reason. Astronomers had assumed the solar system held no history at all, formed billions of years ago and unchanged since, whether out of the nebula Kant and Laplace described or by a passing star. If his account holds, the system changed, and changed recently.
Predictions: the moon, Mars, and Venus (32:24)
Velikovsky lists the predictions he drew from his theory. The moon must still be hot beneath its surface; its craters came from large meteorites striking it while it stayed viscous, from volcanism, or from electrical discharge. Since he wrote, observers detected more than three hundred unburst bubbles, or domes, on the moon, found it hot, mapped over a hundred glowing spots that give off their own light, and recorded gases venting from several craters; laboratory discharges reproduced the circular forms. Mars, a participant in the same events, came back moon-like, with no room for the intelligent beings once imagined behind its canals. Venus had to be hot. Until 1959 astronomers expected room temperature; radio measurements in 1961 read about 600 degrees Fahrenheit, and Mariner 2 found nearer 800. Velikovsky held that Venus had erupted from Jupiter, as the ancients saw and described, and as Jupiter’s mass, almost four hundred times that of Venus, allowed. From that he predicted a thick envelope of hydrocarbons around Venus. Observers found that envelope: fifteen miles thick, forty-five miles above the planet.
Celestial mechanics and the electromagnetic claim (36:12)
Could such events obey the laws of celestial mechanics? Velikovsky thinks an unusual run of circumstances allows it: a body on a long ellipse, slowed by some obstacle, would tighten to a shorter ellipse and then to a circle, the path he assigns to Venus. He notes that the cosmologist Raymond Lyttleton argued in 1959 and 1960, from his own calculations, that Venus had erupted from Jupiter, though Lyttleton placed the event far deeper in the past. Then Velikovsky states the claim his critics found most outrageous: electricity and magnetism take part in the mechanism of the solar system alongside gravitation and inertia. The Lord, he says, did more than wind a watch.
The confirmations (39:01)
Velikovsky points to the swift vengeance on that objection. Astronomers had treated electricity and magnetism as parlor tricks while these forces ran through neurology, botany, and chemistry. Radio noise from Jupiter, detected in 1955, satisfied one of his crucial tests. The magnetosphere around the earth turned up in 1958. The interplanetary magnetic field and the solar wind, plasma streaming along magnetic lines, followed in 1960, and the earth’s magnetic field proved to reach the moon. He observes that the memory has already reversed: tell an assembly of astronomers today that ten years ago they stood united against any electrical or magnetic force between celestial bodies, and they would start to doubt it ever happened. His opponents put it on record — a debate with the Royal Astronomer of England in an English magazine, an exchange in Harper’s with a Princeton astronomer, and a stack of articles against his first book.
Astral religion and collective amnesia (42:13)
With minutes left, Velikovsky returns to where he started. The ancient religions began as astral religions, and the audience can now guess the reason. As a psychiatrist he faces a phenomenon: the same events appear across the whole record, verse after verse and book after book. A reader once sent him an index counting more than two hundred and thirty biblical passages in his first book that point to these global upheavals. The Vedas carry them; so do the Mexican inscriptions, where Quetzalcoatl stands for the planet Venus and another figure for Mars. A traveler reads of bitumen falling from the sky and of mountains changing places and rising new, then stops at a motel, opens the Bible, and misses the very theme of the book. That, for a psychiatrist, is scotoma.
Velikovsky widens scotoma into collective amnesia. He traces how later writers forget what earlier ones recorded — Lucretius still remembers the world aflame while his contemporary Cicero already denies it; the New Testament, Revelation, the Sibylline books, and the Stoics before them speak of what later readers file under visions of the last day. Velikovsky gathers the converging evidence — astronomy, Babylonian astronomical records, legend, sacred text, philosophy, geology, the ocean, the planets — and asks what the forgetting means for us.
The danger in man (47:07)
Velikovsky ends on a grave note. Humankind is a victim of amnesia, and a victim of amnesia acts without responsibility; his technological power has outrun his grasp of the world his ancestors lived through and sometimes died in. A victim of amnesia who plays with thermonuclear weapons enters conflicts that have no cause. We share in that course: the wish not to know, the preference to forget, the hostility toward a book that repeats what thousands of ancient sources told already. Velikovsky names that hostility as the root of the violence against his work — the desire not to know — and he gives it as his reason for going to campuses and telling the young that what they are taught stays incomplete.
He has put a hundred questions before them, and he holds one above the rest. The solar system has come to peace — as the Hebrew prayer asks, the Lord who made peace in the heavens keeps the earth in peace — and the danger now sits in man himself. He closes with a correspondent’s image: the thermonuclear weapon as a symbol of the destructive celestial body that once exploded in the face of the earth, which man now longs to imitate, a child repeating a performance he does not understand. His time gone, Velikovsky opens the floor to questions.
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