http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ mirrored file
For complete access to all the files of this collection
	see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php 
==========================================================
Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 12: The Laughing Gods                          
175

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE LAUGHING GODS

When Hephaestus roared out his anguish and humiliation at
being cuckolded, he demanded that "Father Zeus and all you
other eternal and blessed gods come here to see for yourself this
laughable, this unyielding truth." But not all the gods came to
gaze upon the trapped "embedded" couple at his copper-floored
house. There came Poseidon, Hermes, and Apollo, all three
being important Olympian sky gods.

From Father Zeus came only silence. He deigned neither to
appear nor to return the bride-price that Hephaestus had paid
him. The "gifts of wooing" were unlike the gifts of Ares to
Aphrodite; they were injuries received, not injuries given. Most
of the gods had "taken their lumps" from the Father, from time
to time.

To imagine Zeus upon the scene could only occur to the raving
Hephaestus. He is not to be called upon for a laughable matter.
Indeed, the presumptuousness of calling upon him is comic.
The scene would become too heavy, the literary critic would
say, if Zeus should appear. Besides, Zeus was in truth absent. In
the tragic setting of the Trojan War, Zeus had been engaged,
acting to preserve the balance of power so as to work out the
preordained plot, arbitrating, mediating. Still he is remarkably
aloof, even there, his thunderbolts remembered by gods and
men alike, but held in a kind of nuclear-missiles reserve. His
deeds were deeply etched upon human memory but physically
he was receding into the far skies.

Why then, would Hermes, Apollo, and Poseidon make an
appearance?

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 12: The Laughing Gods                          
176

MERCURY

Hermes does not enter upon the action, As the planet Mercury,
he may have been in a conjunction with one or more of the
principles, in which event he may have vented some unusual
expression. He may have presented an apparition at the time.
For the scene may not have had the celestial clarity in the
actuality that it achieved in the dancing circle. In a time of
storm, of darkness and ashes, of lightning strokes, of different
visual and acoustical perspectives - especially at the climax of
the celestial disturbances - it is possible that a convocation of
the gods was perceived.

Perhaps Mercury appeared as an optical illusion and also as a
re-engagement of memory, as both crisis and the memory of
crisis struck hammer blows upon the mind and, later on, made
demands upon the unconscious to recreate the "pluperfect"
along with the "perfect." Venus was there; Mercury had been
there, too. The climax of tension produces in the mind both
memories overlaid.

The fourth day of the month in Greece was sacred jointly to
Aphrodite and Hermes, celebrating a game of dice between
Moon and Hermes, the outcome of which added five days to the
year, bringing it from 360 to 365 days. (The legend is probably
of Egyptian origin.) In my book of Chaos and Creation (1981),
Mercury was assigned a period of heavy worship between 2200
and 1500 B.C., that is, up to the Exodus, when Athena-Venus
became the cynosure of Earthly eyes. M. Mandelkehr has more
recently informed me of several additional authoritative sources
who found Thoth active throughout the Old Kingdom of Egypt,
and points out that his ibis symbol existed even before dynastic
times [1].

One should not be astonished by the implication that the planet
Mercury had inflicted its presence upon Earth. Other volumes
of the Quantavolution Series have explored this possibility in
detail. The natural history of Mercury is significantly marked
by its appearance earlier as a most prominent god in the
succession of gods. Its physical composition and size resemble
the Moon's; the two bodies possess, too, with one of Zeus'

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 12: The Laughing Gods                          
177

satellites, an odd angular momentum. Like the Moon, it has
suffered heavy bombardment from space.

Called by different names in different cultures, he was repre
sented often by various animals, especially by monkeys, in
Egypt for instance, among the Gauls, and in India. Hanuman,
the Indian monkey-god, once became as resplendent as the sun
and moved whole mountains. The planet is suspected of having
played a major role in the destruction of the Tower of Babel;
there in Babylon it was called Nebo and emperors carried his
name in theirs. A Jewish legend says that the survivors of the
disaster and fire were turned into monkeys. The recollection
may have arisen from a gibberish, the confounding of tongues,
following upon mass electroshock; it may also have pertained
to many physiognomic changes by mutations or congenital
defects [2].

As a god, Hermes has more than a touch of the Moon's
irresponsibility. He is fleet, perhaps because his solar orbit is
shortest of the planets. He is the lucky god of gamblers, the
messenger, the robber, the friendly night. He leads downwards
into Styx and upwards into heaven (as a planet rises and sets).
He guides the flocks. He is a helper, a healer; he is - writes Otto
- Priapus, Tychon, and Perseus. He may have inspired Moses as
scientist and electrician. He caries a snake-entwined rod, nowa
days the symbol of healing medicine. He is younger than
Apollo, older than Athena.

He can laugh. His responsibility here is as spectator, apparition,
and "extra" brought in to reinforce the climax of the story with
more bodies. But he not only laughs. He speaks several
significant lines. Asked by his older brother "would you really
be willing, despite being tightly netted, to couch yourself
alongside golden Aphrodite?" Hermes replies that he would
gladly be witnessed by the gods and goddesses and suffer twice
as many fetters for the pleasure of Aphrodite's love.

Perhaps, then, he is reminiscing; perhaps once upon a time he,
too, had enjoyed the devastating experience.

"Again the laughter arose among the immortal gods."

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 12: The Laughing Gods                          
178

Unless Mercury was laughing at his own joke, Apollo must
have been laughing alone. In two places, the poet has more
gods laughing that appear to be present and in a laughing mood.
It is possible that several dancers are emulating unidentified
minor gods or the idea of collective divine laughter.

APOLLO

Apollo, himself, is always a character of ambiguity and
mystery. We have an abundant mythology about Apollo, from
several cultures, but he has never been placed among the
heavenly bodies, except that, for lack of better, and because he
is "shining", he is commonly identified with the Sun [3]. But
most, if not all, of his Sun-identity comes later in the history of
mythology, and much of this ascription is readily traceable to
an effort to clear the skies of gods.

