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CHAPTER THREE

CATASTROPHE AND DIVINE FIRES

If the Israelites did not know that a great comet was visiting disaster
upon the Earth, they would be the only people in the world from whom the
knowledge was withheld. In fact, they did know. And they called it by
god-names just as everybody else did in those days. But it is also true
that a peculiar kind of suppression of cometary evidence is present in the
Israelite record, for which there is an explanation.

In Chapter 1, I offered several pieces of evidence that the Israelites
knew a comet was in the sky, and that the disasters on Earth were from
heaven, and, furthermore, that the Lord bore them "on Eagle's wings" from
Egypt. (See Figure 6) More evidence is due here. I must reason out the
position as well. Was the whole world electrified beyond any later
historical awareness? Is there an alternative to the comet: could there be
another cause of all the disturbances? What was the fate of the comet?

	Figure 6. On Eagle's Wings (Click on the picture to get an
enlarged view. Caution: Image files are large.)

"You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, how I bore you on eagle's
wings and brought you to me." Ex. 19-4 (The Torah: The Five Books of
Moses, trans from the Masoretic text. Philadelphia: Jewish Publications
Society, 1962) Cf. Deut. 32: 10-3. The cometary images are of Comet
Swift-Tuttle (1962) III, NASA, op cit., 29.

WHOSE ANGEL?

It is said that the Israelites were frightened in their Exodus by the
sight of the Angel of Egypt darting through the air, "as he flew to the
assistance of the people under his tutelage."[1] This tutelary angel was
also called Uzza by the Jews [2], strangely, because the name is found
among the ancient Arabian people in reference to the planet Venus [3]. It
is to be identified with Seth, god of the Hyksos and the anti-god of the
Egyptians, with Lucifer, and Phaeton-Typhon. Hence the "Egypt" referred to
is already the conquered Egypt. Uzza is also Azazel, the devil to whom the
Jews dispatched the scape-goat carrying their sins on the annual Day of
Atonement. A very large body it would be.

Uzza, goes the legend, accosted the Lord, with a plea to return the
Israelites to Egypt. A debate ensued between Uzza and the champion of the
Jews, the Angel Michael. Archangel Michael is identified by Velikovsky as
a Hebrew equivalent of the planet Venus. So that we had here the same
figure debating itself, that is reasonable, for a myth as for a dream.

Uzza claimed that the bondage of the Hebrews had not been completed; only
86 years, not 400 had passed. No explanation is given of the 86 years;
Auerbach and others believe that the Jews had been in Egypt for that time
or less; perhaps only 60 years had passed since Joseph's death, since the
pharaoh who "did not know Joseph, succeeding to one who did, laid heavy
hands upon the Jews." The point may not be important [4]; the characters
to the debate are. Uzza, of course, loses the debate. The Jews owned the
comet, not the Egyptians (or the Hyksos).

Another of the explicit references to the comet is contained in a
legendary speech of Moses to Yahweh, following upon the adoration by so
many Jews of the Golden Calf. Imploring the angry Yahweh not to annihilate
the chosen people, Moses says: "Fulfil not, I implore Thee, the prophecies
of the Egyptian magicians, who predicted to their king that the star
"Ra'ah" would move as a harbinger of blood and death before the
Israelites."[5] "Ra'ah" in Egyptian must mean "the Great Sun," the comet
luminous and larger than the sun.

The night before departure from Goshen, the terrible night of the killing
of the first-born, was said by one legend to be a bright night, as bright
as the brightest day of the year [6]. This legend contrasts with another,
that the darkness persisted in the Egyptian capital. Might the comet tail
be falling so densely in some places as to block the light, while the
comet appeared larger than the sun in others, at least to accommodate
these particular differences? Perhaps. The prophet Isaiah, recalling the
Exodus long afterwards, preached: "The People that walked in darkness have
seen a great light; they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death
(which must mean Egypt), the light of Noga was upon them." Noga, insists
Velikovsky, means planet Venus in Hebrew [7].

In the year 1666, a young man called Moses Suriel from Brussa, Turkey,
claimed to be a prophet and supported Shabatai Zevi as savior of the Jews.
He pointed to a comet that had appeared and explained that this, too, had
appeared in the sky during the Exodus. (In 1665, G.A. Borelli probably
used the same comet in calculating the parabolic forms of cometary
paths.)[8] We infer that an insistent Jewish tradition tied the cometary
form to Exodus.

Velikovsky claims that the adventuring Israelites saw this and more. That
they saw the full comet in the apparition of a serpent. When Moses, later
on, made a serpent of brass and put it upon a pole,"[9] he was in fact
modelling the image of the great comet as it snaked through the sky [10].
The same sculpture had, as we shall see, electrical utility, and could
well have been a symbol that united the electrical events of heaven with
those of the ground.

Legend has Yahweh at the Burning Bush foretelling to Moses: "I behold what
cometh after, how the people will worship the steer, the figure of which
they see upon My chariot..."[11] This has a four-fold significance: it
conforms to cometary images in general; it connects the comet with the
"golden calf to come;" it puts Yahweh into the driver's seat of the
cometary chariot, and it parallels the Greek myth of Phaeton, searing the
world from his solar chariot.

But the most powerful and exercised of cometary references is the towering
column of smoke and fire that was first before and then behind the
Israelites as they crossed into the desert. In ancient history and in
folklore comets are often "hairy" and "'smoking" stars. I have already
quoted this apparition of the lord that had led them from the beginning;
it "did not depart from before the people."[12] The Lord here must be the
comet. Ilse Fuhr, writing of comets in 1967, says [13]:

"A comet which approached the Earth moving for a time -
for the sake of argument - in synchronous orbit with the
Earth between latitudes 33° north and south, would move
back and forth in a flat figure eight with the two halves
meeting at zero (this was demonstrated by the orbit of the
synchronous satellite Syncom II), in other words, during a
period of 24 hours it would seem by an Earth-based
observer as appearing once behind him and once in front of
him in the sky (cf. Exodus 13:21)."

It is not announced when this apparition ceased, but it was the veritable
incarnation of their god in their eyes. It was a monstrous verification
that they were being watched over by the god whose protection and
leadership Moses had prophesied.

We never escape this deity during Moses' life, for it assumed terrestrial
form. It was Yahweh who led them on their wanderings, in a column of smoke
by day and a pillar of fire by night, he who encamped with them and whose
very same manifestations emerged from the sacred enclosure that Moses had
built for him.

There is a naive myth, founded indeed upon the very words and acts of
Moses, that the Israelites shunned the gods of the sky - the sun and moon,
planets, and stars and would not fashion religious images. Although Yahweh
is reconciled to the existence of other gods, he is zealous to be first
and exclusive with his chosen people, on pain of their destruction. Yet
the people knew there was more to the sky-scene than Yahweh.

Heaven to the people of Israel was a thickly populated region. Besides the
gods of their enemies, there were hosts of angels, animals and ancestors,
not represented alone in the stars but by all the meteorites that flew in
the disturbed skies. The heavenly host rained down fiery darts, lightning
balls and wheels of light, stones, and coals of fire. The Bible is purged
of most of these visions, but the legends carried forward the visions of
the people[14]. They are admitted to the Scriptures on occasion, as in the
Revelation of John of the Apocalypse in the New Testament.

"In a somewhat indefinite way some Biblical scholars have recognized that
Jacob's Bethel might have been a meteorite."[15] The Greek word for Bethel
was Baetyli, meaning a Jovian thunderbolt. Baetyls are sacred
thunderstones or meteorites carried by the holy litters or arks of various
Bedouin tribes. Originally, directly or indirectly, the Ark of Moses
carried the Ten Commandments on such tablets, as we shall understand later
on. Very material things from the sky, then, were connected with Yahwism.

