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Recovering the Lost World,
A Saturnian Cosmology -- Jno Cook
Chapter 1: Introduction.


A [Table of Contents] of all the chapters in HTML here.
A [Table of Contents] of all the chapters as PDF here.

$Revision: 30.8 $
Contents of this chapter: [The Sledgehammer of Ignorance] [The Other Side of the Coin] [Disbelieving the Historic Record] [What this Site Is About] [What Others Say] [Why This Text Is Presented] [Who I Am] [The History of Objections] [Collation and Synthesis] [Endnotes]

"... a large planet stood above the North Pole for a very long time."

That is what all the mythology throughout the world uniformly states -- mythology from every nation, region, tribe, and period, in thousands of languages, in hundreds of forms, from every continent -- they all resound, "a large planet stood above the North Pole for a very long time." Every country, that is, except those more than 10 degrees below the equator.

The mythology of regions as far removed as Siberia, North Africa, and Guatemala all agree. If the mythology is true (and what other conclusion could be drawn), then the fact that a large planet stood at the northern horizon is true. How this could be, is a matter which this text will attempt to address.

I will suggest that this planet was Saturn. From other sources we can estimate that the planet Saturn moved on a wildly elliptical path around the Sun in the remote past, entering the Solar System at very long intervals. Some time in the last 6 to 3 million years, perhaps after passing close to Jupiter, Saturn was placed in a much closer orbit around the Sun, very near Earth. From about 9000 BC, Saturn captured and held the Earth in a sub-polar position until 3100 BC, when Earth broke away.

"You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place."
-- Jonathan Swift

This is, however, exactly what I will attempt to do with this text: I will try to tell the actual history of the world and humanity -- in the face of knee-jerk reactions and spitting noises by those who know better. This is not my story, but the efforts of a great many other people, and based on evidence in plain view.

My starting point is the postulate that myths throughout the world should be taken at face value. For the recurring worldwide mythology this is almost completely obvious. No other form of meaning can be assigned.

An attempt to apply local cultural conditions and limited attitudes to mythology, meets with failure because of a lack of appreciation of the enormous extent of mythology throughout the world, and the constant refrain of identical themes by peoples who have remained completely foreign to each other -- who have never had cultural contact. Any theory of mythology based on limited and local aspects will fail to translate to the hundreds of additional instances across the world.

This holds also for notions of ritual, of model behavior, of allegories of nature, of personifications of the weather, and any other metaphorical meanings. All these myopic attempts fail utterly in the face of the wide diversity of meaning among languages and grammars, and not least also in the enormous cultural differences between peoples. All explanations of the origins of myths are doomed to failure when based on a limited scope.

This leaves only the historicity of mythology. It has an evidential character which is absolute. If myth tells us that a large planet stood above the northern horizon, then we are stuck with this as fact. It cannot be negated or waived aside. It only remains to investigate how this could have been so.

Of course it is not always as astoundingly clear as in this instance. Frequently we are met with wording which is no longer understood, and frequently it will be easier for us to elicit metaphor from our culture and our language in an attempt to explain the inexplicable. This is probably the most frequently made mistake in investigating mythology.

Mythology represents a history stretching into the depths of time. On the other hand, the accepted mainstream history is a 2000-year record of denial and eradication, created for the sake of the comfort of your soul and your psyche. If the pretensions of conventional wisdom suit you, you should stop reading here, for this particular story will get progressively stranger. Be comforted, though, that it will not be about crashing meteors, undetected planets, or visits by aliens.

Returning now to that large object in the sky:

"The evidence of myth which points to Saturn having once occupied a position above Earth's north polar regions is voluminous. There is not a race on Earth that has not preserved at least one account which states as much. According to this evidence, Saturn occupied a central position in the north celestial regions. It rotated, and rotated widely; but other than that, it was immovable.
-- Dwardu Cardona (1978) [note 1]

It rotated, in fact, in a circle around the polar axis. From a vantage point 15 to 20 degrees of latitude further south than Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Guatemalan Popol Vuh recounts that it rose out of the ocean and sank back into it every day for what appears to have been some 6000 years, long before it flared up like a sun, and its later daily brightening.

The Sledgehammer of Ignorance

If you think the image of a large planet at the pole is strange, consider these comments by the historians of science and philosophy, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, both at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s, in Hamlet's Mill: an Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time (1977). Von Dechend writes, in the Introduction:

"It was after having spent more than a year over at least 10,000 pages of Polynesian myths collected in the 19th century ... that the annihilating recognition of our complete ignorance came down upon me like a sledgehammer: there was no single sentence that could be understood."

But that was only a single instance from the complete compendium of mythological tales of the past. Von Dechend specifically noted for the Polynesian myths she was looking at (10,000 pages!) that:

"But then, if anybody was entitled to be taken seriously, it had to be the Polynesians guiding their ships securely over the largest ocean of our globe, navigators to whom our much praised discoverers from Magellan to Captain Cook confided the steering of their ships more than once. Thus, the fault had to rest with us, not with Polynesian myth."