Apollo earlier commanded greater respect and fear than did the
Sun. He was the god of prophecies, of music, the archer-god,
the source and also healer of plagues. He showers rocks and
poisonous airs as well as arrows upon humans who have
incurred his enmity. He has an aloof, judicious temperament.
He does not interfere in the Love Affair but plays the minimal
role of lending his presence and posing a question to his
younger brother. In the Iliad, at one point, he disdained a
challenge to personal combat.

If Hermes is a subconscious memory of an apparition which
itself is the subconscious memory of an earlier celestial
appearance, Apollo may be the same. But he may be even more
so, as I explain in Chaos and Creation. Unlike Hermes, who
existed in the sky as the planet Mercury, Apollo most probably
did not then exist in the sky at all. He may represent a lost
planet, a destroyed planetary body of an earlier age. He may be
the belt of asteroids between mars and Jupiter, whose existence
has from time to time been premised upon a previously existing
body that disintegrated upon the approach of Jupiter or another
intersecting mass [4].

Apollo's traits befit vanishing and disintegrated behavior.
Plague, arrows and prophecies have in common a widespread
incidence of discrete events upon individuals. In addition,
Apollo acts from a distance. Murray, in one of his few

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 12: The Laughing Gods                          
179

interpellations, explains his translation of an Apollonian ephitet
as "the archer god" by adding "or, possibly, 'the averter of ills.'
The word means literally, 'he who works afar.'" [5] Apollo is a
retired and disoccupied god, Deus Otiosus; he is a god who
works as a ghost presence.

Apollo has been moved in myth closer to the events of which
we speak, for he is the slayer of the monster serpent Python.
Python, says Graves, is none other than Typhon [6], hence to us
a form of Hephaestus. But Graves is probably mistaken, for the
Python incident seems to have been an earlier analog, following
the death of Saturn (Osiris). So we use it here to explain further
how the presence of Apollo at the Love Affair climax was
subconsciously prompted. The closeness of the names
strengthened the suggestibility of Apollo's presence, and
originally Typhon may have been named out of a wordplay
with echo of the more ancient Python case.

There is yet another hint of Apollo's presence. If he does repre
sent the asteroids, if he does pelt the earth with various small
missiles and gases, then the disintegration of the cometary tail
of Venus-Hephaestus, not to mention the material exchanges
occurring among other bodies, would prompt the subconscious
memories of Apollo and bring him into the climactic scene of
the opera.

POSEIDON

Poseidon is present, "yet did not laugh." He is disturbed, impa
tient, persistent. He wants Hephaestus to set Ares free. He
offers to guarantee Ares' just debts as an adulterer.

Hephaestus at first refuses: "Don't ask this of me, Poseidon,
You're sure to be sorry if you give bond for a miserable rascal.
And how would it be among the gods, if Ares should escape
both his fetters and his debt and I should have to bind you
instead?"

Poseidon is etymologically "master of the earth." He is the sea
and the mover of Earth. Here now, he insists. "Even should he
avoid his debt and flee, I shall pay for him."

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 12: The Laughing Gods                          
180

Hephaestus cannot refuse. "It is not permitted me to say 'no',
nor would it be proper."

Why? Is this mere politeness, to move the plot along? But a plot
in literature is as determined by psychology as falling rock by
gravity. Is it respect for a feared uncle, brother of Zeus?
Hephaestus once sympathized with a rebellion against Zeus; he
is clamorously angry at his parents now. No; the end is foreseen
because that is the way it happened in nature. Hephaestus
cannot command the planetary gods. They move ultimately in
freedom according to their natures.

So the fetters were loosed and the freed pair sprang up and off.
Poseidon has reason to feel relieved, although he is still in
bondage to Hephaestus.

Poseidon is here a representation of Earth. He is the masculine
of the Earth-Goddess. Before the Olympians came the Earth
gods. The Earth Gods were female, as Erinyes in Aeschylus'
Orestes. In Sophocle's Antigone, the chorus chants of Gaia, "the
eldest of the gods, the eternal and inexhaustible earth".

Poseidon, says Graves, is lord of the seas and the Earth-shaker,
but is always greedy to possess himself of land, if by no other
way, then by loosing floods upon it.

The "Love Affair" threatens turbulence for both land and seas.
Poseidon is the only god to fit the role, and the plot might have
had to be completely redesigned if the role were absent.
Besides, the evidence of the ancient accounts and of the
calendrists and geologists lend confidence in the designation of
Poseidon and Earth.

Michael G. Reade, in a brilliant study of perplexing perturba
tions registered in the famous "Ramesside Star Tables" of
Egypt, has fixed the critical year to which they refer as around 
700, about the time of our Love Affair. It would be the time of
the Trojan War, too, when Homer says, as Lattimore translates
the line (p. 405), Poseidon "shuddered all illimitable Earth, the
sheer heads of mountains." We quote Reade's conclusions.

"...the axis of the earth was forced out of its hitherto normal
alignment with the stars at a season shortly after the

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 12: The Laughing Gods                          
181

summer solstice... the displacing force was a sustained one
rather than a shock... it was associated with an acceleration
in the spin rate of the earth... the effects of the disturbance
were in many respects only temporary... the axis of the
earth did eventually drift back in the same attitude with
respect to the fixed stars (subject to a minor discontinuity in
the precession of the equinoxes)..." (IV S.I.S.R. 213 1979
80, 49.)

Any such disturbance in the motion of the Earth would have
caused earthquakes, volcanism, tidal movements, and
atmospheric turbulence.

Poseidon has reason to feel surly and "put upon." It is Earth that
has suffered devastation in these sky-battles. This is no
laughing matter. Earth has had to change its calendars. Its cities
have been battered, its plains flooded, its skies filled with
poisons and ashes, its magnetic field has been reversed [7].
Earth will chance future disaster at the hands of cometary
Venus if Venus will only deliver it from Mars. Besides, the
Moon is with Earth. If Hephaestus-Venus lays claim to Moon,
that is one thing, a claim long experienced. If Mars now claims
Moon, that is another thing, a serious conflict indeed. Already,
the Moon may have been drawn away from Earth. It would be
noticeably smaller.