THE CENSORED DESIGNS OF HEAVEN

The Israelites were therefore eager to construct their habitat on earth in
the image which they transported of heaven, and felt constrained to carry
out as closely as possible the instructions that Moses received from
Yahweh in this regard. These were numerous and the designs that he carried
down from his first forty days and nights of isolation atop the sacred
mountain of Sinai were particularly impressive. "And see that you make
them after the pattern for them, which is being shown to you on the
mountain."[16]

Yahweh's 'commands were not so easy to execute: "Upon the occasion of the
erection of the Tabernacle, God gave red, blue, black and white fire to
see and imitate. To the question of how this might be possible, God
answered: "I fabricate my glory; you make your own colors..."[17]

A legend conveys what must have been the feeling of the people, that the
existence of the world depended upon the construction of the Tabernacle,
sanctuary of Yahweh, "for when the sanctuary had been erected, the world
stood firmly founded, whereas until then it had always been swaying hither
and thither."[18]

If, as now seems probable, the Earth suffered a moderate tilt at the
climax of the Exodus, a celestial unsteadiness would be perceived, both in
the general turbulence and in the erratic movements of the stars and
heavenly bodies. And one can be sure that in the retelling, if not in
actuality, the earthly and heavenly climaxes would be brought together for
maximum effect and symbolism. Perhaps the new awareness came in intervals
of light in darkness or from reports received from the larger world. Nor
can one be positive that the reference is not to continuous earthquakes.
Then, too, "The land (world) turns round as does a potter's wheel," in
Ipuwer's metaphor [19]. And the Psalm sings out: "God, when you set out at
the head of your people, and marched across the desert, the earth
rocked... The heavens deluged at God's coming..."[20]

It may be premature to claim definitive proof, but we can make the
following statements with some confidence; no settlement anywhere in the
world escaped heavy destruction in the finale of the Middle Bronze Age, at
the time of the Exodus, that is, about 1450 B.C.; further, no temple that
existed before 1450, and that was reconstructed or added to afterwards,
was given the same astronomical orientation that it possessed before.

The implication of these statements will not escape the reader. With the
accumulating evidence of worldwide destruction, it will no longer be
permitted scholars to cast the Exodus in whatever form they please - as a
stroll in the desert, the flight of some slaves, a Jewish fairy tale. The
Exodus occurred in a catastrophic setting.

Secondly, shifts in temple orientation form the strongest possible proof
of an historical shift in the angle of the axis of the globe with respect
to the ecliptical plane. And when an axial tilt occurs, great destruction
is visited upon the Earth: tidal waves, adjustment of the equatorial
(rotational) bulge by rising and sinking land, earthquakes and volcanism,
vast and violent storms, and electrical discharges of all kinds. Further,
the almost certain cause of an axial tilt is the near encounter of Earth
with a great passing body.

Some of the objects of the Tabernacle stood for celestial bodies - stars,
cherubim, the curtain of the sky [21]. "The separate parts of the
Tabernacle had each a symbolical significance, for to all that is above
there is something corresponding below."[22] The great encampment of the
Israelites follows a celestial plan.

The division of the tribes of Israel according to four
standards, as well as their subdivision at each standard, is
not arbitrary and accidental; it corresponds to the same plan
and directions as that of which God made use in heaven.
The celestial throne is surrounded by four angels: to the
right Michael, in front Gabriel, to the left Uriel, and to the
rear Raphael. To these four angels corresponded the four
tribes of Reuben, Judah, Dan, and Ephraim, the standard
bearers [23].

The sacred ball-courts of the Olmecs of the same age and of other
Meso-Americans are authoritatively acknowledged to be tied to the cardinal
points of the sky. The planet Venus is prominently represented in the
games [24]. The players fought to the death. The Roman circus had on its
axis altars of the planets [25]. There, too, blood flowed freely. "Ninevah
proclaimed itself the seat of stable order and power by its seven-times
crenellated circle of walls, colored by the seven planetary colors." [26]
Chariots would run along the top of the walls.

"Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven..." So goes the Lord's
Prayer. The idea is worldwide. "Ancients believed that earthly temples and
their cultic equipment were made according to the pattern or prototype of
heavenly models."[27] The comment is too mild; it was imperative to
imitate heaven, to placate, identify with, and control heaven. In most of
this construction is to be seen a cultural heritage going back long before
Moses and deriving from many gentile nations. Yahweh, himself an old god
in many ways, puts old things together to make new ones.

But when it comes to mirroring himself, Yahweh is avant-garde. There is no
throne in the Tabernacle. He is not carried about as a beautifully
enthroned image, as Arabs carried their palladium and Europeans carry
their saints and the Son of God. He has a "Mercy Seat" - strange
contradictory words of the King James translation - the lid of the Ark-box
a "vehicle" is the more literal translation - where he makes himself
visible from time to time.

That invisibility had drawbacks is indicated by the Revolt of the Golden
Calf when, before Moses' designs can be implemented, a great many
Israelites melt their gold and fashion an animal form whom they
immediately term their god. (See figure 7.) This is usually regarded as
Baal, but "what Baal?" is the question, for Baal means "god" unless a
special context or appellation is provided to further distinguish the
Baal.

Here, say some scholars, it is Baal the Cow, or Baal the Bull, which could
mean Baal Venus, inasmuch as the great comet, so often identified with the
planet Venus, took on the appearance of a cow, its head elongated, its
coma looking like horns and its tail pulling itself into the perspective
of a great thick body dropping ambrosia or manna like milk, and like
excrement, too.

The legend has it that the Golden Calf heresy "is in part explained by the
circumstance that, while passing through the Red Sea, they beheld the
Celestial Throne, and most distinctly of the four creatures about the
Throne, they saw the ox. "[28]

On Earth, in those days of high electrical effects, the homology is proven
by the discharge of fire between the horns of the animal. (A sculpture in
the Athens Museum from Mycenean times, perhaps paralleling the Exodus
period, carries a bull's head with a double-edged ax between the horns;
the ax, as well as the ox horns, conveys electricity - mountain climbers
write about the lights streaming from their axes.) The altar of the
Tabernacle carried four gilded horns at its corners.

But why is this Baal of the Israelites a calf and not an adult animal
[29]? It is called a "bull" on occasion in Jewish legend, however. "The
word (translated 'calf' from Hebrew) is not a pejorative term for an ox,
as many surmised. It denotes a young ox, an ox in the full vigour of its
youth."[30] The only reason I can offer for this modification of the
universal cow-bull theme is that the Israelites knew that the comet was a
young body in the sky. It had not been known to them for long. The bison
and bull, always with a divine celestial connection, had been worshipped
and were sacred since time immemorial [31]. Zeus, the thunderbolter,
assumed the image of the bull. Thoth (or Hermes or Mercury) took the image
of a ram, afterwards.

	Figure 7. Moses' Tablets and Golden Calf Heretics. (Click on the
picture to get an enlarged view. Caution: Image files are large.) ( La
Somme le Roy, ca. A.D. 1295 British museum Add. MS 54180, folio 5v)

Zeus, it will be recalled, had fathered and mothered Athene who was the
Greek planet Venus. The new heavenly body, the Messiah, would take the
form of a calf. The Venus connection is obvious, with Baal, then, being
Venus. And for some hundreds of years the Baal Venus cult occupied a great
many Jews. It was not generally admitted, but usually the god who competed
with Yahweh and aroused the indignation of the Yahwists was the cometary
Baal.

That the rebels of the Sinai incident had deep roots in the community was
evidenced much later on, when the writers of Judah had to mention them
again in order to demonstrate the terrible end that awaited their likes:
when the Northern Kingdom of Israel, hundreds of years later, under
Jeroboam, built two golden calves, one for each of its principal
sanctuaries, in competition with and defiance of the Kingdom of Judah that
possessed the Ark of the Covenant and the Temple at Jerusalem. But even
before Moses' death, the Hyksos in Egypt had elevated the new young bull
to divine status as Apis [32].