De Santillana and Von Dechend eventually turned to astronomy in an attempt to find a resolution to the primary theme of ancient mythology -- that object, real or fictional, above the northern horizon. But they never achieved a synthesis, because they insisted on remaining entirely within the framework of handed-down uniformitarian astronomy, which assumes that things have always been as they are today.

The Other Side of the Coin

"When analyzing the origin and evolution of the solar system, we should recognize that its present structure is a result of a long series of complicated processes."
-- Hannes Alfven, at http://history.nasa.gov/

Things have not always been as they are today. Even NASA recognizes this. I will propose an alternative, defendable, and reasonable model of history which is entirely cohesive and complete as a template which allows elucidation of all of world mythology, fitting it properly to times and places. There will not be a single mythical element which cannot be understood and placed in time.

So, for example, when Von Dechend starts extensive speculation about who was the father of Hamlet (the "Amlethus" of the 12th century Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus), we can close up the six pages of meanderings of her Appendix 2 with the single statement that it was "He of the Arrows" -- who was the figure seen periodically for 4000 years in the south skies since 8300 BC. The existence is known from contemporary research of ancient petroglyphs and laboratory plasma stream discontinuities (by others), and reported on later in this text.

Hamlet is Saturn, the planet above the north horizon. Saturn of the north horizon has a voluminous mythology. "He of the Arrows" is the southern ball plasmoid, 435,000 miles below the South Pole (and offset by about 15 or 30 degrees), identified by Anthony Peratt's group of plasma researchers in 2003. "He of the Arrows" is "She of the Arrows," the Egyptian and North African goddess Neith.

It is so simple. The template developed in these texts fits almost all mythology with great ease and manages to explain both the many concepts which have remained entirely discordant under uniformitarian consensus, as well as many baffling ideas and images which have eluded competent researchers in catastrophism. I have been amazed at this, but perhaps I should not have been, since I took pains to make sure that all of the model would operate under established physics, and that the dates could be ascertained with some reliability. That altogether took ten years.

Disbelieving the Historic Record

But of course, many will disbelieve and deride the concept of an alternative history, for it was not learned at their mother's knee. Most people have never actually tested the logic of the mainstream scenarios. The orthodoxy just "feels so right," because it is promulgated by a consensus of the established community of scientists, astronomers, and historians. (The last two disciplines operate entirely within the vacuum of the mind.) It is so here and now; it is everywhere; it's as accepted as religion, and with as little basis in logic. Any alternative to their conventional cosmology is thought to be impossible. Can we argue with such thinkers?

So, if you need to ask: none of the information presented here has been published as scientific opinions in peer-reviewed professional journals. There are no clinical trials underway. My readers either understand and agree or they retain an absolute silence. Over the last ten years I have only been faulted once -- for my claim that mountains existed before the flood of Noah.

Ralph Juergens, in 1972, in a brief evaluation of reasons for the "emotional outburst from the community of astronomers" (in particular) to the writings of Immanuel Velikovsky, wrote in summary about the scientific community:

"... I believe it is only fair to acknowledge an underlying and totally sincere scientific disbelief in the historical record."

Is that amazing? The major portion of the historical record is the record of mythology. Juergens here plainly translates mythology to history, as I do also. We can imagine personality disorders for the generation of knee-jerk psychological defense to perceived attacks, for academic exclusionary politics, and for the resentment at being bested -- all resulting from Velikovsky's book -- but what is the excuse for a disbelief in history? [note 2]

What This Site Is Really About

This is a cosmology. It is not the traditional handed-down narrative passed off as the history of everything. It is an alternative, but it is very extensive, quite complete, and more than accurate. My method is to hold worldwide mythology as absolute and believable, although at times very obscure. My method subsequent to this starting position was to develop, in turn, a chronology, the celestial mechanics, the collection myths and iconography, and then turn to a narrative. As an alternative cosmology it has remained within the accepted boundaries of physics and dating. This has continued to surprise me as the details developed. I have had no problem with the integration of the iconography, the odd events, and the obscure mythological phrasings, where other alternative cosmologies have had to resort to analogical and metaphorical readings of the past, or suggest improbable exploding bolides.

In the realm of orthodox cosmology, we are currently (2007) seeing astrophysicists, atomic physicists, and archaeologists doing exactly that, that is, suggesting improbable exploding bolides in attempts to explain an event in 12,500 bp (before the present) which caused the complete destruction of all the megafauna of the North American continent, plus an absolutely stupendous conflagration which vaporized everything organic and melted rocks. To explain these data, published papers have alternately posited an influx of meteors, aerially exploding ice balls from space, the propagation of flaming shockwaves from kinetic energy conversion in the air (even though there is no such thing), and the influx of atomic particles from a supernova. The establishment scientists are lost, and by their own admission they are grasping at straws.

