mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== William Mullen It is a privilege indeed to speak after Victor Clube, and I hope that by the end of my talk you will see that this paper was written every bit as much for readers of the Cosmic Winter as of World's in Collision. It's also a privilege to be back among so many people I went to symposia with 20 years ago. It's a privilege to be back among those whose labor has been unremitting, unlike mine. I'm here to propose a new term for your critical scrutiny, but let me hasten to say that I'm no friend of neologisms. As a classicist I have a fussy anxiety that the new word will not be correctly formed (both of the elements composing it should be from the same language, not half from Greek and the other half from Latin, or whatever). And as a friend of interdisciplinary synthesis, I know how it is obstructed by the proliferation of the jargon of subdisciplines. My purpose in proposing this neologism is therefore not so much to get you to accept it as to see if you agree that there is a need for something like it. If we agree on the need then we can talk the matter through till a better term is decided upon-- perhaps one that already exists. The prefix "ceno-" is from the Greek word kainos, which means "new" or "recent". It is already in use in the term "cenozoic", the most recent major period of life on earth, and in the subdivisions of that period into epochs, from the "paleocene"-the "oldest recent", to the "pleistocene", the "most recent", and the "holocene", the "entirely recent", i.e. up to and including the present. The most basic definition for "cenocatastrophism", thus, would be that it is a model for scientific inquiry which assumes that the earth has suffered catastrophes of global extent in recent times. "Catastrophism" itself, of course, is the name for a model which since the l9th century has existed in opposition to a rival, "uniformitarianism". When Velikovsky published Worlds in Collision uniformitarianism ruled the day. Now it no longer rules the day; the emergent scientific consensus that the dinosaurs were extinguished by a meteorite has left uniformitarianism itself a dinosaur among models. Without quite fully admitting it, science has moved on to the question, What kinds of catastrophism is it most eager to see adopted as models for future research? Cenocatastrophism designates a model for research which assumes that global catastrophes have occurred recently. The next question is clearly, How recent is recent? The very age which began with the extinction of the dinosaurs is called, as just noted, the "Cenozoic", and by that standard recent is any time within the last 65 million years. But "recent" is of course relative to an observer, and therefore I find it legitimate to use the prefix "ceno-" here to mean "within human memory". By this definition, therefore, cenocatastrophism designates a model which has not yet won a scientific consensus; those who support it have all the methodological and rhetorical problems of the not-yet-mainstreamed. It is a model shared by those strange bedfellows, Immanuel Velikovsky and Fred Hoyle, and also by Victor Clube and Bill Napier, the two astronomers on whose The Cosmic Winter Hoyle's recent The Origin of the Universe and the Origin of Religion openly depends. Just as catastrophism once existed in opposition to uniformitarianism, until the latter gained dominance and the two terms became archaic, so cenocatastrophism now exists in opposition to those who insist on keeping global catastrophes comfortably in the remote pre-human past-a consistent nomenclature would call them "palaeocatastrophists". Thus the opposition of these latter terms is no more likely to be permanent than that of the former; I propose them for what I hope is relatively short term duty, until one prevails over the other. The sign that one has prevailed over the other will be the emergence of a methodology with a large consensus behind it, and hence, pleasantly, massive funding, publication, and validation through peer- review. But until one prevails over the other the problems of cenocatastrophism will, inevitably, be in part rhetorical. By rhetorical I mean simply anything involved in persuading people of widely different disciplines-specifically disciplines separated by the great chasm between the natural and the social sciences-to see the necessity of their sustained cooperation. Before turning to the methodology and rhetoric of cenocatastrophism, it might be useful to ask, How many types of cenocatastrophist are currently out there? Useful and possibly crucial, for a sufficiently respectful answer might allow the different types to agree to disagree with each other on their specific scenarios. Having agreed to disagree, they might then establish enough unity among themselves to be effective in getting the general model they share taken seriously by a scientific mainstream still shy of it. The normal way to define sub-types within a controversy is to assume schools mutually exclusive of each other. An alternative, however, is to construct a series of theses each more specific than the last, in such a way that one can subscribe to the first without committing oneself to the second, to the first and second without the third, and so on. Thirty years ago the philosopher David Stove attempted to describe Velikovsky's claims in terms of four such theses. The first he called "general