Enough sights, apparitions, effects, events, and experiences come with a
large-body near-collision to supply readily all the personnel and myths of
a full-fledged religion. Yet Moses was not alone in rejecting the absolute
identification of a comet as a mainstay of his god. Generally so-called
planetary, solar, or lunar religions are not exclusively such: there is a
marked body giving substance to their god, and its behavior is carefully
observed for indications of how to conduct themselves. In addition, there
occur innumerable god-named manifestations and designations in the sky,
the biosphere, the air, and the falling stones. When the profound
prejudices in favor of the Hebraic religions are waived, their
resemblances to other religions, even to planetary religions, are great.

But Moses probably had something special in mind, and the subsequent
Judaic priesthood in their mind, in laboring against cometary (or
planetary) worship. Moses wanted to root his religion in earthly phenomena
to the maximum extent possible so that he could control it. And the
priesthood, too, had the same motive, plus a strong desire to make ritual
all-important, so that they might control the worshippers as well as the
god. The transition from the charismatic religion of Moses to the
ritualistic anti-charismatic religion of the body of priests can be so
understood.

Another reason occurs for banishing sky-body worship, and suppressing
reference to any distinguishable body as being part of Exodus. If a named
natural object were worshipped, even only as a manifestation or presence
of the god, then all other peoples who saw the same body could pretend to
the same god. They could match their experience, and counter their claims
against those of the Jews. This would not do for Moses' exclusive people,
exclusive god, exclusive religion.

Furthermore, the comet was terrible and damaging to the Jews. Undoubtedly
the behavior of the god immanent in it was a large factor in permitting
the extremely harsh rule that Moses imposed upon them. But the relation to
Yahweh could be controlled; deep down there was an ambivalence, a hatred
that could hardly be governed, working against a gratitude for an escape
from "slavery," together with all that was provided for survival - water,
manna and the poor subsistence coming from hard labor.

Moses himself could not help but feel this intense ambivalence, for of all
people he could understand how the comet was wrecking the Earth. So he
would not wish to make the phenomena of the skies of Exodus any conscious
part, much less any identifiable part of the new religion and new god that
he was building. Other religions with multiple gods, or gods and devils -
and we should note that Moses would deny the existence of a devil - could
handle ambivalence toward divinities much more easily than Yahwism could.

Now we are face-to-face with the phenomena of psychic repression. Yahwism
sees no comet; it sees as little of the sky as possible; it allows only
the fire of Yahweh to be seen. Z. Rix is "convinced that the prohibition
to show an image of Yahweh is a repression, very injurious to the human
mind."[33] What begins as traumatic terror is suppressed in memory; then,
rather than gradually becoming adjusted to the memory, the mind is
committed to the suppression by priests and ritual. And it never can
adjust to the reality of recollection, and hence never can accommodate to
the reality of the present. This mental condition is bound up with the
invisible god and is a large factor in the psychological operations of
mosaism and Yahwism.

If the mental process were to be divided into phases, in the first phase a
perception occurred: the sight and force is then accorded life, that is,
anthropomorphization. The reality of the comet passes and the memory
remains, but not a memory of a comet as such; rather the memory of a
divine intervention, of a god who can be controlled by sacrifices and
subservience.

Memory always has a function and, to have this function, especially in
terrible instances, must be distorted. The trauma of anthropomorphic
natural force can be managed; a great natural force cannot, and hence must
be denied. Thus, the Romans had gods with human qualities and permitted
themselves psychologically to associate these gods with planets - as in
the case of Mars - but in only one case, cited by Pliny, was an actual
comet consciously named and admitted to the pantheon as a god, that of
Augustus Caesar.

THE GENTILE EXODUS

The experience of Exodus was critical in the history of the Jews; further,
a long chain of history has bound up over a billion people, indirectly the
whole human race, in its consequences. Yet, at the time, the Israelite
experience was special, affecting only a small fraction of the world's
people. I say this not only to extend history but to contract it, and then
I contract it in order to extend it differently. It has been a source both
of pride and sorrow to the Jews in that they have unwittingly made the
whole world suffer their Exodus. But every people of the world suffered
its exodus at the same time. By taking on the record of the Hebrew Exodus
it has been substituting the Jewish Exodus for one of its own, or blending
them, or reviving its own. Whether this is for better or worse depends
upon how each of hundreds of surviving cultures and many more dead
cultures incorporated their own catastrophe.

In this age of one humanity and a sense of the good of all, I cannot but
feel sympathy for the hapless nations and tribes that succumbed or
survived in wretchedness. If only all had written books and these had been
preserved, what a sense of common destiny, amounting practically to a
common humanistic religion, we might share. Nevertheless, we have this
one, with its terror, strife, and striving. And, here and there within it,
we glimpse the distraught other peoples, the Egyptians of Ipuwer and El
Arish accounts, but also especially of the Bible, written by their
presumed enemies, the Israelites.

In the chant of Moses, already quoted, we hear of the people by their
great highway into the Near East, the Philistines, Edomites, Moabites -
all prostrated by disaster [34]. Velikovsky is like many people when he
forgives the desperate Jews their transgressions upon others, while
denouncing their equally desperate enemies such as the Hyksos-Amalekites
for their transgressions. This is not only unfair; it obscures also the
motives of peoples, their common fates, and the origins of their gods. It
continues the destructive notion of the chosen people whether it be Israel
or the mosaic-inspired Kaiserdom of "Deutschland Über Alles."

From the scene of the Exodus we can fan out in all directions, finding
everywhere in the records and ruins of the time the same elemental fury.
We look of course for the same things that we have found in the Biblical
setting: the plagues, the years of darkness, floods, earthquakes,
wanderings of people, continuous heavenly fire, electrical effects, new
frenzied and obsessive forms of worship and gods on the ruins of shattered
cities and among groups of survivors.

"Plagues of insects, drought, earthquake in the night, the most terrible
devastation, clouds sweeping the ground, a tidal flood carrying away
entire tribes - these disturbances and upheavals were experienced in
Arabia and Egypt alike."[35] Amidst tumult and disorder, the
Amalekites-Hyksos managed to reach and conquer Egypt.

During the Late Holocene period, which may actually have included the time
of Exodus and later catastrophic episodes as well, the Sinai subplate was
subjected to heavy uplifting, folding and submerging at its East and West
margins. This is the scene of the Exodus drama; however, archaeological
evidence is not yet available to tie a phase of this turbulence to the end
of the Middle Bronze Age. (As matters stand, a connection can be made with
an uplifting event and the disturbed astronomical years 776 to 687 B.C.
that I refer to and describe in Chaos and Creation, in The Disastrous Love
Affair of Moon and Mars, and, with Earl R. Milton, in Solaria Binaria.)
[36]

In a paper published elsewhere[37], I surveyed the evidence for the
catastrophes of the Near and Middle East, which I can summarize here.
Claude Schaeffer, whose archaeological work in Syria brought him many
honors, published as early as 1948 a great compendium of the destruction
of settlements in the second millennium before Christ. The end of the
Middle Bronze Age, corresponding to the end of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom
that we have been studying, seems to have witnessed the complete
destruction of every city that had been excavated. The effects of
earthquakes were most common.

Since it is believed sometimes that the pyramids and other strong stone
structures have escaped damage through the ages, it is worthwhile
mentioning that even the Great Pyramid exhibits severe damage by
earthquake[38]. I do not make more of this case and others because there
is presently no way of judging whether the damage was caused in the
earthquakes of the Exodus.