Earth-Poseidon is put in the sky, as a sky-god. This should not
cause surprise. he was born brother of Zeus and son of Chronos
(Saturn), and assigned Earth, when Zeus received Heaven and
Hades the underground. Earth was immemorially conceived as
an entity, a unity, a being. Further, even the idea of Earth as a
space-ship, like the other gods, had been developed in a number
of pre-Homeric cultures. The sense of the instability, the
changeability, the restlessness of Earth affected Homeric and
pre-Homeric humanity much more profoundly than it affected
mankind more recently.

To the Greeks, as expressed in Plato's writing, the Earth was an
organism, alive, as the planets and stars were alive. In conceiv
ing of this state of affairs, modern man might not simply
imagine that it was alive simply because it was covered with
live plants and animals but that it was full of gods (as Thales
said), alive as a whole, breathing and moving as the Mother
Earth Goddess. Poseidon, her counterpart, was masculine, but

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 12: The Laughing Gods                          
182

so was the god-earth of Egypt, Geb. This conviction was a
sensual impression, not a metaphor and was born out of
thrashings, twistings and turnings, and from transformations for
which people have today only the barest of sensitivity.

So the song has the Earth siding with the lesser of two evils to
retain the Moon, to settle peace upon the Moon-path and thence
to tranquillize its own way through the skies.

HELIOS

Helios is not present among the laughing gods and there is no
reason why he must be. There are so many differences between
the Sun and the sky gods that one must continually suspect
mythological claims that assimilate their identities to him.

Helios is an everyday herald, a routine chariot-driver of the
sunlight. Whatever importance late historical man may ascribe
to his life-giving powers, he did not contribute significantly to
the development of the human mind and soul in the Homeric
age. A Homeric hymn begins "tireless Helios who is like the
deathless gods," and ends, "now that I have begun with you, I
will celebrate the race of mortal men, half-divine." [8]

Something of the passive incapacity of the Sun is revealed in
another place in the Odyssey. Helios, when his cattle are stolen
and eaten by the sailors of Odysseus, exclaims: "Father Zeus
and you other happy and eternal gods, I call on you to punish
the followers of Odysseus, son of Laertes. They have had the
insolence to kill my cattle, the cattle that gave me such joy
every day as I climbed the sky to put the stars to flight and as I
dropped from heaven and sank once more to earth. If they do
not repay me in full for my slaughtered cows, I will go down to
Hades and shine among the dead."

"Sun," the Cloud-gatherer answered him, "Shine on for the
immortals and for mortal men on the fruitful earth. As for the
culprits, I will soon strike their ship with a blinding bolt out of
the dark-wine sea and break it to bits." That is, the Sun must
keep to his course. Only the great gods fly freely. Helios must
use the gods for his needs. Graves reminds us that "Helios was
not even an Olympian, but a mere Titan's son; and, although
Zeus later borrowed certain solar characteristics from the Hittite

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 12: The Laughing Gods                          
183

and Corinthian god Tesup and other oriental sungods, these
were unimportant compared with his command of thunder and
lightning."

Further, Graves tells us, "The Sun's subordination to the Moon,
until Apollo usurped Helius's place and made an intellectual
deity of him, is a remarkable feature of early Greek myth [9]. It
appears that the herds of Helios are numbered by lunar
multiples, that "cattle are lunar rather than solar animals in early
European myth", and that "Helius's mother, the cow-eyed
Euryphaessa, is the Moon-goddess herself." [10] "Thessalian
witches used to threaten the Sun, in the Moon's name, with
being engulfed by perpetual night." [11]

A DIVINE SENSE OF HUMOR

When the gods are no longer near enough to be recognized as
dwellers in their celestial homes, the age of philosophy begins.
They are assigned to a mundane abode or relegated to astrology
and denigrated. A Mount Olympus is provided, together with
such local vacation places, you might say, that they favor for
rest, recreation, rehabilitation, and retreat. The gods must be
kept nearby. It is well enough for astrologers to watch remote
planets and to bank their fears and hope thereupon, but for most
people, displacement of the gods upon more familiar grounds is
preferable.

For humanity can suffer great fear, but it is an animal with a
formidable physiology for converting fear into intelligence and
power. Much of the complexity of theology is the
rationalization of how the powerless, the misbehaving and the
ashamed can nevertheless infiltrate their will into the almighty
and the all-knowing, living a successful perennial paradox. By
the time of Homer, men are beginning to strut, to smile grimly,
to mutter innuendoes. Hybris?

This laughter of the gods has puzzled ages of scholars and
schoolboys. However, the gods jest with each other. They do
not laugh at pathetic, troubled, insubordinate, vicious or the
occasionally happy human beings. Nor do humans indirectly
laugh at the gods. The sight of the gods in good humor is still a
sacred sight. One of the means that enable the plot of the Love
Affair to come off so well is the absence of humans in the cast.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 12: The Laughing Gods                          
184

This precludes a dangerous conflict of interests; one need not
fear the overstepping of bounds.

Which is not to say that the audience is not laughing at the
gods. It is, but by the completely safe psychological technique
of displacement and projection. The Greek sense of humor,
itself derived from the way its theomachy is constructed, writes
into the gods' behavior what they would laugh at in themselves
and at the same time feels dissociated from that behavior by its
imputation to sacred character. Therefore, the audience may
have laughed as the dancers and singer spun out the humor;
more likely they marveled, were fascinated, and thought of
themselves as receiving moral instruction from the gods.

The humor itself - the laughing at the discomfiture of Ares and
Aphrodite, at the insulted dignity of the insultable Hephaestus,
and at the desirability of committing the same crime if one
could (spoken in the very presence of the injured party) - this
falls readily into the category of sadistic and savage humor.
Except that we do not understand the genesis of humor very
well yet.