catastrophism", the second "extra- terrestrial catastrophism", the third "historical extra-terrestrial catastrophism", and the fourth the specific thesis of Worlds in Collision, " that one of these catastrophes was mainly due to comet-Venus, around 1500 B.C. " Setting aside his first two theses, general and extraterrestrial catastrophism as now belonging to mainstream science, I would like to substitute for his last two a sequence of three further theses all explicitly cenocatastrophist. As in Stove's scheme, they are so arranged that one can agree with an earlier one without thereby committing oneself to a later. Thesis I: that remote human memory of extra-terrestrially caused global catastrophes is preserved in mythology. Thesis II: that human memory of the most recent such catastrophes is registered in historical documents which can be used to date them precisely. Thesis III: that human culture as a whole came into being in response to such catastrophes, apart from which no distinctively human form of behavior is to be postulated. It should be noted that all three theses could be developed either along Clube and Napier's lines, by scenarios involving comets and meteor swarms in an otherwise stable solar system, or along the lines of Velikovsky and many after him, by scenarios positing recent instabilities in the behavior of specific planets in a specific sequence. What differentiates each thesis from the preceding is the magnitude of its claim to explanatory power, and hence the number of disciplines it must enlist to establish itself. Thesis I will seek to connect astrophysics and geology to the interpretation of mythology, the latter being an enterprise so problematical that there exists at present no single formal discipline whose methodology commands respect as adequate to it. Thesis II will seek to connect astrophysics and geology to the entire range of disciplines by which precise chronology of human activities is achieved. Thesis III will by definition lay claim to all disciplines, since it will see all human activities as a configured whole, no part of which can be supposed recognizably the same in a pre-catastrophic past. One might for the moment label the first thesis "mythological cenocatastrophism" and the second "historical cenocatastrophism". For the third we should consider the term put forward by the most comprehensive theorist in this area, the "quantavolution" of Alfred de Grazia; he introduces this neologism in the opening pages of Chaos and Creation and defines it as a "model" that "considers 'quantajumps' to be the main feature of change (volution)... Humanity, art, institutions and science are products of the most ancient catastrophes... 'quantavolution' may be preferable... to... the wholly negative word 'catastrophe"'. An alternative label, "anthropic cenocatastrophist", might be coined by borrowing from Fred Hoyle's way of putting it: "Why then the coincidence that it [earth's encounter with a giant periodic comet] seems to have happened as recently as 15,000 years ago? ... the answer to this question lies in what nowadays is called the anthropic principle, which says that the fact of our existence can be used to discount all improbabilities necessary for our existence. If history and civilization were caused by the arrival of a periodic giant comet all accident is removed from our association in time with such a comet." One can be a mythological cenocatastrophist without being convinced that the most recent catastrophes are dateable by the written records of literate civilizations witnessing them. Likewise, one can be a historical cenocatastrophist without being convinced of the necessity to reconceptualize "humanity" as a behavioral configuration catastrophically precipitated. If the three kinds of cenocatastrophist can agree to disagree on their respective theses while uniting in their insistence that palaeocatastrophism is inadequate, something decisive will have been achieved for the immediate future of science. What principles of methodology and rhetoric, then, might it be most productive for cenocatastrophists to agree on for the sake of advancing research beyond its present state? I am obviously not going to pretend to be exhaustive in answering this question; I wish simply to name a few points I see as taking precedence. To begin with mythology. What is most frustratingly lacking in cenocatastrophists' use of myth thus far is an effort to give an account of each culture's myth-system as a whole, within which specifically catastrophic material can be located. The reason this effort is lacking in Worlds in Collision is obvious enough; Velikovsky was concerned to dramatize the parallel configuration of elements in myth-systems of cultures all around the globe, elements supposedly meaningless in isolation but which leap alive when interpreted as accounts of actual celestial havoc. There was clearly not room in a single book to give a holistic account of each of the myth-systems of the many cultures being called upon. But it has to be admitted that to draw selectively on these complex systems is to borrow credence. This credence will not be consolidated until many further books are written on separate myth-systems by researchers versed in them, who are ready to make the time-consuming transition from comparative catastrophist mythology to assessment of each mythsystem in its own terms. The result of such transitions cannot but be sobering. They