Theos-Talk Archives (August 2005 Message tt00031)

8/9/2005 2:55 AM

Dear Cass

Who wrote this (was it Velikovsky ? and Where?) excellent critique that
reveals how much modern claimants to knowledge have culled from the ancients
and failed to give them credit?

At least we can say after reading HPB's works that she failed in that.

I have always admired the Velikovsky books.

Dallas
 

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-----Original Message-----
From: Cass Silva
Sent: Sunday, August 07, 2005 11:33 PM
To: 
Subject: Velikovksy's P 2


My Challenge to Conventional Views in Science 

 

“Books written about the solar system before the advent of the space age
could as well have been written in Latin or Greek, so dated do they appear
to a contemporary reader.”

Zdenek Kopal - THE SOLAR SYSTEM (Oxford University Press, 1973)


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“In my published books, notwithstanding often repeated allegations, no
physical law is ever abrogated or “temporarily suspended”; what I offered in
them is primarily a reconstruction of events from the historical past. 


Thus I did not set out to confront the existing views with a theory or
hypothesis and to develop it into a competing system. 


My work is first a reconstruction, not a theory; it is built upon studying
the human testimony as preserved in the heritage of all ancient
civilizations—all of them in texts bequeathed beginning with the time man
learned to write, tell in various forms the very same narrative that the
trained eye of a psychoanalyst could not but recognize as so many variants
of the same theme. 


In hymns, in prayers, in historical texts, in philosophical discourses, in
records of astronomical observations, but also in legend and religious myth,
the ancients desperately tried to convey to their descendants, ourselves
included, the record of events that took place in circumstances that left a
strong imprint on the witnesses. 


There were physical upheavals on a global scale in historical times; the
grandiosity of the events inspired awe. From the Far East to the Far
West—the Japanese, Chinese and Hindu civilizations; the Iranian, Sumerian,
Assyrian, Babylonian, Hitto-Chaldean, Israelite and Egyptian records; the
Etruscan, Attic and Roman theogonies and philosophies; Scandinavian and
Icelandic epics; Mayan, Toltec and Olmec art and legends—all, with no
exception, were dominated by the knowledge of events and circumstances that
only the most brazen attitude of science could so completely disregard. 


The scientific community starts its annals with Newton, paying some homage
to Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, unaware that the great ones of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries searched through classical authors of
antiquity for their great discoveries. 


Did not Copernicus strike out the name of Aristarchus of Samos from the
introduction to De Revolutionibus before he signed imprimatur on his work? 


Did not Tycho Brahe find the compromising theory of the Sun revolving around
the Earth—but Mercury and Venus circling around the Sun—in Heracleides of
Pontus, yet announce it as his own? 


Did not Galileo read of the equal velocity of heavy and light falling bodies
in Lucretius; 1 did not Newton read in Plutarch of the Moon removed from the
Earth by fifty-six terrestrial radii and impelled by gravitation to circle
around the Earth, the basic postulate of Newton’s Principia, and 2	did
not Halley read in Pliny about comets returning on their orbits?  


3 Then why does modern science disregard the persistent reports of
events witnessed and recorded in many languages in the writings of the
ancients and also transmitted from generation to generation by communities
unable to write, by American Indians, by the people of Lapland, the Voguls
of Siberia, the aborigines of tropical Africa, the Tahitians in the South
Pacific?


Why is theomachy the central theme of all cosmogonical myths? 


Should not a thinking man pause and wonder why the ancients in both
hemispheres worshipped planetary gods; why temples were erected to them, and
some are still standing; why sacrifices, even human sacrifices, were brought
to them? 


Why was Saturn or Cronos or Brahma the supreme deity to be replaced by
Jupiter of the Romans, Zeus of the Greeks, Ormuzd of the Iranians, Marduk of
the Babylonians, Shiva of the Hindus, Ammon of the Egyptians? 


Why did the planet Venus—Ishtar, Athene, Kukulcan of the Mayas or
Quetzalcohuatl of the Toltecs—become the feared deity, as I saw it
omnipresent in Yucatan, where I savored a few days this February, writing
this paper? 


Why is this Morning Star shown in sculpture as a feathered serpent on the
grandiose monuments of Uxmal and Chichen Itza, where temples were built, one
upon the other, if not to commemorate the ages, the last of which was
dominated by Huitzilopochtli, Ares of the Greeks, who protected the people
of Troy, while Athene clashed with him protecting the Achaean host?


Why was Mars of the Romans chosen as the protector of Rome, the greatest
empire after the Empire of Heaven (Livy), while Athene gave her name to the
capital of Attica, as Tanis to Tunisia? 