The destruction of Minoan Crete around the same time was exposed by Evans.
Evidence of a Chinese catastrophe with a hiatus between the Hia and the
Chang dynasties was adduced by Schaeffer and Velikovsky. Previously, the
Indus River civilization was shown to have collapsed in ruins then, too,
and the extent of the fall has been steadily expanded north, east and
south on the Indian subcontinent in the past half century of exca-
vation[39]. The Euphrates River systems of channels moved west at this
time and hundreds of settlements were abandoned in a long dark age[40]. It
was then, too, that "the ancient cities of Southern Turkmenian
civilization perished at about the same time as the proto-indian, and the
reasons are still unknown."[41] The antiquity of Meso-American
civilization is only now being discovered. The Olmec civilization, which
had the lodestone compass before the Chinese, suffered devastation by fire
and flood at this time [42].

To the evidence of the spade may be added the evidence of legend from
around the world. Greco-Roman civilization knew of the Exodus catastrophe,
which Pliny gives passing mention to, in part by way of the stories of
Typhon and Phaeton. Phaeton loses control of the chariot of the sun and
sets fire to the world; Zeus has to strike him down with a cosmic
thunderbolt to save the world from destruction. (See figure 8.)

Stecchini has recently publicized the work of the Babylonian astronomical
scholar, F.X. Kugler, that assigns to about 1550 B.C. the adventure of
Phaeton. By Kugler's reconstruction, "a sunlike meteorite" passed by Earth
from South to North creating various disasters until it, or some portion
of it, fell in the Thracian region. This would be the region of the Celts,
whose representatives, when asked one time by Alexander the Great what it
was that they feared most, replied "that the sky might fall."

Typhon, too, was part or all of a monstrous sky body, which Zeus was
supposed to have felled with his thunderbolts. Bimson shows that Typhon
has another identity, that of the first Hyksos king of Egypt following the
Exodus. Either the comet or the king was named for the other. The typhoons
of the South Seas carry the name, too, and resemble, as do the American
tornados, the pillar of smoke, water and fire.

The legends of the world are rich in material probably of this period.
From Egypt we have a depiction of the "red (angry) eye of Horus in the
mouth of Seth," who is the Typhonic monster. Sutherland has given us an
account of how the unlucky dragon of China originated at this time and
developed into the "lucky dragon" of later times, honored by being woven
into the Emperors gown, even as magnificent as the ephod, robe and
breastplate of Aaron. He depicts a large serpent-like creature with stubby
feet and jets of flame flashing the length of its body as it pursues with
jaws agape a round globe that may be taken to be the head of a comet [43].
Obviously the Jews were not alone in converting the harbinger of disaster
into a benevolent and beneficent being.

	Figure 8. Zeus Strikes Down Phaeton. (Click on the picture to get
an enlarged view. Caution: Image files are large.) (Source: Sixteenth
century embroidery of scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses)

On what must be the last day of Passover week, but in every month, the
Babylonians celebrated a 'Day of Wrath' of the goddess Ishtar with the
stoppage of work and lamentations; Ishtar was Athene, Minerva, Venus, and
Baalzevuv. Baal Zevuv or "god of the flies," whom Americans know by the
popular devil's name of Beelzebub, was also Baal of the Ten Tribes of the
Northern Kingdom of Israel and of the Canaanites; god Ares in the Iliad
calls Athene: "dog-fly;" a reading of the voluminous cross-cultural
evidence brought forward in Velikovsky's books should provide assurance
that the four plagues of diverse insects or vermin before Exodus were
inextricable from a celestial, catastrophic event.

THE HORROR OF RED

The horror of the color red in Egypt after 1450 B. C. is an understandable
result of the Exodus catastrophe and most precisely the red plague. "Red
is regarded as a purely calamitous color."[44] Yet the heavenly gods of
Edfu (third dynasty of the Old Kingdom) were clad in festive red. The
tracing of just this detail of a culture, the color red, illuminates how
the cometary disaster produced long-lasting psychological and material
changes,

The Egyptians could not even enjoy a red sunset or sunrise for a long time
thereafter, deeming the sun to be ominous of danger and anger. It was
"Horus raging with red eyes." The Red Sea was probably named for those
days of the red plague. "It is remarkable that the designation of 'Red
Sea' has no precedent in Old Egyptian; to the contrary, expressions
regularly contained no mention of color."[45] The seas all around were
feared and the Egyptians did not go to sea but left the waters to other
peoples. The whole foreign world was called "the red " with the same
loathing that a modern capitalist might talk of the "reds" of communism.

While the murex, the shell that makes a beautiful red dye, was the object
of brisk trade elsewhere, the Egyptians would never deal in it. In the
sarcophagi, a bull at one end of the tomb was painted red. The dead who
were buried with broken red pots were said thus to ward off Seth and
recognize Osiris.

The Egyptians were probably the source of imagining the devil to be red.
Seth - god of the conquering Hyksos, but eternal foe of Horus - was sent
into the underground after the expulsion of the Hyksos. The color of Seth
was red. So was the color of Typhon, who came to be a monstrous identity
of Seth. Human sacrifices - the highest compliment that humans can make to
a deity - were offered to repeat and thus reassure the destruction of
Typhon. According to Rix, Jews were often chosen for Typhonic sacrifices,
especially red-headed Jews. Possibly thus the historical connection of the
Jews with the red plague could be more sharply symbolized. "Therefore the
nuggoi (red) people were persecuted, therefore only nuggoi animals were
chosen for sacrifice, therefore also fiery colored people (Typhonians)
according to Diodorus in ancient times were offered at the tomb of Osiris,
and according to Plutarch, later, were burnt in Eileithyia and their ashes
winnowed to the winds."[46] Yet, "the name (or nickname) 'the red one,'
referring to skin color or hair color had at first no negative value,"[47]
When animals were substituted for humans, "the sacrifice of a red bull is
represented at Denderah with the formal statement that the animal was
Typhon."[48] Cows, bulls and asses were portrayed as red on ceremonial
occasions. Seth was also the red ass and hippopotamus. However, the
bull-god Apis, object of the Hyksos cult, is colored black [49].

The Pharaoh of Egypt wore a double crown to represent both Upper Egypt and
Lower Egypt, which includes Memphis and the Nile River Delta whence
occurred the Exodus: the crown of Upper Egypt was white, the crown of
Lower Egypt red. This was to show the domination of Lower Egypt by Upper
Egypt. But this domination meant probably the disaster, suppression, and
finally liberation of Lower Egypt from the Hyksos, the people of Typhon.
"Because red had an evil meaning, the red crown was referred to
euphemistically as 'the green."' A district governor from Siut declares
his resolve "to bring order to the red."[50]

The god, Horus, was connected with the color white but when angry, his
eyes became red. Isis, when siding with her brother Osiris, is black; when
shown as the sister of Seth, she is red. Although red originally was used
on a papyrus as "the color of high rank" it "becomes later the symbol of
the unfavorable and dangerous." The Pharaoh's name is in red in the Book
of the Dead. Calendars marked their unlucky and evil days in red ink [51].
The pervasiveness of the attitude toward red as evil is a measure of the
trauma of cosmic catastrophe, followed by foreign oppression, that befell
Egypt as the Israelites under Moses departed.

THE ELECTROSTATIC AGE

His lightnings lighten the world;
the Earth sees and trembles.
The mountains melt like wax before the Lord,
before the Lord of all the earth.

This Psalm 97 of the Bible seems to have been composed by a devout but
advanced electrician. So also seems Deborah: "The mountains melted... even
that Sinai." (Judges 5:4-5). Only lately, and by means of satellites, have
scientists known of mega-lightning, 100 times more intense than the
typical thunderstorms discharges, which shoots bolts of 1013 watts and 109
joules between the highest atmosphere and low clouds or earth [52]. Such
discharges, of which there are many and which were probably once more
common, can transmute heavy elements and create radioactivity in
abundance.