will inevitably dramatize what Roger Wescott has called the "indeterminacy" of mythology alone as a source of precise information about sequences of celestial events over a long period of time. Myth-systems change to meet a culture's needs over time, and the commonest form of change is not to eliminate a mythical element but to reinterpret it. An element which was used to give an account of an earlier cometary or planetary appearance will be reinterpreted to give an account of a later one; and in the succeeding era of celestial calm the same element will be used again to do other kinds of duty (validate a political order, serve the devotional needs of cults, provide poets with their symbolic fictions, etc.). Interpretation of a myth-system which does not include an account of its mutations from the catastrophic past to the present era of stability is unlikely to convince the unreconstructed uniformitarian. Just as importantly, interpretation of a myth-system which does not allow the possibility that it has mutated to do duty for several successive catastrophes is of severely limited use for the fashioning of precise scenarios by cenocatastrophists. To question a myth-system about its reinterpretations over time is inevitably to ask how much can be securely known about the chronology of the culture that did the reinterpreting, and hence to enter the realm of the second type of cenocatastrophism, which I have called "historical". Here too it has to be admitted that Velikovsky was compelled, in his own words, to "borrow credence" about Egyptian chronology, and that the process of consolidating that credence has turned out to be far more arduous than even he could have guessed. Worlds in Collision and the Ages in Chaos series dismantle the structure of Egyptian chronology erected in the late l9th century, but leave intact the Mesopotamian chronology erected in the same period and an early Hebrew chronology traditional for centuries. It has been the undertaking of Gunnar Heinsohn to submit these latter chronologies, and many others dependent on them, to the same thorough and critical scrutiny Velikovsky spent four decades giving to the Egyptian. His impressive work is still in progress, but it is already quite clear that if accepted it will render unusable many of the key Mesopotamian and Hebrew dates on which Worlds in Collision itself builds. Indeed, as I understand it Heinsohn calls for an even more radical shortening of Egyptian chronology that Velikovsky does. I may be exaggerating but I have the sense that the upshot of his work will be to establish a roughly mid-second millennium B.C. baseline for the emergence of all complex civilizations around the globe, Egyptian, Hebrew and Mesopotamian no less than Indus Valley, Chinese, and Mesoamerican. What these civilizations are all so simultaneously emerging from will then be the largest question before historians of early mankind, of whatever persuasion. But until Velikovsky's and Heinsohn's chronological revisionism is assessed-a massive undertaking for innumerable specialists-it is hard to imagine historical cenocatastrophism making any serious progress. As for quantavolution or anthropic cenocatastrophism, since it by definition encompasses the whole of human history and civilization, it would be presumptuous to single out for it any one methodological point that ought to take precedence over all others. But at this juncture I am concerned with rhetoric as well as methodology, and so wish to conclude with a few remarks about rhetorical similarities among cenocatastrophists when they come to speak of humanity's future in terms of its past. Both Velikovsky, on the one hand, and Clube, Napier and Hoyle, on the other, have made claims about the dangers for mankind of not taking their models seriously. In each case the claim is made from within the discipline in which the author has been professionally trained. Velikovsky's claim is that of a psychoanalyst: human beings have been traumatized by the catastrophes of the past, and in their amnesia of them remain subject to the compulsion to "identify with the aggressor" and reenact the catastrophes as inflictors rather than victims. Though his incomplete attempt to work out this idea is only available for inspection in the posthumous Mankind in Amnesia, an allusion to it is already present in the somber final paragraph on nuclear war in the preface to Worlds in Collision. Clube, Napier and Hoyle, on the other hand, make the kind of simple predictive claim about probabilities to which a professional astronomer might be driven by the evidence. The last chapter of Clube and Napier's The Cosmic Winter, "A Risk Assessment", concludes that if their hypothesis is right "we are still in the tail end of an impact episode" and must "go from mere statistical projection to detailed forecasting", for which "a generation of exploration, both of the Earth's environment and of our history and prehistory, will be necessary." Cynics in each case are apt to see these claims as manipulative alarmism, a rhetoric of threat. They will see the psychoanalyst as attempting to put the final stamp of his own discipline on works which so widely exceeds its bounds, and they will see the astronomers as playing upon irrational terrors in order to secure massive funding for further research. Pessimists, in turn, are free to declare the uselessness of the anamnetic enterprise on either hypothesis. It is