Two major contributors to the theory of humor are Sigmund
Freud and Arthur Koestler. Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to
the Unconscious explains a joke as the subconscious prevention
of a wish from completing its natural aim. For that aim is
tabooed or aggressively hostile or tragic. Hence the mind
switches onto a parallel track that unexpectedly carries it to a
conclusion of minimal threat.

In Act of Creation, Koestler insists, besides, that both humor
and creativity rest upon hidden associations. These associations
are inharmonious. They are wrestled into contact with one
another in a double frame of meanings that resolve into a
synthesized single frame with a new more acceptable meaning.

Since the whole of the Love Affair proceeds on a double level
of meanings, two sets of mental events that lead to humorous
resolutions may occur, or six in all, because there are three
mentions of laughter.

For the Love Affair, Hephaestus is first to confess the laugh
able. It is that he should be victimized for his born disabilities.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 12: The Laughing Gods                          
185

On the overt level, the threat is that he will prove false
assurances of fidelity had been given him when he married
Aphrodite. The expected and feared result is that he will prove
these false assurances and gain an undeserved right. The
situation is to be resolved humorously, laughably, as
Hephaestus himself confesses in advance, because other people
actually will see that he has been denied his rights despite his
assurances.

Covertly, Hephaestus is threatening to possess the Moon
himself, though rather impotently. The danger is nevertheless
that the Moon will go beyond all bounds in losing its free and
irrepressible spirit. However, all will gather to see that the
assurances are denied of their validity.

There was probably also amusement, though not named as
laughter, in calling upon all the gods to appear. Nothing would
be less funny in the play or more tragic in reality than the
coming of Zeus, the father of gods.  Fortunately "everyone
knows" that Zeus is not likely to intervene in such a ridiculous
affair. Hence, humor. In fact, Zeus does not appear. Again,
comic relief.

Next, the gods laugh as they see how "swiftness," speeding to
its rendezvous, is unexpectedly and ignominiously trapped by
"craft." Here the overt thrust of the action is that Ares is bound
to steal a love. It is expected that he will succeed. But he is in
fact trapped. Covertly, Mars is moving towards the ravaging of
Moon and Earth. The fear is that he will succeed. The comic
release follows when he is trapped and exposed to view by the
public of gods.

Then the gods laugh because Hermes gives an unexpected and
amoral answer to a question about himself. Apollo asks whether
he would agree to such fetters if he might lie with Aphrodite
and Hermes answers that he would accept thrice as many bonds
for the pleasure it would give him. Here the thrust is towards
repeating the adultery. The expectation is that he will falsely
deny it. Instead he affirms it, but does so "harmlessly." The
covert parallels are that Mercury too now (as once) is invited to
ravage Moon and Earth. The result expected is that the disasters
will continue; instead the memory is affirmed while the future
possibility is dismissed.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 12: The Laughing Gods                          
186

There are here, in effect, four types of joke. But in all there are
four overt thrusts leading to expected disappointments; four
covert thrusts leading to subconsciously feared disasters; and
eight triumphs of evasion leading to laughter.

So then a conclusion is manifest, in general, regarding laughter:
that the formula of laughter is ipso facto satisfied when laughter
occurs, but an audience will laugh only when a threshold of
anxiety has been reached. Also, laughability (and its
companion, the plotting of laughability by a jester) is moral one
in which criteria of savagery, vulgarity, virtuosity, and
sophistication enter. To know when to joke is to know when to
harm; to know how to joke is to know how to dodge the larger
harm - which is to say that high wit and laughter become a
property of morals and genius.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 12: The Laughing Gods                          
187

Notes (Chapter 12: The Laughing Gods)

1.     E.A.W. Budge: Osiris, The Egyptian Religion of
Resurrection, (Univ. Books, 1961), pp. 81-3; J. Bonwick:
Egyptian Belief and Modern Thought, (Falcon's Wing Press,
1956), pp. 101-2; R.T.R. Clark: Myth & Symbol in Ancient
Egypt, (Thames & Hudson, 1959), pp. 124-6; D.B. Redford:
"The Sun-Disc in Akneton's Program: Its Worship &
Antecedents I", Journal of the American Research Center in
Egypt, Vol. 13 (1976), p. 57; Cambridge Ancient History, Third
Edition, Vol. 1, Part 2 Early History of the Middle East, p. 53.

2.     Hugh Eggleton, "Mercury and the Tower of Babel," V
Society for Interdisciplinary Studies Workshop 2 (1982-3) 10
1; and see the present author's God's Fire, Chaos and Creation,
and The Lately Tortured Earth.

3.     See discussion by R. A. Herring and others in 2 Society
Interdisc. Stud. Workshop 4 (april, 1980) and subsequent issues.

4.     Cf. Fritz Heide, Meteorites, 1957, trans. by E. Anders
and E. Dufrense. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1946), p.
130, and Solaria Binaria.

5.     Op. Cit., p. 281.

6.     Op. cit., Apollo used a bow and arrows fabricated by
Hephaestus, ibid., 21.a. We must suppose this is an incidental
mythical reversal of time. for Hephaestus, we reason, is active
later than, unless he earlier participated in, the events of
Apollo's life and death.

7.     Science News (Penguin Publications, July 1949). Manley
discusses the reversal of the Earth's magnetic field as evidenced
in Attic and Etruscan pottery of the eight century. The reversals,
cited in Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval (1955) p. 283, seem to
have been a temporary phenomenon resulting from "The Battle
of the Space Sheaths;" See below pages 265ff.

8.     "Homeric Hymns," no. XXXI, contained in the Loeb
edition of Hesiod, p.459.