But there is a straightforward answer. It lies in the predictable effects of repulsive electric force between planets when their plasmaspheres intersect -- which is what I will propose. For some almost inexplicable reason, such forces and such interactions cannot be conceived of or even discussed within the realm of consensus science, especially in astrophysics, despite the fact that electrical fields have been the stock of electrical engineering since the early 19th century. That's 200 years.

"When the moment arrived for the inevitable encounter [between plasmaspheres], [the] sheaths would make contact. Unleashed electric fields would clash. Almost instantly, forces immeasurably greater than gravitation would be brought to bear on the charged bodies. Cosmic thunderbolts would flash between the bodies in an effort to equalize their electric potentials."
-- Ralph Juergens, "Reconciling Celestial Mechanics and Velikovskian Catastrophism" (Pensee 1972)

The forces "immeasurably greater than gravitation" are real. They are electrically repulsive, are billions of times stronger than gravity, and operate at the speed of light. "Cosmic thunderbolts" take longer, and would be delayed until a reversed charge was induced.

Juergens continues with:

"The list of unthinkably disastrous effects that would result could go on and on. The point to be made, however, is that Worlds in Collision [Immanuel Velikovski's book] -- at least in my opinion -- documents historical evidence to indicate that phenomena associated with spacecharge-sheath destruction were actually suffered and survived by peoples of antiquity."

The attractive force between unlike charges is about 20 orders of magnitude greater than the attractive force due to gravity -- thus it is greater by a factor of 10 exp 20. That is 10 followed by 20 zeroes. Gravity drops off with the square of the separation distance. That is also true for point electrical charges, but for charged spheres the force drops off only as the simple inverse of the separation distance. Repulsive electrical forces between objects with a like charge follows the same schema. It is here thus assumed that planets are negatively charged to rather extreme values (a surface charge). This awareness is only slowly creeping into the field of celestial mechanics.

It is absolutely astounding that in the 40 years since 1972 no one has taken proper account of the repulsive forces first introduced here by Juergens, but also in neglecting the time delay before electrical arcs would pass between planets. When Juergens writes "Almost instantly forces immeasurable ..." and "Cosmic thunderbolts would flash ..." most readers fail to realize the delay between these two separate actions. It seems to have been universally assumed that the thunderbolts result instantaneously from sensing a difference in potential, perhaps because one sentence follows directly on the other. The difference in potential which causes the "cosmic thunderbolt" does not exist until it is induced (which takes time) and the thunderbolt is further delayed by the time it takes for electrons and ions to travel from one planet to the other. Interplanetary lightning strikes are almost benign compared to the destructive interaction due to the likeness in potential.

What is also astounding is the shear lunacy of Velikovskian researchers, almost none of whom had the slightest background in physics or engineering, of insisting, for a span of thirty or forty years (as did Velikovsky), that somehow an interaction of magnetic fields between planets would account for changes in the Earth's orbit and Earth's axial inclination -- despite the fact that the two planets accused of interfering with Earth, Venus and Mars, have no magnetic field.

Much of this was due to Velikovsky's insistence on the primacy of magnetic fields while ignoring electric fields. This idea remained in the foreground as long as it was thought that the planetary interaction genuinely involved "collisions" or "near collisions." Everyone has played with magnets and understands their effectiveness at close distances. Almost no one has any feel for the wallop packed by electric charges at great distances.

Orthodoxy holds that things always were as they are today, and no other condition can enter the imagination and certainly cannot present itself as fact. Yet all indications from the recent past are that things were different -- even the very arrangement of the Solar System differed from the conditions of today.

What is most important about the changes in the arrangement of the Solar System, many of which were catastrophic, is the cultural and psychological reaction of the people of Earth to these events. The last 1000 years of the period when Saturn stood above the North Pole (9000 BC to 3100 BC), was remembered as the "Era of the Gods" and subsequent human history has been a singular effort to regain the Paradise of that time. This period was followed by a series of adjustments in planetary orbits, some of which also had significant effects on Earth and on human history.

Humans changed after Paradise closed -- not just the rapid changes to what we would call civilization, but also the acquisition of subjective consciousness. The response to catastrophic events determined how we became fully human. To say it would have happened anyway does not hold up. There could have been any number of other outcomes. We could still be chipping flints. After all, we did that for more than a million years.

One More Thing

After recently (2010) rereading David Talbott's The Saturn Myth, de Santillana and von Dechend's Hamlet's Mill, Dwardu Cardona's God Star, plus essays by Ev Cochrane and Alfred de Grazia, I am again astounded at the scope of information which has been brought to bear on the Saturnian Cosmology so far. In this essay I am providing no more than cursory information. I have skipped most of the worldwide information on myths already tracked down by other researchers. Additionally, there is no reason to weigh down a narrative with thousands of "op cit" and "ibid" footnotes (which are too unrevealing and foster the decontexualization of primary sources).

