The Road To Saturn (Excerpts from an Autobiographical Essay) Dwardu Cardona .In January of 1976 Velikovsky wrote to thank me for my contribution to the anthology. In a hand-written note at the end of his letter, he mentioned something about a "chance for co-operation" which I took for a veiled hint aiming at collaboration. As I was to learn years later, this was an offer he had made from time to time to various others of his supporters. I did not wish to hurt his feelings (although I doubt that they were hurt) but, for one thing, I was already overburdened with work; for another, I doubted that he would appreciate the turn my writing was taking. I had already been asked to temper my criticisms of his work, not to arm his detractors with additional ammunition to fire at him. When I questioned the integrity of this appeal, I was told that while there need be no sacred cows, not even Velikovsky, we should, on the other hand, attempt to time our gorings. To be honest, I did not quite relish the idea but, not wishing to create unnecessary waves, I held back my major criticisms ofWorlds in Collision until the San Jose seminar of 1980. That thank you note was the last time Velikovsky wrote to me. He had gotten wind of my collaboration with Greenberg et al., and he feared that From Genesis to Hiroshima might preempt him on the subject of collective amnesia about which he himself had been preparing a book. He did not take kindly to my declaration that he would be receiving full credit on the subject and our relationship began to sour. As it turned out, From Genesis to Hiroshima was to peter to a halt while Velikovsky's Mankind in amnesia did not see publication until three years after his death. In the meantime my article on Saturn's flare up, titled "Let There Be Light," was published in the Spring 1978 issue of KRONOS. While I did not expect a pat on the back from Velikovsky for having furthered his theory, I did not expect resentment either. As I later learned through the grapevine, his pronouncement on reading it was: "Cardona has made the flare-up his own." This disconcerted me because I had given him full credit for having originated the idea. But, as Stephen Talbott had written in the closing issue of Pensée, "The continuing non-publication of major portions of Velikovsky's research. . .has become, after two decades, a serious damper to all discussion." Those of us who wished to plunge forward on our own were forever risking a head-on collision with Velikovksy's fear of being pre-empted, a fear that was by then becoming legendary. At some point during this dilemma, I hit upon the idea of provoking Velikovsky into publishing his own material on Khima and Khesil alongside mine. This would achieve a double result: It would allay Velikovsky's fear of pre-emption while, at the same time, his disclosure would indirectly act as an endorsement of mine. In a way, my ruse worked. Velikovsky did publish his paper with mine in the Summer 1978 issue of KRONOS. But the plan also had its dire effects. Velikovsky remained displeased especially about that portion of my paper which delineated, in outline, the thirteen points I chose to disclose concerning Saturn's former northern placement. Through Jan Sammer, then acting as his secretary, Velikovsky let me know that he was emphatically against the concept of Saturn's polar configuration that Talbott and I were independently working on. The grapevine had it that, either in humor or disdain, Velikovsky started to refer to Talbott and me as "Portland and Vancouver." I had been burdened with Velikovsky long enough. It was time I divorced myself entirely from his scheme. Whatever my colleagues may think, there was no point in pleading for a backyard cleaning unless I was willing to abide by my words. It was of course already widely known by then that Velikovsky himself had refused to stand behind Talbott's scheme and my near-identical one. And this might have had a lot to do with the unfortunate repudiation of Talbott's work. It therefore became imperative to make Velikovskian scholars aware that their mentor's outpouring was not as solid as some die-hards were still maintaining. By then there was not much of Velikovsky's scheme, as outlined in Worlds in Collision, that I still adhered to. In fact when, in September that year, Mrs. Velikovsky asked me at the Princeton seminar how much of her husband's work I aimed to leave untouched, my reply was: "Very little." I could still acknowledge Velikovsky's pioneering thrust in matters of cosmic catastrophism and, of course, I continue to applaud his scholarly insights on the subject to this day. But the scenario of Worlds in Collision was no longer, in my opinion, as solidly founded as it had originally appeared. SIS workshop: COMPELLING INSIGHTS: CONCLUDED IN SORROW by Cardona Derek also saw fit to chide my 'over-confident position' in knowing what to accept of Velikovsky's work and what to discard. He himself found it difficult to do away with Velikovsky's particular hypothesis concerning the occurrence of planetary catastrophes 'within relatively recent historical times.' The record, however, speaks for itself. As I have pointed out in various works, any errant planet within the historical period would not have failed to leave its mark on the historical literature of the time and my question has always been: where are the historical records of these events? Errant planets at close quarters would have been seen by everyone and such stupendous prodigies would have overawed every historical writer of antiquity. Velikovsky may well have described the celestial battle between cometary Venus and its trailing parts at the Sea of Passage but the event is nowhere recorded in the historical annals of the nations - not even in the Book of Exodus where it would rightly belong. The mythological dragon-fight on which he relied for his telling of the event is nowhere dated to the time he had in mind. The same is also true of the purported Martian fly-bys which supposedly beleaguered the Earth during the 8th and 7th centuries BC. Not a single historian of the time ever recorded the supposed proximity of the plant Mars. We do not read of the planet looming large in the sky during that period in the ancient histories of the world.[5] If anyone can show differently, let him or her stand up with the evidence. From the Chilam balam: "Then it was that the lord of (Katun) 11 Ahau spread his feet apart." "Then it was that the word of Bolon Dzacab [Mars] descended to the tip of his tongue."