9.     Graves, I. 156.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 12: The Laughing Gods                          
188

10.    Ibid., 156-7.

11.    Ibid., I, 13 citing Apuleius, Metamorphoses iii, 16.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 13: How the Gods Fly                            
189

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

HOW THE GODS FLY

My readers, who thus far have been kind enough to loose me on
a long tether, have probably been conducting their own more
restrained examination of the events being discussed. I suppose
that I can rely upon their achieving a certain respect for the
connections shown between gods, skies, Earth, and the
audience of Demodocus. Reviewing their own information,
they will have recalled that a great part of human activity,
especially in earlier times, has gone into watching the skies,
relating the movements and events there to human affairs and
celebrating the connections by religious observances,
astronomical observations, fairy tales, song, and dance. They
would readily acknowledge the occasional episodes of
conjunctions of planets, earthquakes, clouds of volcanic dust,
lightning storms, and cometary apparitions; these they might
think are adequate to explain the celestial imitations occurring
in the Love Affair. More than this may be in their opinion
unnecessary and probably untrue. Indeed, the reader may feel
that every step that I take to tighten the correspondence between
a sky episode and dramatic poem and dance becomes less
believable until finally every step become false. "Let well
enough alone !" would be their advice.

I grant that this liberal view may be correct, and that I should be
thankful for it and that in pursuing my radical exercise I am
constructing a model of the absurd.  Nevertheless, I shall
proceed, on and on, until if I fail to validate the relationship
between the scenarios of drama and disaster, I shall have
opened up new lines of thought about ancient history,
dramaturgy, religion, human memory, and the psychology of
the unconscious. Whereupon, since the cast of characters in the
"Love Affair" is composed of celestial bodies, it needs to be
explained how they can move about in the skies as they moved
in the opera theater of ancient Phaeacia. The movements of the
scenario should be translated into astrophysics.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 13: How the Gods Fly                            
190

One will encounter three major problems. The first, which has
been dealt with in Part One and will be treated again later on, is
to discover and justify the movements of the plot as being the
movements to be traced in the sky. How strictly must one be
able to follow the scenario in the sky in order to accept its
general validity? Up to a point, it is excusable to perceive a
physically impossible movement; myth and dream, in the
interest of censoring content and creating an aesthetic
experience, may have Hephaestus-Venus, for example,
doubling back on the "celestial bedroom" too quickly for any
conceivable physics to account for. On the other hand, suppose
that Ares-Mars had flown off to Cyprus with Aphrodite there to
be reunited with her. This would present an obstacle to
credulity, although there are some twenty-eight movements,
and "one swallow doesn't make a summer." The whole set of
movements must be nevertheless both necessary and possible
leaving only an occasional screening anomaly to be justified by
causes outside of astrophysics and astronomy.

Secondly, there is the problem of apparent movements of
celestial bodies. The Phaeacians, proud of their navigational
skills, will nevertheless have set the story on a flat stage, a
platform of the celestial map of the vault of heaven emplaced
upon the platform Poseidon-Earth. They will have been
perceiving apparent speeds, flattened orbits when the bodies
were close-in, apparent sizes that would not make allowances
for distances in space. How great a problem is presented by the
semblances, as opposed to the reality, of vision of bodies in
outer space, remains to be seen. Although the best of ancient
astronomers struggled to actuate the apparent frame in their
observations and calculations, still the Phaeacians may have
carried an astronomical sense from extremely ancient times.
That the Earth is round has been discovered and forgotten
several times. The measured circle of the dance and the Coda
Dance of the Purple Ball are suggestive of many early theories
of the vault and dome of heaven.

The problem is that of translating apparent motion into accept
able and probable real motions. If one cannot offer an explana
tion of the movement of the scenario that is respectable, even if
controversial, as a working hypothesis in astrophysics, then the
credibility of the structure here established will slump. Accord

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 13: How the Gods Fly                            
191

ingly, after discussing the movements of the scenario, we shall
consider in the section on "Electro-mechanics of the Gods" cer
tain theories of astrophysics under development today, and use
them to explain the events of the Love Affair.

Another indulgence is besought. Consider, for a moment, that
there are five bodies plus considerable debris whose matter,
motions, and positions are to be accounted for. Each body has
orbital and rotational motions that provide its angular
momentum; it has orbital distances from the sun and the other
bodies, orbital speed, and mass. It has volume. It has rotational
speed. It possesses an angle to the ecliptical plane, and an axis
of rotation at an angle to that plane. It has a magnetic field.
These still do not include "minor" eccentricities, such as the
fact that the shape of the moon reveals three "remnant" asym
metries, or that the earth is swollen at its equator and flattened
at its poles. More ominously, the other planets, notably Jupiter,
are excluded from the scenario.

Consider, too, that each property of a body may have an effect,
provided it changes, upon all these other properties of its own
body and upon any one or all of the properties of the remaining
four bodies. The number of possible combinations of changed
motions - taken in the bare qualitative sense of change, not as a
quantitative set of relations that would give us azimuth readings
or particle counts - will be (pardoning the metaphor)
astronomical.

From one moment of time to another, one state of affairs may
transform into another. It is as if one had come upon a round
billiard table with five balls already struck and in motion at
each its own speed. Each is of different size, each is capable of
a change in its volume; each is spinning at a different rate and
angle to the board; each possesses a magnetic field of different
size and intensity that is capable of change, plus a changeable
electric charge; each is drawn invisibly and is electrically
related to the center of the board (the Sun).

If commanded to describe the scene, one might pray to God to
restore order immediately by sending the bodies into non
intersecting circle moving around the center of the board
according to a single law of gravity and with unchangeable
speeds. Failing this, one might invoke the most skillful

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 13: How the Gods Fly                            
192

mathematicians and latest computers to tell us what is
happening. But they would be distressed by the lack of data.
"Give us some benchmarks," they would plead, "Give us
parameters." At which point one would have to offer some
fuzzy archaic snapshots with their double and triple exposures
saying; "Here you are. We must do the best we can with them."