Since we have had no recent experience of lightning-like electrical
discharges between a large body and Earth, we need to draw analogies from
extra-terrestrial astronomy to imagine what can have happened during
Exodus times. The closest analogy may be what is happening between planet
Jupiter and its moon-sized satellite Io.

"Probably the most spectacular discovery of the Voyager mission has been
the existence of active volcanoes on Io, erupting material to heights of
several hundred kilometers above the surface."[53] According to T. Gold,
these "volcanoes" are probably of electrical origin. Seeking out points of
high potential and conductivity on Io, lightning from Jupiter shoots ten
trillion watts of power repeatedly across the space gap between the two
bodies. It digs volcano-like craters with high heat and explosive force,
raising pillars of material to heights of up to 270 kilometers, whereupon
most of it falls back around its caldera. The electric current or arc "can
be expected to be an accurately repeating process."[54]

I would add here, and discuss later, the comment that the Earth-to-comet
discharges would range from such enormous discharges (which would however
be not so repetitive) to much less powerful, non-explosive electrical
melts of mountain-tops. The tie-in of electrostatic discharges with a
thermal flow through mountaintops is still a problem for a future science.
Meteorologists and geologists have no sense of its history, possibility,
and effects. Hence for thousands of years Psalmist 97 has been regarded
merely as an exuberant poet.

The Age of Exodus was perforce electrical, judging by the traits and
behavior of the greatest gods of the age, such as Zeus, Jupiter, Thor,
Marduk, Thoth, Amon and Yahweh, electric phenomena were pervasive and
intense, and took many forms. As G.B. Vico wrote, every gentile nation had
its Zeus. Every mountain had its fire sanctuary. The Etruscans, probably
in the Near East in Moses' time and, later on, a powerful and advanced
Italian nation, are a case in point. They exhibited the most frenetic
obsession with lightning; every stroke made its target sacred and
approachable only by one of the powerful priesthood; today every eminence
in Tuscany seems to reveal to the aerial infra-red camera a ruined
development beneath its soil. The Etruscans gave the Romans Jupiter, who
was Jove or Ioweh or, who knows, Yahweh; they originated in the Near East
and some of their linguistic roots are in Sumer, their blood types
resemble an Anatolian group, and they possessed creation and flood legends
strikingly like those of Genesis.

Throughout the world, altars were placed on eminences, where a "priesthood
of the mountain" would collect and administer static electricity in the
course of its rituals, orgies, and oracles. These would not necessarily be
the highest peaks. Very tall mountains discharge readily and invisibly
into the vapor clouds that hover over them and frequently envelop them.
For electrical purposes, lesser eminences, with the proper types of
conductive rock, the proper network of fractures, and the presence of
groundwater steeply descending would facilitate the religious function.
Everywhere priesthood developed an expertness in selecting and shaping
sites for the exploitation of divine fire. The Druids of Britain
distinguished between the lightning of priesthood (drui-lanack) and the
lightning of god (dis-lanack). In Egypt, the age of pyramids preceding
Exodus brought the mountain priesthoods to the flat Nile Valley.

Everything that was luminescent, that emitted a high density of photons,
was termed "fire." Left with this general word, we of this age, when much
less of fire is left in nature, are likely to regard all ancient
references as combustion or lightning. The term may mean these two forms;
or it may be a metaphor; but very often it refers to strikingly different
manifestations.

The incessant attention given to many forms of fire is one reason why I
believe that certain ancient periods were undergoing a universal change in
electrical conditions. Already highly electrical before Exodus, the world
was impelled by the comet of those years into a yet more widespread and
intense electrical condition.

There is every reason to believe that "present conditions" -meaning by
this the past 2500 years - have experienced in no way the conditions of
the Jovean age which we are discussing, and the Bible misleads or is read
wrongly when Moses is pictured as a traveling magician with a tent full of
trinkets. Seneca, the great Roman stoic, recalls in a tragedy a Jupiter
whose bolts would level mountains; this is the kind of god with whom we
are dealing. Experts on lightning who have looked into paleontological
lightning evidences - such as E. V. Komarek [55] - draw pictures of heavy
past electrical activities; immense fields of lightning-caused fulgerites
are to be found embedded around the world. No such processes have been
reported in historical times.

Electrical fires may have been responsible for scorching of some sealed
tombs of the period [56]. The pyramids or Egypt may seem to have evaded
divine melting, but calcination is manifested in certain places, and the
plated stone that covered the pyramids is missing. We do have a
provocative instance of burning in Babylon, such that it has been
considered by some as the original Tower of Babel, whose brick and bitumen
construction was struck by divine fire [57]. It was of the stepped,
ziggurat type.

It appeared that the fire had struck the tower and split it
down to the very foundation. In different parts of the ruins
immense brown and black masses of brickwork had changed
into a vitrified state. At a distance the ruins looked like
edifices torn apart at their foundations. Evidently the
fiercest kind of fire created the havoc. The most curious of
the fragments found were several misshapen masses of
brickwork, black, subjected to some kind of heat, and
completely molten.

The whole ruin has the appearance of a burnt mountain. On
one side of it, beneath the crowning masonry, lay huge
fragments torn from the pile itself. The calcinated and
vitreous surface of the brick had fused into rock-like
masses. It is difficult to explain the cause of the vitrification
of the upper building. Great boulders were vitrified, and
brickwork had been fused by fire [58].

It is probable that thousands of burnt eminences exist around the world
whose tops have seen the electrical fusion of rocks, perhaps even Troy
IIg, the "Burnt City" so-called [59]. The famous site, whether or not it
was the real Troy, is on an eminence. While not high, the city would have
had many small reservoirs of water, whereas the ground outside might
already have been dried out. In Troy IIg a sulphurous color suffuses all
outdoor spaces and passageways of the town. A deposit of lead and copper
melted and flowed around the town. (It is possible that this melt had been
scavenged after Schliemann reported it in the 1880 s and the discoloration
was all that was discoverable when the Blegen expedition re-excavated the
site in the 1930's.) No human hand could have or would have set such a
fire. The heat was fierce. The ash was far too abundant for a deliberate
fire from local materials, and carried a red color. No one would have
wanted to destroy precious metals (not to mention even more precious metal
left in abundance in the scorched houses and the "treasure of Priam,"
found on a wall.) Noteworthy is the almost complete absence of human and
animal skeletal material in the ruins. Either they turned to dust from the
heat, or the electrical buildup was sensed, as it is by animals before
earthquakes for example, and they fled from the hill onto the plain where
the sensations were absent. Troy IIg, however, should be dated around the
time of the Tower of Babel, and exemplifies the unusual play of electrical
forces in pre-Exodus times, rather than during the Exodus itself.

In this connection, it is suggested that a great many eminences without
settlements or special conditions may, in the process of conducting a
charge to or from deep below the surface, have liquified silicates and
ferruginous substances together as a conductor, or fused them from the
ancient rocks and from by-products, and brought these materials up to the
top of the eminence where they are today found, resting on loose, hardly
consolidated rocks, as a hard dense cap. This phenomenon is usually
explained as a metamorphosis, of very old age, that somehow raised the
temperature of water-laden deep limestones and granites and caused them to
nearly melt and to rise.

Silification is abundant around igneous metamorphism. In a hot and fast
reaction, siliceous fluid is introduced hydrothermally and replaces the
host rock, such as limestone, into which it intrudes. It is possible, with
or without water, for an electric discharge to assemble and flow quickly
as a current up the core of a hill, heating as it moves. Resistant rock
heats up like the resistant coils of an ordinary electric room-heater. The
taller the mountain, the less time and chance for the siliceous fluid to
reach and cap its peak before the current is dissipated in heat or finds
enough discontinuities of strata and faults to disperse in different
directions.