Why were human sacrifices brought in this country by the Pawnee Indians only
a few scores of years ago, every fifty-two years connected with the Venus
calendar? 


Why did the Ancient Assyrians mark on tens of thousands of clay tablets,
free from any mythological theme, astronomical observations, but all data
from before -687 are in contradiction to known values such as the duration
of the daily rotation of the Earth, the time of the vernal equinox—that by
the way was repeatedly transferred, as was also the beginning of the
year—the ratio of the longest and shortest days of the year, the length of
the month and of the year and the motion of the planets? The legends and
myths clearly point to an astral origin of all ancient religions.


The problem that occupied the minds of the Classicists, Meso-american
scholars. Orientalists, and students of social anthropology and mythology,
was not solved in any one of these disciplines separately. Like the early
memory of a single man, so the early memory of the human race belongs into
the domain of the student of psychology. 


Only a philosophically and historically, but also analytically trained mind
can see in the mythological subjects their true content—a mind that learned
in long years of exercise to understand the dreams and phantasies of his
fellow man.


Thus I entered a field that should be at the basis of the natural sciences,
not only of the human soul and of racial memories, and soon I observed that
the divisions in science are but artificial. I had to cross barriers. How
could I do otherwise? 


Upon the realization that we are unaware of the most fateful events in human
history, I had before me the task of explaining this well-known phenomenon
of repression, the realization of which could also become crucial to the
survival of the victim of amnesia playing with thermonuclear weapons. 


But before that I had the task of confronting the humanistic heritage with
the message of stones and bones—do geology and paleontology carry the same
testimony? I went again from shelf to shelf, once more around the Earth, and
the record from the bottom of the sea and from the top of the mountains,
from the deserts, jungles, tundras, lakes, rivers and waterfalls, told the
same story—documented in every latitude and in every longitude. 


This evidence is presented in EARTH IN UPHEAVAL, which I kept free from any
bit of testimony that can be classified as human heritage. 


The scenes of devastation, mass extinction of many species in circumstances
that are by far in excess of what can be considered as local catastrophe,
the simultaneous change of climate all over the globe thirty-four and
twenty-seven centuries ago, the drop of the level of the ocean and many
other phenomena observed, could not be accounted for but by paroxysms in
which the entire Earth was involved.


A psychological situation provoked the change in the attitude of the
scholarly world with the beginning of the Victorian age. 


The founders of the sciences of geology—Buckland, Sedgwick, and Murchinson
(who gave the classification of formations used today); of vertebrate
paleontology—Cuvier; and of ichthyology—Louis Agassiz—never doubted that
what they observed was the result of repeated cataclysms in which the entire
globe partook. 


Actually, Charles Darwin, observing the destruction of fauna in South
America, was convinced that nothing less than the shaking of the entire
frame of the Earth could account for what he saw. 


But the introduction of the principle of uniformitarianism by Charles Lyell,
a lawyer who never had field experience, and the acceptance of it on faith
by Charles Darwin, are a psychological phenomenon that I observed again and
again. 


Exactly those who, like Darwin, witnessed the omnipresent shambles of an
overwhelming fury of devastation on a continental scale, became the
staunchest defenders of the principle of uniformitarianism, that became not
just a law, but a principle that grew to a statute of faith in the natural
sciences, as if the reasoning that what we do not observe in our time could
not have happened in the past can in any measure claim to be philosophically
or scientifically true.



Obviously, a motive is at play that makes appear as scientific principle
what is but wishful thinking. 


For over a century after Copernicus man did not wish to believe that he
lives on an Earth that travels, and Francis Bacon and William Shakespeare
were not persuaded by that firebrand, Giordano Bruno, of the truth of the
Copemican doctrine. 


Even much less man wishes to face the fact that he travels on a rock in
space on a path that proved to be accident-prone. 


The victory of Darwin’s evolution by natural selection over a six-day
creation less than six thousand years ago made it appear that evolution, the
only instrument of which is competition, is the ultimate truth. But by
competition for survival or for means of existence, never could such
different forms as man and an insect with many legs evolve from the same
unicellular form, not even in the six billion years that replaced the
biblical six thousand. Mutations were necessary, and today we know that by
cosmic and x-rays, by thermal and chemical means—conditions brought aboutin
the catastrophes of the past—massive mutations can be achieved.


The pre-1950 astronomy followed the same pseudo-scientific statute of faith,
elevated to a fundamental principle, and made believe that the Earth and
other planets travel the same paths for the same six billion years, always
repeating the same serene circling. 