Thirdly, concerning how the gods may fly, is the problem of
power to change all the motions involved in the scenario.
Briefly, the gods fly by electrically assisted inertial power,
gravitationally maintained. This, too, requires explanation,
much more than what can be supplied here.

THE MOVEMENTS OF THE SCENARIO

The group's dance in the measured circle that precedes the song
is intended to indicate the celestial and sacred nature of the
story. It is not counted here as a spatial event. Nor is the Dance
of the Purple Ball that follows the story. In general, the scenes
are brilliantly lit, 'Phaeacia,' 'Hephaestus,' 'brazen,' 'copper,'
'golden,' 'sparks,' 'bronze,' and 'blazing' are among the
metaphorical suggestions of light; brilliance is carried as the
28th movement or change.

The "Love Affair" proper gives the following spatial changes.
They are listed in the order in which they occur.

1. Secret copulation of Ares and Aphrodite in the house and bed
of Hephaestus.
2. Ares gives gifts to Aphrodite
3. Helios moves past their bed.
4. Helios passes and reports to Hephaestus
5. Hephaestus goes to his smithy.
6. Hephaestus places his anvil on the block and hammers out
fetters in his smithy.
7. Hephaestus goes to his house and bed.
8. Hephaestus spreads the net from ceiling and bed posts.
9. Hephaestus moves towards Lemnos.
10. Ares is moving towards house and bed.
11. Aphrodite goes from Zeus presence to house.
12. Ares arrives at house after Aphrodite does, and speaks to
her. He reaches out for her hands.
13. Ares and Aphrodite copulate in the bed.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 13: How the Gods Fly                            
193

14. Ares and Aphrodite are paralyzed.
15. Helios passes by their bed.
16. Helios approaches Hephaestus and reports to him.
17. Hephaestus moves to the doorway of the house and stops.
18. Hephaestus shouts terribly to the gods.
19. Poseidon arrives at doorway and pauses, disturbed.
20. Hermes arrives at doorway and pauses.
21. Apollo arrives at doorway and pauses.
22. Hermes and Apollo laugh, jest and draw conclusions.
23. Poseidon argues with Hephaestus and gives guarantees.
24. Hephaestus strikes off the fetters.
25. Ares flies to Thrace.
26. Aphrodite flies to Cyprus.
27. Aphrodite is bathed and anointed.
28. Overall and repeated brilliance.

Let us classify these movements, following their temporal se
quence in the scenario and retaining their given numbers. When
a movement is appropriate to more than one category, it is
carried more than once. At this point we shall also change to
astronomical names.

1. The first category of movement includes all passages of
bodies through space. In astronomical terms, we are speaking of
the relative motions of these bodies in the terrestrial sky. The
left-hand numbers correspond to the list of spatial changes
above.

3      Sun passes Mars and Moon
4      Sun moves and passes Venus                              FIRST
5      Venus moves to a false setting                          DAY
7      Venus moves to Moon and Mars apparent
orbital rendezvous location
9      Venus moves to a second false setting

------

11     Moon moves to rendezvous location                       NIGHT
10/12 Mars moves to rendezvous location

------

15     Sun passes Mars and Moon

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 13: How the Gods Fly                            
194

16     Sun (approaches) passes Venus
17     Venus moves to apparent rendezvous
point slower than Mars                                  SECOND
19     Earth moves to rendezvous point                         DAY
20     Mercury moves to rendezvous point
21     Apollo moves to rendezvous point
25     Mars moves from rendezvous point
26     Moon moves from rendezvous point

From these movements comes confirmation that the action
takes place in the sky. The Sun gives an orientation by pursuing
its regular rounds. Although Demodocus does not say so, the
elapsed time may be two days; the Sun makes two rounds;
better say two days and their intervening night, but the climax
(catastrophe) of the scene probably occurs after sunset of the
second day. Moon appears generally to hold its course. Venus
moves erratically and may not have set during the period. Mars
appears to be moving on a near collision course parallel  to the
Moon-and-Earth solar orbit (the persistent lover) until sprung
into a farther orbital track by Venus.

II. The second category of movement includes all decelerating
and accelerating events, including pauses, that is, what would
be referred to astronomically as changes in orbital and
rotational speed.

1      Erratic, jostling movements of Moon and Mars in close
proximity
6      Venus apparently pauses for discharges remotely
8      Venus apparently pauses for discharges near at hand
12     Mars stops at Moon's house (apparent rendezvous point)
13     Erratic, jostling movements of Moon and Mars in close
proximity
14     Longer pause and slowed movements of Mars and Moon
as Venus approaches
17     Venus apparently pauses at apparent rendezvous point
19     Earth apparently pauses at apparent rendezvous point
20     Mercury apparently pauses at apparent rendezvous point
21     Apollo apparently pauses at apparent rendezvous point
25/26 Mars and Moon move at opposing adjacent angles for
rendezvous point

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 13: How the Gods Fly                            
195

From this collection of movements, it may be inferred that
marked changes in the orbital speed of Mars, Moon and Venus
occur. The two sets of encounters tend to confirm the two-day
calendar. Earth's rotation is slowed to give a strong impression
of the whole action being frozen during the dramatic crisis,
when Mars, Moon, Venus (and Earth) are all lined up (in
perilous conjunction). Mercury and Apollo, with Earth, join the
scene at this point, as archetypical memories from earlier crises
being forced upon the scene of the present crisis. If it is
objected that the convocation is simply a literary device
invented to stress the literary catastrophe, one should recollect
the theory that experience calls forth devices of literature.