YAHWEH'S ELECTRICAL FIRE CONGLOMERATE

Yahweh is present in smoke and fire both in the Tabernacle and elsewhere,
giving rise to the naive view that he was simply a typical volcano god, of
which, presumably, there are as many as there are volcanoes [60]. Freud
adopted this view as part of accepting the primitivist bedouin theory of
much of Exodus. The volcano gods that inspire this belief are the small
"retail" gods of today, not the wholesale volcano and fire gods of old -
like Hephaistos. And Yahweh was more than a wholesale volcano god; he was
a giant fire conglomerate god.

When Moses invited the elders to visit Yahweh with him, they came upon his
presence on a vitrified surface, sapphire as of heaven. This was the Sinai
that "burned like wax." On the occasion when Moses had spent days and
nights on the Holy Mountain, the electrical currents were so heavy that he
had crouched in a cleft for fear of electrocution as Yahweh passed by. The
Israelites had their own electrical mountain:

There were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon
the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast... And Mount
Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the Lord descended it
in fire [61].

The fire came down to the mountain. Only Moses could approach its heights
safely. The people had to stand below, which is something nevertheless
that they might not do if it were a violently erupting volcano. A column
of smoke went up. The horns sounded ever louder. Fiery darts dropped
everywhere. There were frightening electrical storms and earth movements.
Stones were cast down from the sky. The people scarcely dared approach the
foot of the mountain for fear that they would be destroyed by fire. They
did finally run away.

Since Mount Sinai does not behave like a volcano, one is not surprised to
learn that explorers have not found a volcano, whether extinct or alive,
at any of the sites proposed for the location of Moses' Holy Mountain. The
two major contenders for the position are Jebel Músa in the South Central
Sinai Peninsula and a mountainous location at the northeastern head of the
Gulf of Aquaba (see map of Figure 5) referred to as Mount Horeb. Following
Winnett's tracing of the Wilderness itinerary, I am adopting the latter in
my considerations, partly because this is in Midian and Horeb is placed in
Midian by Ex. 3:1 and Moses has had so much to do with Midian otherwise
[62]. Geological investigations are required before Mount Sinai-Jebel Musa
is definitely pronounced a possibility for "electrico-vulcanism," and even
less is known of the geology of the several locations heretofore proposed
near modern Eilath, in ancient Midian or modern North Hêgaz.

On various occasions Yahweh sent consuming fires upon the Israelites, once
even at a place renamed Teberah, "the Burning Place."[63] The fire:
"wrought havoc among...the murmuring and complaining multitude that had
joined the Israelites upon their Exodus from Egypt."[64] It was a fire
that destroyed fire. It spread on all sides. It was the same fire that
"found its place on the altar of the Tabernacle," and that destroyed
Aaron's sons and Korah's company. "Moses took bundles of wool and laid
them upon the divine fire, which thereupon went out."[65] Wool is of
course more effective than water in extinguishing electrical fires.

One cannot be sure what kind of fire it is that runs along the ground. It
is not ordinary combustion; it may be fleets of ball-lightning such as
have rarely been observed in recent times [66]. "Fire has mounted up on
high" (Ipuwer) is significant. This is not lightning: the combination
indicates a type of St. Elmo's conflagration - there are cases reported
even recently like this with a climbing of whatever eminences are
accessible. Pyramids, obelisks, buildings, perhaps even balls and jets of
fire leaving the ground and moving through the dense atmosphere upwards,
like a clutch of balloons, are probable.

The repeated Biblical references to Yahweh's sending darts of fire, jets
of fire upon the enemies of Israel and even upon the Israelites when they
displease him inspires one to seek the corresponding natural phenomenon,
even though it would be enormously amplified in a general catastrophic
encounter. Juergens has suggested plasmoids, pieces of plasma, as being
formed and bombarding earth on some ancient occasions. These electrical
footballs are formed of a balance of positive ions and electrons. They
retain their identity and appear as luminous objects of the size of
missiles. They would cause explosions near the ground and/or dig craters
[67].

It is the voltage difference that promotes electrical activity; opposite
charges that attract are not necessary for a discharge. A high negative
charge will discharge to a low negative charge; the electrons explode or
spark to the less dense negative region, or follow a highly conductive
medium. The difference in potential is the setting for an activity.

The Earth as a sphere carries an overall charge but no one knows what it
is [68]. The concept of "charge" is effectively meaningless except in
relation to other aggregates that carry an electric charge. The charge of
the Earth as a whole then is significant when any part of the whole - its
rocks, its waters, its atmosphere, its depths and heights - becomes
electrically differentiated, which means that these are electrically
potentiated for activity when their charges or distances or media of
conduction change in relation to one another. Also the Globe is charged in
relation to other aggregates of the solar system environment, be they
plasma, gases, meteoroids, planet or sun, just as it may have a
gravitational relationship to them. And just as that gravitational
relationship varies exponentially with the distance of the aggregates, so
does the electrical relationship vary.

The solar system as a whole, moving as it does in relation to millions of
bodies of the Milky Way Galaxy, operates in a changing electrical
environment. This is constant so long as the solar system as a point in
the Galaxy retains a stable position, though moving, in relation to all
other significant charged points. And it does so too, so long as such
body-points are not rapidly changing their electrical condition, as for
example happens when a star explodes as a nova or supernova.

In good weather a point on the Earth's surface carries in the meter of
atmosphere above it a negative charge of about 100 volts. (Ground zero is
a relative concept; an immense voltage might conceivably be in the Earth.)
The luminous halo-discharges from points, known as St. Elmo's fire, "are
caused by a sharp increase in the voltage field to a value a thousand
times greater than the average 120- 150V/m."[69] At a height of 50
kilometers, the ionosphere carries a positive charge of about 400,000
volts, which would indicate an average vertical voltage gradient of about
8 volts per meter. This difference produces no visible or felt effects
ordinarily. A sudden change, such as occurs just before an earthquake,
will excite greatly the biosphere and produce weakness, giddiness, and
tense feelings among people [70]. Eric Crew points out that there is a
normal leakage in the atmospheric column; this current is tiny and totals
1800 amperes, which is balanced by the charging effect of lightning
carrying negative charge to the ground [71]. Changing atmospheric
conditions also play upon this voltage gradient causing electrical
effects.

Any changed deployment of external aggregates also plays upon this voltage
gradient and often it is by no means child's play. A volcanic eruption or
a meteorite fall plays havoc with its ambiance, electrically as well as
otherwise. Sun spots, which are electrified explosive events, have
meteorological and climatic effects on the Earth and may even disturb the
Earth's motion.

If two large bodies - such as the earth and a great comet - approach each
other, they will invariably be carrying unequal charges at various lines
of potential contact. They will exchange charges between their plasma
sheaths (magnetospheres), between their atmospheres, between their surface
prominences, and between their surfaces, which are graded according to
conductivity and resistances. Even if all of these changed states and all
bodily motions were known and this data were fed into a computer, and even
if all the laws of electricity now known were programmed to manipulate the
data, the pattern of exchanges would be exceedingly complicated, fast,
often violent, and in any event impossible to plot given the present state
of knowledge and the many behaviors that are beyond history.

A long-term charge exchange of Earth with its atmosphere and
interplanetary space is postulated, together with a large-body encounter,
to explain the apparently heavy electrical effects of the mid-second
millennium B.C. A third major producer of electricity would be the crustal
stresses of the Earth in the aftermath of a large-body encounter, whether
involving a slight or major deceleration or axial re-orientation of part
or all of the Earth's crust, mantle and core. These would bring about a
long period of earthquakes and piezo-electric effects.