What is missing from the wide-ranging efforts of other researchers, however, is a coherent analysis of Mesoamerican sources. I have added this. But it could not have been done without the prior exposition, by others, of the sequence of events as described in Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indian, and Chinese sources. I am also indebted to earlier commentators and chronographers from Augustine to Ussher.

So, after writing most of this text, I started to look at the ceremonial centers used in antiquity by the Olmecs of Veracruz and the people of the Valley of Mexico. I wanted to verify the solstitial site alignments which Vincent H. Malmstrom (Malmström), writing in Cycles of the Sun, Mysteries of the Moon (1997), had suggested existed for sites from Guatemala to Mexico (as well as similar claims by Anthony Aveni).

My thinking was, that if some of these sites were established before 685 BC, there certainly would be evidence of the Earth's axis being inclined to 30 degrees (as I will claim later in this text), instead of today's inclination of 23.5 degrees. At the solstice the sun would set at about 32 degrees north of west, rather than 24 degrees (as today). Since Mesoamerican sites are consistently aligned to important sunsets (rather than to cardinal directions), this indication should have been obvious and easy to detect.

I looked at 15 sites and found none. There simply were no solstitial alignments at all, with one exception, which may have been a coincidence. There were no solstitial alignments for today's arrangement of the skies, nor for the earlier one.

What I found instead for almost all the sites, were alignments to the setting of the zenithal sun (the day the sun exactly overpasses a particular site). It became clear that the location of any new site was selected so that the sun passing directly overhead (which happens two days each year) would set at a mountain or in a volcano on the western or northwestern horizon. The sites were selected to correspond to an alignment within 1/3 degree of this.

Additionally I found alignments (of sunsets) to six calendar dates, at some sites selected for the condition of a 23.5-degree axial inclination of the Earth, at other sites for 30 degrees. Only two sites (Cuicuilco and Tlapacoya) mixed alignment under different axial conditions. All these site alignments also pointed to giant mountains and the largest volcanoes in this region of Mexico, often hundreds of miles away, and often out of view.

I used the latitude and longitude of 11 volcanoes and large mountains in central Mexico to check against the latitude and longitude of 13 early and well-established sites in the Olmec region and the Valley of Mexico (plus two sites elsewhere). Because latitudes and longitudes are today well established for both the sites and the mountains, my results are much more accurate than the data gathered by Vincent Malmstrom (Cycles of the Sun, Mysteries of the Moon 1979), and by Anthony Aveni (Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico 1980), both of which are consistently wrong in their listed data and as a result in their conclusions.

After considering sources from the eastern Mediterranean, I was able to tie the calendar dates to the catastrophic events of 2349 BC (September 8), 1492 BC (April 19), 747 BC (February 28), and 685 BC (four dates in June and July).

The dates turn out to represent the "flood of Noah" in 2349 BC (as the culmination of the Pleiades), the Earth shock of 1492 BC (recorded in Exodus), the shock of 747 BC (the start of the Babylonian "Era of Nebonasser" and the Roman calendar), plus a distribution of four dates which can be assigned to a Solar nova event of 685 BC, in the months of June and July. [note 3]

What is interesting here is that the equivalent (seasonal) calendar dates which were found are likely to be very correct, even if the year these events are assigned to is not. To have the alignments of 13 sites consistently show up on 6 days only is well beyond random. Alignments for matching calendar dates vary only by a fraction of a degree between calculated and observed values from site to site. Among the 13 sites I looked at, there were 25 alignments assigned to the date of 2349 BC, 16 to 1492 BC, 10 to 747 BC, and 22 to three dates in 685 BC. In all there were some 70 identical alignments used by 13 sites, plus 10 alignments for the setting Sun after an overhead (zenithal) passage of the Sun for a site.

Later chapters will deal with these Mesoamerican sources -- the Maya calendar, the record of the "First Creation" in 8347 BC, the history of the world since the "Second Creation" of 3147 BC, the event known as the "Third Creation" of 2349 BC, the cosmological crisis of 685 BC, the search for the "day of Kan," and an exposition of the Popol Vuh.

What Others Say

A few comments from readers, from infrequent emails.

Why This Text Is Presented on the Internet

There is a lack of a comprehensive narrative of events among the catastrophic literature. This is a void I have been attempting to fill over the last few years, initially for my own benefit. The advantage of a web site is that it is completely malleable -- it can be easily changed, added to, corrected, and expanded, while simultaneously making the information available. The alternative of publishing all of this in book form would delay the availability, limit distribution to a select few, and allow no updates. Also, by going public, I am forced to complete the investigation and am under pressure to make all of it coherent. Amazingly, additional details kept coming forward as the edits continued.

Who I Am

I am a visual artist (sculpture, installations), living in Chicago where I teach photography. I have a background in electrical engineering, public administration, programming, and cinematography, and a curiosity dating back a lifetime. More information is available at my website [http://jnocook.net].

The History of Objections

This website takes Velikovsky's groundbreaking work, his book Worlds in Collision (1950), as a starting point for the development of a history of antiquity which answers more questions than any other alternative cosmology, and certainly more than the standard uniformitarian cosmology.