III. The third category of movement involves motions, sounds,
and colors that connote exchanges of energy and/or mass.

1      Erratic responsive jostling of Moon and Mars in close
proximity
2      Material leaves Mars for Moon
4      Venus increases in size, darkening as Sun passes behind
6      Venus thunders and discharges streams of electrified
clouds
8      Venus discharges streams of electrified clouds all over
sky andaffecting Earth
12     Noises from Mars/Moon as Mars approaches rendezvous.
Electrical belts stretch out between the two as they near
each other.
13     Erratic responsive jostling of Moon and Mars in close
proximity
14     Venus' relative movement halts or slows jostling
16     Sun passes behind Venus, darkening it apparently
18     Giant cacophony apparently from Venus, which also
explodes materialagainst Mars
22     General noise
23     Quakes on Earth promised
24     Venus approach suddenly propels Mars and Earth-Moon
to resume movement
27     Moon returns to serenity with new face
28     All major bodies (Venus, Mars, Moon) and their
atmospheres achieve some incandescence during the
experiences

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 13: How the Gods Fly                            
196

The events of the third category include Mars disturbing Moon
and Earth disturbing Mars with discharges of electricity and
material. Earth slows Mars' rotation causing heating and
jostling. Venus showers Moon with the sparks of Hephaestus'
smithy. The intervention of Venus behind Mars and Moon
causes heightened disturbances.

Terrible noises are heard - electrical, atmospheric and/or
meteoric in origin. Incandescences of Mars, the Moon, and
Venus (already incandescent for over 700 years) are noted,
from which great heat is inferred caused by electrical
discharges, crustal frictions from altered motions, vulcanism,
and atmospheric turbulence, especially on Venus.

The appearance of the Moon is altered. Its rocks seem new,
contain remanent magnetism, and are freshly glazed. For the
Earth to magnetize the rocks of the Moon would require that the
Earth approach its satellite to at least three and possibly two
earth-radii distances, there to heat up and magnetize its surface
[1]. This is unlikely to occur in any event because Moon might
disintegrate at about that distance from the electro-gravitational
force pulling at it. Since in the period of the Love Affair the
Moon appears to have been drawn for a time away from Earth,
and Mars came between the two bodies, it is likely that while
Earth beat upon the one face of Mars, Mars beat upon the Earth
face of Moon.

The perspective of the scenario is probably that of an observer
in the southeast corner of Asia Minor. Then, as evening came
and Earth rotated eastwards, and the bodies were accelerated,
they would see Mars-Ares fly northwest to Thrace; Sun-Helios
would fly west; and Moon-Aphrodite would spring southwest
to Cyprus. Venus-Hephaestus is presumably left in charge of
the moonpath from a great distance and follows the setting sun.

Phaeacia was discovered to be a Utopia, but positioned in
Homer's mind in the west. Some have assigned it to Corfu.
Patroni insists upon Malta. Pocock opts for Trapani. Etc.
Notwithstanding this doubt, Phaeacia was recently founded, by
Nausithous, the father of King Alcinous, who hosts Odysseus.
He took his people on a long journey to the deliberately
preferred isolation of Scheria because they had been persecuted
by neighbouring giants (more likely, the meteorites of Mars).

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 13: How the Gods Fly                            
197

But Phaeacia is now doomed. Two days after the recital of the
Love Affair, as the boat that carried Odysseus home was return
ing to its harbor, it is turned to stone; a circle of mountains
erupts and girdles the town, land-locking it forever.

We can surmise, therefore, that the Phaeacians had witnessed
the Love Affair in Southeast Anatolia and had played the drama
later on in the West, without realizing that the actions in the sky
would have followed a different terrestrial mapping if witnessed
from their new home.

ELECTRO-MECHANICS OF THE GODS

Isaac Newton cleared the skies so tidily, and his laws imparted
such regularity and tranquillity to the solar system, that, amazed
at his results, he imagined that only a God could create the
heavenly order. There was born in those times a new deus ex
machina, a mechanical god, from the laws of gravity, inertia,
and angular momentum. But the real historical gods are created
out of catastrophes, not from order. And the heavens are as
prone to disorder as to order.

Attention is called to two additional facets of Newton's mind,
one naturalistic, the other religious. He could not believe that
gravitational attraction between two bodies could exist without
a medium for transmitting the gravitational force. And, putting
aside his deux ex machina, he went searching for his real God,
the Old Testament God, who brought the Deluge down upon
mankind, even seeming to agree with Whiston, his disciple, that
a cometary force might have provoked the Deluge [2].

The latter is an irony that needs no elaboration here. But the
former sets one to wondering. That all things are "falling" to
wards other things with measurable momenta is apparent; also
that motion and matter are communicable, intra se and inter se,
seems indubitable; further both seem to be inextinguishable.
One must be wary, however, in using general laws of physics
and astronomy when questioning the validity of observed
events and historical-mythical accounts. The task of reconciling
the two kinds of data is so difficult and frustrating, that many a
good mind ends up in some dogmatic or empirical monomania.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 13: How the Gods Fly                            
198

All this is a prelude to saying that the Love Affair portrays
cosmic events that require extraordinary explanations. Yet one
can take heart from the direction in which the current revolution
in astrophysics is moving.

Much of the new astrophysics is based on non-equilibrium
- even explosive - phenomena, rather than the steady state
thermal phenomena which have been the primary concerns
of astrophysics in the past. It is the violence of the
phenomena discovered in the astrophysics of the past
fifteen years that has changed dramatically our current
views of the universe [3].

That some physicists are moving closer to a determination that
gravitation may be transmitted by waves, and that others are
pushing ahead rapidly in electromagnetism and plasma studies
likewise enhances the plausibility of the events of the Love
Affair.

For the Love Affair appears to have the planets moving in an
essentially electric environment, with gravitational movements
largely subsumable under the law of the conservation of
momentum (inertia), which in turn may remotely have
originated as a product of electrical laws. The imagery of the
story is conveyed in motions that appear arbitrary, reversible,
and erratic - qualities more characteristic of electrical than of
gravitational forces. The examination of Moon and Mars has
already shown features, such as rilles, that electrical theory can
explain.