The relation between earthquakes and lightning has been foolishly
neglected for two centuries until now. The Chinese earthquake of July 28,
1976 lit up the sky in red and white colors for 200 miles around its
epicenters for hours [72]. Observers, from antiquity to the present day,
have spoken of the flames emerging from earthquake fissures; one student
counted ten such reports in a survey of several hundred earthquakes.[73]

Piezoelectricity comes from stresses of pressure and heat upon quartz
rock, which is widely dispersed over the Earth's crust, particularly in
lavas. "The North Idu peninsula earthquake on November 26, 1930, the best
documented instance of seismoelectricity (over fifteen hundred sightings),
occurred in a region with widespread quartz rich lava flows."[74] In
quartz whose axis has been lined up by tectonic strains, an earthquake can
create "an average electric field of 500-5000 volts/cm. For distances in
the order of half the seismic wavelength, the general voltage is 5 x 107
to 5 x 108 V, which is comparable with the voltage responsible for
lightning in storms. The discharge will seek outlets through tooth-like
(Sinai=Sinn=Tooth?), sword-like (Horeb=sword), and especially
quartz-loaded eminences, or in fissures, or, if needs be, in fires
"running along the ground" (plagues of Egypt). The piezoelectric effects,
occurring from earth strains, would long outlast the cometary encounter,
and provide continuous high voltage above ground.

E. A. Von Fange quotes 37 passages from the Old Testament referring to
great destruction by fire, only one of them from Exodus, which we find has
numerous references to fire. He also mentions "a total of 28 fields of
burned and broken stones called harras, has been found in Western Arabia,
covering up to 7000 square miles each. "[75]

A comprehensive list of all electrical phenomena that are mentioned or
hinted at in the Bible and Jewish legends would include: celestial eyes;
angels and other apparitions on prominences; St. Elmo's fire; blasts;
jagged lightning; jets or darts of fire; exploded gas pockets or petroleum
fires; electrically induced or electrically accompanied dust and water
typhoons and tornados; ionized winds; charged and ionized dust-falls;
illuminated skies, including earthquake lights; the electrical flashes
from volcanoes; point discharges on controlled machines or near to such
apparatus; smoke clouds of luminous quality; night lights;
phosphorescence; thunder, trumpets and singing; piezoelectric effects; and
natural electrochemical compositions of manna and other substances. To
these should be added the fall-outs of electro-jet transported stones and
dust, and electrically accompanied radioactive fall-out or explosion. Nor
should one neglect the many electrical changes overcoming the great comet
in its movements through space, that gave it so many different identities
- animal, human and divine.

We can be sure that a full range of electrical effects - visual, auditory
and physiological - would be experienced by the whole population and that
many changes would occur in the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere and
biosphere. Furthermore, the effects would be enduring. Centuries would
pass before the numerous causal chains would emerge into an apparent
equilibrium. Then all spheres of nature would gradually have been adjusted
to all others. Earth rock strata, discontinuities, faults, and contours
would carry differing currents, generate piezoelectricity, and so-on, but
at a level finally recognizable as of the present day. Like water seeks
its own level, electricity gropes for a balance of charges.

THE CELESTIAL FIRST CAUSE

Given the Exodus symptoms which were exhibited in the Near East and
elsewhere, which were not all confined to Lower Egypt, we can surmise that
physical convulsions overcame the Earth. These were provoked either by
internal causes or external ones. But what would provoke a quiescent
Earth, as we know it today, to such energetic reactions as we observe
during the Exodus? If the Earth's interior were as it is now, and as many
believe it to have been for a billion years or more, and if its motions
were then as they are now, as they are believed to have been for a billion
years or more, neither Exodus nor any other such general catastrophe would
have been experienced in history and prehistory.

We have a convenient test of this statement. The island of Thera-
Santorini, north of Crete, and only some hundreds miles from the scene of
the Exodus plagues and tides, has recently been accredited with that
disaster [76]. Thera, an ancient center of Minoan civilization, suffered
more than one explosion in the second half of the second millennium. The
date of its climactic destruction may be about 1000 B.C. based on
Isaacson's matching of cultural remains with Bronze Age remains of
Egyptian origin also found there [77]. The incredible blast, 50 times that
of Krakatoa offshore Java in 1883, is known to have filled the sky with a
fall of ashes and excited great tidal waves.

I eliminate Thera as the source of the Exodus catastrophe, not only
because of the late date of the most destructive outburst, but also
because it alone could not have brought about the long period of ground
and air turbulence of Exodus, the biosphere behavior, the sky scenes of
moving bodies, or the years of dust, chemicals, and dark clouds. Further,
it is more likely that a general thermo-electric effect of the Earth's
crustal torsion brought on the explosive series of Thera than the reverse.
Mount Vesuvius exploded with a force equal to the climactic Thera
explosion about 3500 years ago [78]. Many other eruptions would have
occurred, both conical and fissure in type. The great explosion of Thera,
when it did happen hundreds of years later, may have contributed to the
rapid decline and fall of the Hyksos empire of Syria and Lower Egypt, a
fall made final by an alliance of King Saul of Israel and Pharaoh Ahmose
of Egypt [79].

Therefore, there must have been some extra-terrestrial cause of the Exodus
catastrophe. There might have been a change in the sun, which we consider
because of its great size to represent also any considerable change in the
galactic environment. Or there might have been a wandering cloud of gases
or meteoroids that invaded the Earth's "air-space." Or there might have
been some large-body intrusion, coming close enough to the Earth to
provoke the destructive effects experienced on Earth.

This large body would be by definition a comet, because any body on an
irregular orbit or path near us cannot be called a planet, and further,
there is no fundamental difference between a meteoroid and a comet
(although it used to be thought that meteoroids were short-distance
travelers in the solar system and comets long-distance travelers [80]. As
for the coma, or "hair" (Latin) that characterizes the comet, any body
moving through different types of space will react gaseously and
electrically to the differences, and grow or lose its "hair" or "tail."

Since large meteoroids behave like comets, we may turn to smaller
meteoroids. A meteoroid of, say, the diameter that caused the Berringer
Crater of Arizona, or the Tunguska blast in Siberia, which exploded
aboveground, falls on rare occasion. Today Earth experiences incursions by
swarms of meteorites from time to time. A regular swarm hits the
atmosphere and is to be seen on or about August 10 of each year. Their
effects go generally unnoticed. Several reliable accounts of meteorite
swarms of greater moment are available: the widespread terror is
noticeable; the incitement of earth's tremors has been attributed to some
meteors. Strange effects such as gas clouds, ball-lightning, and small
gelatinous masses have been partially verified. No effects comparable to
those of Exodus are demonstrated.

Especially in view of the astonishing irregularities that have been
ascribed to the sun in the past several years [81], one might think of
blaming the sun for the Exodus catastrophe. But here the problem is that
those who experienced Exodus did not blame the sun. The Phaeton legend is
practically alone in asserting that the son of Helios stole his chariot
and lost control of it, careening about the sky to the great distress of
the Earth and its inhabitants. I have already referred to the study of
Kugler who severed any relationship between Phaeton and the sun, giving an
independent existence, path and destruction to this large sun-like body.
The Greek legend of Zeus striking down Typhon, and the Egyptian legend of
Horus defeating Seth and sending him to hell represent much better the
celestial events surrounding Exodus. It is probable, however, as I explain
in another work (Chaos and Creation), that changes in the sun and solar
system precipitated the great body upon its errant course.

Nevertheless, the body is independent, very large, and distinct in the
eyes of the beholders. Velikovsky says it was the planet Venus; I term it
elsewhere the protoplanet Venus or Cometary Venus. This is because of the
abundant connections made in antiquity that associate the great body of
the Exodus skies with the planet Venus. But this point has been heavily
discussed in many places and we can be satisfied, for the purposes of this
book, with the realization that an enormous body passed near the Earth and
that only such a body could have produced the Exodus effects.