I should add a note on Velikovsky, since people tend to hold pre-formed opinions of him which are derived from rather scurrilous condemnations by the scientific community. In this respect it is interesting to note that although the force of Worlds in Collision is almost entirely constituted by mythological texts and classical literature, all of the criticism revolved around physical aspects of the proposed theory, and most of these were so weak that they had to be overdramatized to attempt any effect.

These knee-jerk reactions, which still exist today, resulted from a symposium held by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1974. This was to represent the ultimate and final excommunication of Velikovsky in a trial of scientificisms performed by the AAAS. By that time, 20 years after his first publication, all too many predictions and corollaries formed by Velikovsky had been verified, based mainly on data gathered from the space program. Velikovsky had become an embarrassment to astronomy, and meanwhile Velikovsky was on a program of standing-room-only university lectures.

James Hogan, in Kicking the Sacred Cow (2004), writes:

"Organized science had tried every tactic of distortion, evasion, misrepresentation, intimidation, vilification, and suppression of evidence to slay the monster that threatened the entire foundation of the collective uniformitarian world-view and mind-set. But after twenty years, interest in Velikovsky's theories was not only getting stronger with the apparent vindication from all quarters that was getting past the censorship and receiving coverage."

About the AAAS proposal for the symposium he writes:

"It soon became clear that the intention was not to stage an impartial debate, but a court of inquisition, where the verdict had been determined. The aim was not to give Velikovsky a hearing but to discredit him in the eyes of the press and the public. ... In this it was resoundingly successful and for the most part remains so to the present time."

The AAAS symposium opened with a statement by astronomer Ivan King:

"No one who is involved in the organization of this symposium believes that Dr. Velikovsky's ideas are correct. Yet millions of people have read his books and after more than twenty years of condemnation by the scientific establishment he still has a large and often devoted following. ... It is in this spirit that we present this morning's symposium,"

Hogan paraphrased this as, "We're here to stamp out heresy."

Carl Sagan was the featured speaker at the symposium. He more than met the expectations of his fellow panel members. Hogan became so disgusted at the barrage of misquotes, mistaken "facts," errors, and untruths being expounded, that Hogan spends some 20 pages discussing ten topics broached by Sagan. The AAAS printed up the proceedings, but without allowing responses from Velikovsky. The papers of the 1974 AAAS conference appeared in Donald W. Goldsmith, Scientists Confront Velikovsky (1977). The introduction by Isaac Asimov begins with, "What does one do with a heretic?" Indeed! Asimov's essay goes on to suggest that miracles by God are a more likely solution to the catastrophes recorded in the Bible: "the hypothesis that divine intervention caused the miracles." In later recollections by Sagan in Broca's Brain (1979) the television-personality astronomer accused Velikovsky of delusions of Bible religiosity and astrology. I couldn't believe this.

Science magazine gloated in 1978 about the AAAS proceedings:

"As far as Velikovskianism is concerned it is dead and buried. The final nail has been driven."
-- Science, v.l99, Jan. 20, 1978, pp.288-9)

Leroy Ellenberger, in a much later critique of Velikovsky titled "Still Facing Many Problems" (Kronos, 1984), remarked:

"Most often, spokesmen for mainstream science such as Sagan, Asimov, Gardner, and Oberg have not expressed their criticisms using valid arguments but, rather, tend to substitute polemic, ridicule, and caricature for serious discussion. The resulting performances are riddled with errors and are received by Velikovskian partisans with diminished credibility."

What is happening here? Let me quote Edward T. Hall, who in Beyond Culture (1976) sums up the reaction to telling people that their world is misconceived:

"When other people call attention to ... perceptual differences, suggesting that the world is not as one perceives it, these observations can be unsettling. To do so is to suggest that a person is incompetent, not properly motivated, ignorant, or even infantile."

This is exactly what Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision did to the astronomers of the USA. And their reactions were completely infantile, because the unspoken implications were that they were incompetent and ignorant, and they were being told so by an outsider.

Euan W. MacKie, had earlier addressed the reaction to Worlds in Collision by scientists who lacked "training in the handling of historical evidence." In "Challenge to the Integrity of Science" (New Scientist, 1973) MacKie writes:

"Nevertheless, such understandable scepticism hardly explains the violence of the reaction against the book and its author, from certain quarters of the scientific establishment in the United States in the years following its publication. So outrageous were some aspects of this reaction when compared with the strictly rational ethic which is supposed to govern the scientist in his evaluation of new work that the situation eventually attracted the attention of the psychologists."

In fact nothing explains the "violence of the reaction" except the rather preposterous suggestion that Velikovsky was right in his analysis from mythology and ancient history. Velikovsky was, at any rate, a genuine threat, and not to be dismissed as a quack.