Against this violation of the principle of empiricism in science stood my
work. In it I rejected the postulate that the ancients, the Greek
philosophers Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Democritus and Plato included (O.
Neugebauer in THE EXACT SCIENCES IN ANTIQUITY wonders why Plato is
considered anywhere a philosopher of any rank 4) were childish in their
claims of repeated world conflagrations, and that the ancients were almost
imbeciles in their beliefs. 


The ancients, the canard goes, believed in the Earth placed on the back of a
tortoise. Thus it is preferred to start science three hundred years ago, and
my work was pronounced (by those who did not read it) as an act of
destruction of the entire edifice of science erected by the giants of
science since Copernicus.


I offered a series of claims that naturally followed from the
reconstruction. In science they are usually called predictions, but I prefer
to term them advance claims. 


Thus I claimed that Venus, due to its recent birth and dramatic though short
history, must be very hot under the clouds, nearly incandescent, and gives
off heat—it has not reached thermal balance; that it must have every massive
atmosphere; that the atmosphere consisted largely of hydrocarbons but that
if oxygen is present petroleum fires must be burning—thus explaining also
the present massive carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere; that sulfur
and iron (ferruginous pigment) must be present too; and that if the same
catalytic process that took place on the Earth when it was enveloped by
clouds of Venus’ origin takes place in Venus’ own clouds, they must consist
mainly of organic material infused with sulfur and iron molecules. Further,
I considered that Venus was disturbed in its rotation.


VENUS

Venus was found over 750°K. hot—many metals are incandescent at this
temperature—while the consensus of opinion among astronomers was 17°C.,3°
above the mean annual temperature on Earth. Venus was found rotating slowly
and retrogradely. The atmosphere was found very massive, 95 terrestrial
pressures near the ground surface, and not reckoning with this possibility,
the first Venera probes were crushed. The content of the clouds is still
unsolved, but in a paper in the Winter, 1973-74 issue of PENSÉE, a journal
dedicated to the reconsideration of my views, I elucidated that the spectral
features in the ultraviolet, near infrared, infrared and deep infrared can
be accounted for by organic matter, and so can the volatility and the index
of refraction. 


Nitrogen gas, expected by all specialists to comprise as much as 90% of the
atmosphere, was not found. The enigma of the very rich content of carbon
dioxide below the clouds is solved if the combustion of hydrocarbons took
and still takes place. 


I expect that the Venus Mariner X probe of this month will bring us nearer
to properly evaluating the content of Venus’ clouds. But the preliminary
report already says that “the manner in which that planet was born and
matured differed basically from that of Earth.” An editorial in the New York
Times, commenting on the bands and streaks first discovered by Mariner X,
spoke of an “uncanny similarity” to the bands “in the atmosphere of
Jupiter.” It added that “it is a problem that poses a formidable challenge
to astronomers.”


There are problems requiring study that were not discussed in WORLDS IN
COLLISION because the origin of Venus belongs to the volumes dealing with
the earlier catastrophes. 


How did Venus, in Latin, “the Newcomer,” escape from Jupiter four hundred
times more massive?— and Lyttleton’s work gives some idea; or how could
Venus be so much heavier per unit of volume than Jupiter?— either it was
expelled from inner parts of the giant planet, or gases like hydrogen
entered into chemical compounds of higher molecular weight. 


In WORLDS IN COLLISION I suggested that electrical discharges in the
atmosphere of ammonia and methane in which Jupiter is rich, would produce
hydrocarbons of heavy molecular weight—an experiment successfully performed
ten years later by A. T. Wilson. Further, I envisaged fusion of
elements—like oxygen to sulphur—in interplanetary discharges.


Orbiter and Surveyor probes of the Moon were followed by Apollo probes; and
on the historic night of July 21, 1969, when Man stepped on the Moon, I made
a series of claims in an article written at the invitation of the NEW YORK
TIMES, and spelled out earlier as well in memos to the Space Science Board
of the National Academy of Sciences. 


Strong magnetic resonance, I claimed, would be discovered in lunar rocks and
lavas, though the Moon itself hardly possesses any magnetic field
whatsoever. 


A steep thermal gradient would be found already a few feet under the
surface.


Thermo-luminescence would disclose that the Moon was heated considerably
only thousands of years ago. Hydrocarbons, preferably of aromatic structure,
would be found in small quantities, but carbides, into which hydrocarbons
would transform when heated, in substantial quantities; expressed
radioactivity would be detected in lunar soil and rocks; and several more
claims. 