Notes (Chapter 3: Catastrophe and Divine Fires)

1.  III G 13-4.

2.  III G 17.

3.  Velikovsky, W. in C., 156.

4.  If 430 years (not 400) are divided by 86, and the dividend is 5; then
Uzza could have been calculating in some cycles of 86 years, but the
legend is mute about the further meaning and I know of no such cycle. I
mention later that the years of Moses, some patriarch, and other events
before 1440 B. C. may have been calculated on a sacred year of 260 days,
perhaps the work of Amon-Jupiter or Thoth-Hermes.

5.  III G 126. For other references to the great celestial light over
Exodus, cf. II G 37, III G 133.

6.  II G 373. Earlier, in contradiction thereof, we spoke of Moses' last
meeting with the Pharaoh being in heavy darkness.

7.  Is. 9:2; W. in C., 175.

8.  B. Feldman, in a letter to VI Kronos, 2(1981) 92, reporting from G.
Scholem's Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah (trans. Werblowsky),
Princeton U. Press, 1973.

9.  Num. 21:9.

10.  Velikovsky, W. in C., 176.

11.  II G 316-7.

12.  Ex. 13:21-2. Cf. 14:19-20.

13.  Translated as, "On comets, comet-like Luminous Apparitions and
Meteors," VII Kronos 4(1982).

14.  III G 26.

15.  G.A. Wainright, "Jacob's Bethel." Report. Pales. Explor. Fund, 1934,
32.

16.  Ex. 26:49.

17.  VII Reallexikon fur Antike and Christentum, p. 376, citing a Midrash.

18.  III G 150-1.

19.  Velikovsky, W. in C., 107.

20.  Ps. 68:7-8.

21.  III G 151.

22.  Ibid., 165.

23.  Ibid., 231-8, with each of these four were grouped two others, making
four groups of three. The Levites, not a tribe, were centered around the
sacred area in the middle of the roughly nine square miles of residential
area.

24.  E.C. Baity, "Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy Thus Far, "14
Current Anthropology 4(Oct. 1973), 389.

25.  Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechand, Hamlet's Mill, Boston :
Gambit, 1969, 239.

26.  Ibid., 239-40.

27.  Oxford Annotated Bible, fn. Ex. 25:40, citing also Ex. 25:9; 26:30;
27:8.

28.  III G 123.

29.  It is called a "bull" on occassion in Jewish legend.

30.  Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the book of Exodus (tr. I, Abrahams)
Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew U., 1967, 412.

31.  Coe. Henri Breuil, "Le bison et le taureau céleste chaldéen, "XIII
Revue Archeologique, series IV, Mar-Ap 1909, 250-4.

32.  Velikovsky, W. in C. 181, quoting Nechre-Wahibre.

33.  Unpubl. letter to author.

34.  Ex. 15:14-16.

35.  Velikovsky, A. in C., 62, quoting Arab sources.

36.  David Neev and G. M. Friedman, "Late Holocene Tectonic Activity Along
the Margins of the Sinai Subplate, "202 Science (27 Oct. 1978) 427-9.

37.  "The catastrophe Finale of the middle Age," Proceeding, IX Int'l,
Congress Prehist and Protohist, Nice, France, 1976.

38.  W.F. Petrie, Egyptian Archaeology, p. 67.

39.  G.L. Possehl, "The Mohenjo-daro Floods..." 69 Amer. Anthro., n°1,
1967, 32-40.

40.  R.M. Adams, "From sites of patterns," 68 U. of Chicago Mag., winter,
1975, 19-20.

41.  Alex. Kondratov, The Riddles of Three Oceans, Moscow, U.S.S.R, 1974,
164:

42.  William Mullen, "The Mesoamerican Record," 4 Pensée, 4 Fall 1974,
34-44.

43.  "China's Dragon," 4 Pensée, 1 (1973-4), 47-50.

44.  Reallexikon fur Antike and Christentum (Anton Hiersemann,
Stuttgart,1969) 366.

45.  Ibid., 362-6.

46.  Zvi Rix, unpubl. mss., quoting K.B. Stark, Gaza and die Philistaische
Küste (1852), s. 268.

47.  Reallexikon for Antike and Christentum.

48.  Rix, quoting E. Lefebure, "Le Sacrifice Humain d'après les rites de
Busiris et d'Abydos," III Sphinx (Upsala), 1900, 143.

49.  Reallexikon, 368.

50.  Ibid., 372.

51.  Ibid., 374.

52.  New Scientist (20 Oct. 1977), 150.

53.  B.A. Smith et. al., 204 Science (1979), 961.

54.  Thomas Gold, "Electrical Origin of the Outburst on Io, "206 Science
(1979), 1072.

55.  "The Natural History of Lightning," Proceedings, III Tall Timbers
Fire Ecology Conference, Tallahasse, Fla., 1964, 150.

56.  Velikovsky, W. in C., 56-57.

57.  Gen. 11:1-9.

58.  E.A. Von Fange, "Strange Fires on Earth," 12 Creation R.Q. (Dec.
1975), 132.

59.  A. de Grazia, "Paleo-Calcinology: Destruction by fire in Pre-history
and Ancient Times," I Kronos 4 (1976) 25-36; II Kronos (1976),63-71.

60.  Cf. Oxford Annot. Bible, Ex. 3:2 fn; 19:9; 33:9; 40:34-8; 1 Kings
8:10-11.

61.  Ex. 19:16-19.

62.  The Mosaic Tradition, 74 and 71ff. Pythian-Adams is cited as first to
suggest, in his Call of Israel, that all Sinai reference were Post-Exilic
while the reference to Horeb are older and original.

63.  Num. 11:1-3.

64.  III G 244.

65.  III G 245.

66.  Cf. W. Corliss, comp., Strange Phenomena, 2 v. (1974) GLB series for
recent cases.

67.  The plasmoid may be distinguished from ball lightning by its more
volatile and heavy explosive quality. Cf. R. Juergens, "Of the Moon and
Mars," IV Pensée 4 (1974), 21.

68.  Contradicting this, V. Manoilov, Electricity and Man, Moscow: Mir,
1978, 54, sets the Earth's charge at 50 million coulombs, granting that
the charge is continually changing globally and locally.

69.  Ibid., 55.

70.  Cf. W. Corliss, comp., Strange Phenomena, 2 v. 1974, GE-GQE-029, 030,
et passim.

71.  Eric Crew, "Electricity in Astronomy," II SISR 4(1977), 24.

72.  U.S. Geological Survey, "Earthquake Lights," (July 3, 1977, Wash.
D.C.)

73.  The space available here does not permit citation of the numerous
scientific articles on electrical effects of earthquakes such as would
have been experienced during the Exodus and in the wilderness. A number of
useful reports are cited and partially
reprinted in Corliss, compiler, op. cit. (GQE series, Sourcebooks, 1974f).

74.  David Finkelstein and James Powell, 228 Nature (Nov. 21,1970)
759-760.

75.  Op. cit., 131.

76.  D. Vitaliano, op. cit., ch. 8ff.

77.  I. Isaacson, "Some preliminary Remarks..." I Kronos 2 (1975), 93-9.

78.  M.R. Rampino, S. Self, R. Fairbridge, "Can Rapid Climatic Change
Cause Volcanic Eruptions," 206 Science, 16 Nov. 1979, 826, citing J.
Keller et al.

79.  Velikovsky, A. in C. 79, ff. The cause may have been an isostatic
adjustment or a cometary revisit.

80.  Richard A. Kerr, "When Disaster Rains..." 206 Science (16 Nov. 1979),
803-4.

81.  John A. Eddy, "Case of Missing Sunspots," 236 Sci. Amer. (May 1977),
80-92; Earl s. Milton, "The Not So Stable Sun," V Kronos 1 (1979), 64-78.