Besides Cosmic Heretics (1983), Alfred de Grazia has authored, with Ralph Juergens and Livio Stecchini, The Velikovsky Affair (1966, 1978), updated from earlier experiences in 1978. Lynn Rose produced articles in Kronos, "Just Plainly Wrong," in 1977 and 1978. Nearly 20 years later, Charles Ginenthal penned Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky (1995). Many others wrote also about the AAAS exercise in exorcism. [note 4]

But all to no avail. There is no right and wrong in all of this, there is nothing to prove. My feeling is that participation in the symposium was a complete waste of time and a mistake which backfired. Nothing was proven through debate of the theories. Besides, you do not need the truth. The establishment owns a complete culture of empty fictions -- the Big Bang, Black Holes, Dark Matter, the Dark Ages of Greece, Sothic dating, and the pretentious paradigm of Absolute Gradualism. None of it is real, yet all of it is accepted as Gospel Truth. What the Velikovskians needed was marketing by professionals -- not some self-generated precepts of decisive proof of their theories. There is no decisive proof.

"The practice of advancing priorities is childish and the idea of proving a general cosmogony by a race of claims is ludicrous. There can be no crucial test or event.
-- de Grazia, in Cosmic Heretics (1984)

Going back to the period directly after (and even before) the publication of Worlds in Collision, let me present some of those first reactions and some analysis by others, because some of this is still mouthed today as absolute proof:

The error on the composition of the atmosphere of Venus was a "complete disproof" of Worlds in Collision wrote an editor of Skeptic magazine. "He did not understand the mechanism for [Venusian] heat," Carl Sagan added, speaking specifically to Sagan's "greenhouse theory" of Venus, which today stands disproven. The book is "totally falsified by the orbit of the Moon," wrote astronomer Philip Plait in Astronomy, meaning that Venus could not have come close to Earth (Wikipedia). We know that. Philip Plait today runs the "BadAstronomy.com" website.

Much of the objection of the Establishment revolved entirely around unspecific calls to uphold the "laws of nature," as Livio Stecchini noted in The Velikovsky Affair (by De Grazia, Juergens, Stecchini, 1978). That, plus evocations of the names of Newton and Laplace.

Almost the complete series of objections presented by Wikipedia today (some listed above), although purported to be "historical" anecdotes, is in error, or is of no current import. While many of the initial celestial suppositions of Velikovsky have proven to be wrong, his corollaries have been correct, despite the fact that in the 1950s the astronomical establishment absolutely railed against them.

One outstanding and contrary element, however, is the following: Wikipedia reads: "He proposed that electromagnetic forces could be the cause of the movement of the planets, although such forces between astronomical bodies are essentially zero."

These forces are, in fact, zero, unless the plasmaspheres of planets of nearly equal surface potentials intersect -- and then the forces are absolutely stupendous, so much so that even today many catastrophists shun all mention of repulsive forces between planets, for without a grounding in electrical field theory, it simply cannot be imagined how these forces act or how large they could be. They are, in fact, billions on billions of times larger than gravitational forces, but will remain hidden and inactive within the shielding plasmaspheres of the planets. This is how Venus "collided" with Earth at a distance of 20,000,000 miles.

I would never have made any sense of any of this if it were not for the elucidation provided by the writings of Ralph Juergens, Wal Thornhill, and Don Scott, which readily explain virtually all the planetary interactions in electrical terms. Additionally, the mythological aspects of my model developed out of writings and theories developed by David Talbott and Julian Jaynes, to whom I am also greatly indebted. [note 5]

Collation and Synthesis

For me the "mythological" texts remained as prima facie evidence, and the physical model would have to be found to match them. For example, Velikovsky suggested, on the basis of Greek "legends," that Venus had been propelled out of Jupiter. Because this is so unlikely, the question which should have been asked is, What view of the planets, seen from Earth, would suggest this to the Greeks? This was actually very easy to resolve. But looking for a solution was not something which ever crossed the minds of any of the hundreds of critics of the 1950s. [note 6]

This site is thus a collation and synthesis of the efforts of many other people to recoup the past and a restatement of their work. Most of the information has been published previously. However, I could only accept parts of the previously published writings. As would be expected, a portion of these prior sources is conjectural when based on unsound chronology, impractical when based on poorly understood physics, and pure fantasy when based on analogies.

In an attempt to put it all together, I am providing a narrative text of acceptable findings and adding what I feel is missing: a sound chronology, realistic mechanics, and an extrapolation to events not recognized by many researchers.

I collected available material and put it in order, and, when it no longer made sense, started writing. Sometimes writing corrected defects in the "theory," sometimes I had flashes of insight, sometimes I never found a solution. But overall, the construction of a cohesive narrative resolved every significant outstanding "problem" which other researchers had run into, although at times it took months to find a solution -- however obvious it turned out to be.

I did not include sources for most of the information in this text since all I am doing is remapping areas already explored by others and all of it is readily available, although scattered over many sites and books.