perfectly possible that knowing the traumas of our past will not succeed in making us stop reenacting them. And it is perfectly possible that the next impact episode will involve an object too big to be deflected. My only response to such negativity is to suggest that the very act of affirming or invalidating these claims about the future should propel cenocatastrophism forward in research that will be methodologically decisive for it. It will be decisive in that it will require social scientists and natural scientists to build bridges across the chasm that divides them and work together as a matter of routine. Until this collaboration is routine every statement a researcher makes that tries to leap from his area of expertise across to the other side of the chasm will continue to have a credibility problem attached to it . As long as cenocatastrophism remains marginalized, then the psychoanalyst can be dismissed without further ado when he ventures into hypotheses about gravitation and electro-magnetism in the solar system, and the astronomers dismissed without further ado when they venture an interpretation of an ancient myth or document without showing command of all the conventional interpretations of it by the relevant guilds. Routine and sustained collaboration between experts in the social sciences and in the nature sciences is the sine qua non for substantial progress in use of the cenocatatrophist model. (Among those present Alfred de Grazia and Earl Milton offer an example of what I am talking about.) It should be added that the mainstreaming of cenocatastrophism could well cause certain disciplines relevant to its various claims for the future to transmogrify themselves. Once global catastrophes within human memory are admitted, theorizing about their impact on the human psyche will not be limited to classical Freudian psychoanalysts-may not in fact be limitable to any larger discipline that calls itself "psychology". And if these catastrophes are explicable in terms of a periodicity relevant to the next few centuries as well as to preceding millennia, then no reassessment of ancient chronology will be deemed too comprehensive or too painstaking; the science of chronology might well cease to be a handmaiden and become (to borrow Aristotle's phrase about metaphysics) the "architectonic science" that assigns the other sciences their place. "History," says Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Ulysses, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.'' It is ironic that while some cenocatastrophists who are impressed by Velikovsky's planetary scenarios are embarrassed by his psychoanalytic deductions from them, others who find his astronomy too shaky for sustained consideration nevertheless follow him in explaining mainstream scientific resistance in terms of some kind of amnesia. "It could be seen as curious," Hoyle says on the last page of The Origin of the Universe and the Origin of Religion, "that society would seek to investigate distant galaxies while at the same time ignoring all possibility of serious impacts with the Earth...Only blind amnesia can explain it." We should not stop, he pleads, until mastering the final step, namely "to deflect those [orbits] for which collision with the Earth may be imminent". When we have learned to do that, he concludes-in language worthy of both Joyce and Velikovsky-"mankind can at last wake up from the strange nightmare of the past." Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (Doubleday: New York, 1950); Sir Fred Hoyle, The Origin of the Universe and the Origin of Religion (Moyer Bell: Wakefield, 1993); Victor Clube and Bill Napier, The Cosmic Winter (Blackwell: Oxford, 1990). David Stove, "Velikovsky in Collision", Quadrant (Oct.-Nov. 1964), pp. 35-44. 3 My approach here is in the spirit of Irving Wolfe's recent article, "A Word about the Planetary Debate", The Velikovskian, Vol. I No. 1, pp. 7-15. Like myself, Wolfe is concerned both with nomenclature and with inclusiveness. His opening list (pp.7-8) of fifteen theorists contributing to the debate is a useful point of departure. The list continues to grow, and one can now add the name Fred Hoyle: see footnote 1. In the "Epilogue" to Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky seemed to wish to introduce a phrase describing the whole of his work, calling it "historical cosmology" (p. 379) and then again "historical cosmogony" (p. 381). Alfred de Grazia, Chaos and Creation: An Introduction to Quantavolution in Human and Natural History (Metron Publications: Princeton, 1981), pp. 4-5. op. cit p. 31 Roger S. Wescott, "Indeterminacy: Temporary, Permanent, or Indefinite?", The Velikovskian Vol. I No. 1, pp. 53-55. "... all mythic images... are superimposed images. Because of this superimposition, they are necessarily blurred images." p. 54 "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." Op. Cit. pp. vii-viii. "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." Op. Cit. pp. vii-viii. James Joyce, Ulysses (Vintage Books: New York, 1986), p. 28. 12 Op, cit. p. 62. Since Hoyle's work acknowledges its dependence on Clube and Napier's Cosmic Winter, it should be pointed out the latter includes a sustained history of amnesia and denial of celestial instability on the part of scientists, philosophers and religious institutions during periods of celestial tranquillity; see particularly Part I, "The Labyrinth of History", pp. 15-127.