Already following Apollo XI and XII the score was complete. But each of the
discoveries—steep thermal gradient, strong remnant magnetism, recent heating
of the lunar surface, carbides and traces of aromatic hydrocarbons, and rich
radioactivity of the rocks and dust— evoked exclamations of surprise and at
best some far fetched, ad hoc hypotheses. 


Magnetic anomalies, especially where interplanetary bolts fell, and huge
enclaves of neon and argon 40 in lunar rocks, were also claimed by me in
advance of the findings.


The Mars probes disclosed, as I had claimed in WORLDS IN COLLISION, a dead
planet that went through enormous cataclysmic events, not unlike the Moon.
The “canali” proved to be not the product of intelligent work, but rifts
caused by twisting of strata. 


Like on the Moon, enormous craters resulted from bubbling, but some
formations, especially surrounded with “rays,” resulted, in my view, from
interplanetary discharges.


When last December [1973] I was invited to address the scientists of the
Langley Space Research Center that prepares the June 1976 Viking probes to
Mars, I was told of the program and shown the module. I found that my 1945
copyrighted view, printed also in WORLDS IN COLLISION, of the possible
abundant presence of argon and neon in the atmosphere of Mars, then a very
far-fetched idea, is now incorporated in the program of the 1976 Viking
probes. 


Today, in one of the alternative atmosphere models (the other has nitrogen
richly presented -- the same alternative I discussed in WORLDS IN
COLLISION), NASA anticipates as much as 33.3% argon in the atmosphere, but,
in my opinion, too little— 666 parts per million —neon. Actually, in 1969 I
saw my assumption indirectly confirmed when after I expressed my expectation
of rich inclusions of argon and neon in lunar rocks, such enigmatic
inclusions were found. I based my expectation on the realization that in the
eighth century before the present era Mars and the Moon repeatedly came into
near-contacts.


I would speculate that the red color of Mars, due mainly to the ferruginous
material acquired from Venus when the latter displaced it from its orbit (in
the theomachy described in great detail in the Iliad), may partly be due
also to an electrical effect in a neon-rich Martian atmosphere. 


I recommended in my lecture and consultation at Langley Space Research
Center several tests not found in their program as it stands now:

1. To study the electrical nature of the sandstorms, occasionally
reaching the velocity of one hundred to two hundred miles per hour, in the
rarefied atmosphere of the planet. 


2. To search for strong remnant magnetism of rocks and lavas, not just
to photograph soil particles attractable to a magnet. As just explained,
iron particles will be found in abundance. In future probes anomalous
remnant magnetism will be discovered near places where electrical bolts
emerged or fell. 


3. To search for expressed radioactivity of the rocks and regolith,
especially near large circular formations that resulted from interplanetary
discharges. 


4. To investigate the thermal gradient, presumably rather steep, even
if only at the depth of two or three feet. 


5. To perform a thermo-luminescence experiment on glass-like particles
in the Martian soil which will disclose a very recent heating of the Martian
surface; if it were not for the expected radioactivity on Mars, the proper
result would be twenty-seven centuries for the last heating. 


The logic that led me to these conclusions and suggestions was the same that
made me make similar advance claims concerning the Moon before the lunar
landings.


I understand that the program will be dominated by an effort to find out
whether there is or there was life on Mars; organic materials will be
searched for and I count with the possibility that traces of hydrocarbons
may be found in the Martian soil, but almost all hydrocarbons must have
turned into carbide rocks by heating; cultures of possible micro-organisms
will be investigated for changes in color and for the production of gases.


In WORLDS IN COLLISION I compiled descriptions from many sources of a widely
spread pestilence that accompanied Mars’ close approaches; it is not
excluded that Mars is richly populated by micro-organisms pathogenic to man.
I suggested an inclusion of a microscope in the equipment of Viking and, if
possible, of an electron microscope for the study of viruses. I do not
discount the probability that the seasonal changes in the color of the
Martian surface may be due to seasonal microbial or other low vegetative
activity.


It is preferable to postpone the second Viking probe, now planned as
identical with the first and following it by one month, in order to rework
the program and to include the instruments needed for the test I enumerated.


When earlier, a year and a half ago, in August [1972] , I was invited to
lecture and consult at Ames Space Research Center (Division of Exobiology),
I suggested also that microbial life able to catalyze can possibly be found
in Venus’ clouds, lower forms of insect life on Jupiter, and primitive plant
life on Saturn, besides what I said now of Mars. So much for cosmology and
also the evolution of life.


If I was completely at odds with the cosmogony that had the solar system
without history since creation, I was also carrying my heresy into a most
sacred field, the holy of holies of science—celestial mechanics. 


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