I should warn that the subject matter here is not any sort of accepted science narrative. It is a cosmology based on a set of reasonable starting postulates. The postulates, like those of any cosmology, are untestable. However, the established theories of physics can be applied to these and this results in an amazing concordance of information in agreement with the initial postulates, historical recollections, and observable facts. It is this which confers validity on the explication pursued here. It suggests sensible answers to questions about the history of mankind, the Earth, the Solar System, and the Universe which have remained completely unanswered by the traditional "handed-down wisdom." The sum total of the conclusions derived here goes much further to constitute a cohesive "world-view" than traditional opinions and narratives have done.

This cosmology can explain everything from the geology of the Earth to the astrophysics of the Solar system. Other people have expanded on separate facets extensively. My first concern was to provide a chronology and a mechanics (see the Appendixes A and B). The connecting narrative came later. In this narrative my main interest has been to trace the origins of contemporary cultural practices. Of greatest importance, from my point of view, is that a Saturnian cosmology provides an explanation of the actions and thoughts of our ancestors and insight into our contemporary behavior and thinking.

Let me state at the outset that I have no particular axe to grind, no politics to promote, this is not a "creationist's young earth" thesis, I do not hold to extraterrestrial interventions, I have no religious or theistic proposals to make, nor do I put stock in the "Elohim" of the Old Testament. I'll remain within accepted physics -- I will not propose new solutions to gravity or offer new "forces" for you to consider, or have planets arbitrarily leave their orbits. And I'll use accepted dates and dating.

I started this essay in late 2001. I never meant to write as much as I did, but people asked, "So what came before 4200 BC?" That alone resulted in nine additional chapters. And then there were minor questions on items I had never paid much attention to, like, "Why was Sirius red in antiquity?" and "What about the two latitudes of Babylon?"

And then, as noted directly below, I started to look at Mesoamerica, which resulted in seven more chapters. So, after completing most of the narrative described in these pages in March of 2006, I came across the Books of the Chilam Balam Of Chumayel of the Yucatan Maya which were written shortly after the invasion by the Spanish. These were an attempt to secretly keep ancient myths and tales alive.

I was astounded to find among the texts a step-by-step rendition of the course of the "creation of the world" dating back to long before 3100 BC, followed by an accounting of other catastrophic events. The events are described in the same detail as the parallel Egyptian and Mesopotamian "legends." The Chilam Balam also provided dates which turned out to be congruent with what had already been extracted from sources in the eastern Mediterranean by others. I started to include references to the Chilam Balam within the main text.

Within the text of the Chilam Balam I have identified the trees of the four directions, the place of reeds, the crossroads or rivers in the sky, the turtle first seen long ago, the three hearth stones in the sky, and a number of additional phenomena. Based on Olmec and later Maya iconography, I have managed to identify the plumed God with the crocodile body as well as the double-headed dragon with the Sun and Venus coming out of its two mouths, and the sloped-walled canyon for ball games. This seems like the material of fantasies, but it is exactly what constitutes the religious symbols of Mesoamerica.

Endnotes

Note 1 --

The opening quotation ("A large planet ...") is lifted from a later chapter in this text.

The quotation by Cardona is from Alfred de Grazia's Cosmic Heretics (1983) as the content of a letter by Cardona to Earl Milton. I originally used a date for the Cardona quotation of 1982, since de Grazia's text covers up to 1983. De Grazia has no endnotes to clear up his sources. In 2010 I changed the date of the Cardona quote to 1978, which is what de Grazia seems to suggest in his text. The concept of Saturn at the North Pole had been under public discussion for about five years at that time.
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Note 2 --

"The emotional outburst from the community of astronomers that so blackened the name Velikovsky and so successfully, if only temporarily, discredited Worlds in Collision has been laid to many causes, from the psychological and the political to simple resentment against invasion of the field by an outsider."

From Ralph E. Juergens "Reconciling Celestial Mechanics and Velikovskian Catastrophism" (Pensee, 1972).

The rejection and debunking by professionals, whether they be astronomers, historians, or linguists, is the best certification of the very likely veracity of new ideas.
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Note 3 --

The culmination of a star (the Pleiades mentioned in the text) is the date when it reaches the highest point in the sky. This would always be directly south, and at midnight. The Pleiades culminated on the third night after the fall equinox in 2349 BC, which occurred 15 days earlier before 685 BC. Precession of the equinox does not apply to the era before 747 BC. The concept of the "third night" (actually two days and a night) is of importance in later religions. All the calendar dates are "Gregorian equivalent" dates, apportioned over the real-time calendar days for shorter years. These conditions will be detailed in later chapters.
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Note 4 --

Alfred de Grazia, in Cosmic Heretics (1983), sources Shane Mage's book Velikovsky and His Critics (1978), with the following note [abbreviations expanded]:

"Shane Mage, in appraising the speeches against Velikovsky, uncovered in them several important concessions that had been apparently achieved over the years. First, the book Scientists Confront Velikovsky, 'disavows and repudiated the entire Scientific polemic of the 1950's and 60's both implicitly and explicitly.'

"Next, both the sponsor, Goldsmith, and Mulholland assert that Velikovsky's ideas and arguments are not un- nor anti-scientific, whatever the press and then the scientific community presumed to draw from the event. Furthermore, the legitimacy of cosmic catastrophic hypotheses in science was acknowledged both by Sagan and Mulholland, but the specific hypotheses of Velikovsky were attacked (and obviously the scientists are in confusion as to how they can work historically and empirically with the hypotheses that they admit.)"

C. Leroy Ellenberger, in "Heretics, Dogmatists and Science's Reception of New Ideas" (Kronos, 1979), quotes from a "widely cited" article by Michael Polanyi, "The Growth of Science in Society" (in Minerva, 1967):

"A vital judgement practised in science is the assessment of plausibility. Only plausible ideas are taken up, discussed and tested by scientists. Such a decision may later be proved right, but at the time that is made, the assessment of plausibility is based on a broad exercise of intuition guided by many subtle indications, and thus it is altogether undemonstrable. It is tacit."

Unspoken ("tacit") because, I should note, it is a classic pre-conscious reaction, having nothing to do with intuition, which is at least guided by experience. Ellenberger notes that Polanyi used Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision as "a case study," but at a later date admitted never having read the book. Polanyi, at any rate, follows this with:

"... a theory rejected as absurd will not always be made plausible by the confirmation of some of its predictions. ... Science cannot survive unless it can keep out such [nonsensical] contributions and safeguard the basic soundness of its publications. ... Scientists from the most distant branches of science will rely then on each other's results and will blindly support each other against any laymen seriously challenging a scientist's professional authority." (Bracketed insertion by Ellenberger.)

This is perhaps better summarized by Ellenberger in a private communication from author John White (Pole Shift 1980), as follows:

"Velikovsky offered a startling perspective that struck at fundamental notions with which many scientists had unconsciously identified. So closely wedded were their beliefs and self-image as scientists -- proud of their knowledge and position as guardians of the truth -- that they quite literally could not change their minds without undergoing a fundamental destructuring of their psyches."

"The necessary destructuring would have been so great in some cases as to amount to severe breakdown. Depth psychology tells us the rest of the story: the ego will cling fiercely to its structure and use all sorts of defense mechanisms to prevent change, including the ugly tactics seen in the Velikovsky Affair."


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Note 5 --

Ralph Juergens' essay, "Reconciling Celestial Mechanics and Velikovskian Catastrophism," found [here], does one of the best jobs introducing interplanetary plasma.

A more recent discussion by [James Hogan] can be found here.

See also for example the following website collection:

Specific to plasma theory are the following:

There are more links relevant to prior research in the next chapter, and in the Appendix "List of Links." See also the Appendix "List of Books." Plasma is a controversial subject with Wikipedia, since it may be enlisted to present evidence against the Big Bang theory. Wikipedia articles dealing with plasma and related topics are therefore often edited in favor of handed-down science. The reader should be aware of this bias. As an antidote I recommend two books: Eric Lerner, The Big Bang Never Happened (1991), and Hilton Ratcliffe, The Virtue of Heresy: Confessions of a Dissident Astronomer (2007).
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Note 6 --

Despite Velikovsky's suggestion, Venus was not expelled by Jupiter. The basis for this was the notion of some Greeks that Venus broke out of Jupiter's head. To suggest such an expulsion requires creating ad hoc causes which remain completely unsupported in physics. One may carry on about some asteroid falling into Jupiter and causing Venus to be burped out from the antipodal location, but the fact remains that a minimum escape velocity of 60 kilometers per second would have been required. That is the orbital speed of Mercury today as it nears the Sun. At the location of Jupiter, that would have placed the exploding planet Venus on a trajectory destined for the far reaches of space.

The only reason for suggesting a genesis of Venus from Jupiter was so that Venus might then be placed on an eccentric orbit which could allow it to close in on Earth, thus fulfilling Velikovsky's other supposition that Venus "nearly collided" with earth. As I will demonstrate, Venus never came close to Earth: the two electrical interactions ("collisions") happened at distances of 20,000,000 and 10,000,000 miles.

Venus was expelled by Saturn instead -- some thousands of years earlier. That is clear from the earliest Egyptian iconography, and from the "descriptions" of Saturn from many sources, and can be inferred from the Maya Popol Vuh and the Chilam Balam.

As I have discovered over and over again, the theorists of catastrophic events (we should call them "story tellers") have seldom given much thought to the obvious. What has happened is that the retellers of Velikovsky's narratives have held his book as Bible truth, for a number of reasons: in order to remain in his good graces, from a deficiency of imagination, and from the complete lack of knowledge of physics and electricity. There has been a whole generation of "researchers" who have never given any serious thought to alternative scenarios which would constitute the same descriptions from antiquity.
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Special thanks to Claudia George and Danford Vander Ploeg for most excellent word editing.

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