Ralph Juergens, who has made a special effort to reconcile the
much-neglected science of gaseous electrical discharges with
the theory of cosmic catastrophism, has recently proposed an
electrical concept of the solar system that appears to fit the
scenario of the Love Affair [4]. He suggests that the Sun's
corona and the surfaces of the planets carry a heavy electric
charge of negative value. Interplanetary space, on the other
hand, is a plasma, a gas of dissociated positive ions and
electrons. This highly conducting medium isolates the electric
field of the planetary body; it shields itself from it. The shield is
called a space-charge sheath.

"In the space-charge sheath, positive and negative charges col
lect and arrange themselves in such a way that the electric field

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 13: How the Gods Fly                            
199

of a body with alien potential is contained within a limited
region surrounding the body." [5] The electrical composition of
the sheath is a function of the need to segregate itself from the
interplanetary plasma and thus the plasma from the charged
planet.

The electrified body, however, has to continually receive a
current of like charge from the outer environment in order to
maintain its charge. This the planets do from solar and galactic
sources, Juergens theorizes. Thereupon "when no orbital
conflict exists, the system operates serenely under the direction
of forces accounted for in conventional celestial mechanics."

However, he continues,

...Let us imagine what might occur should two electrically
charged major bodies in this system find themselves on
intersecting orbit... The stage would be set eventually for a
rendezvous at one or another point of orbital contact. Since
the space charge sheaths of the bodies would occupy
greater volume than the bodies themselves, a collision
between sheaths would actually be more likely to take
place than a direct, bodily collision.

When the moment arrived for the inevitable encounter,
sheaths would make contact. Unleashed electric fields
would clash. Almost instantly, forces immeasurably greater
than gravitation would be brought to bear on the charged
bodies. Cosmic thunderbolts would flash between the
bodies in an effort to equalize their electric potentials [6].

In the present case, Mars, according to Velikovsky's reconstruc
tion of the events of 776 B.C. or thereabouts, was caused to
shift its orbit by the planet Venus, that had previously caused
periods of cataclysm on Earth. The orbit of Venus grew more
round, while that of Mars enlarged. The new orbit carried Mars
on a collision course with Earth. In due time, the encounter oc
curred.

The encounter witnessed in the Love Affair was one in a series
that agitated the world in the period between -776 and -687.
The first encounter between Venus and Mars may have taken
place at a great distance, with a largely visual impression being
created on Earth, an impression that the terrible and eccentric
proto-planet Venus was following a new course and that Mars

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 13: How the Gods Fly                            
200

too had changed its orbital movement to an eccentric one that
brought it periodically - every fifteen years by Velikovsky's
reckoning - racing on an elliptical orbit almost tangent to that of
Earth. There were six such near-misses in the period between
776 and 687 B.C., until a final encounter among Venus, Mars,
and Earth brought about the present planetary system by
expelling Mars into a new orbit. That Earth may have had the
last word may be the inference to be drawn from the
coincidences between the rotational period of Mars
(approximately 24 hours) and its inclination to the ecliptic
(approximately 24°) and those of Earth. For these qualities,
"swift Ares" may have exchanged orbital speed and an outside
position on the racetrack around the Sun.

Let it be supposed now that the Earth and Moon compose a
type of binary system bearing negative charges on their
surfaces: the two bodies tend to revolve around each other; but
the only sign of this is the perturbation of the Moon, because
Earth is so massive relative to the Moon. The same electric
sheath, however, (which may coincide with the magnetosphere
of the Earth) keeps them in electric balance with the plasma.
The sheath is elongated to embrace the Moon as the Moon,
pulling the earth around it, ineffectually, because of the great
inertial orbital momentum of the Earth, revolves around the
Earth. When the sun shines upon Earth, the Earth's
magnetosphere streams away from the sun-side to a perceived
distance at least sixty times the distance from Earth to Moon.

The approach of Mars, on a generally parallel course to Earth,
disturbs the Earth-Moon system. Repelled by both bodies from
a direct encounter, it passes between the two. (One argues this
midpassage because of the recent searing of the Earthward face
of the Moon and the one-sided searing of Mars, also recent.) Its
orbital momentum is also great and there is no question, under
these conditions, of its becoming a part of the binary system.

Nevertheless, it introduces a new negatively charged body into
the sheath and the sheath undergoes violent adjustment. All
three bodies intrinsically repel one another, bringing about
bodily vibrations of considerable amplitude (the "sex bout").
The electrical repulsions overcome the gravitational attractions.
Earth pushes Mars; Mars pushes Moon, and pushes back at
Earth; the Earth's orbit expands slightly. The two sheaths

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 13: How the Gods Fly                            
201

temporarily strive for electric assimilation and equilibrium,
although this is doomed from the start by the differential in
inertial momentum (including factors of speed and angle). The
space sheaths expand enormously into the plasma to acquire the
electrical charges they need on their peripheries. They probably
invade and excite the electrical sheaths of Venus.

As the sheaths move to assimilation, they invade the negative
fields of the body surfaces and cause physical conversions of
several types - chunks of matter are exchanged between the
bodies (in a sense, "gravity falls apart" as opposite charges
momentarily prevail); thunderbolts strike the surface of all three
bodies, with immense violence.

Some of these are not typical thunderbolts. They are the
weapon of the sky gods, at least of Jupiter, Athena and
Hephaestus. Thyestes, a hero of the period, is portrayed by
Seneca as asking Jupiter to still his anguish by bringing disaster
upon Earth, "not with the hand that seeks out houses and
undeserving homes, using your lesser bolts, but with that hand
by which the threefold mass of mountains fell... These arms let
loose and hurl your fires." [7] Juergens refers to them as of the
species of plasmoid, explosive projectiles of electricity
consisting of equal numbers of electrons and positive ions, rare
examples of which have been duplicated in the laboratory by
Winston Bostick. They carry immense electric and magnetic
energy at the speed of solar flares [8].

A simple principle might explain which body will receive the
greater damage. Since the electric charge of a sheath is propor
tional to the surface size of the spacebody, the destructive
potential of the sheath in reference to a second sheath is pro
portionate to the surface size of the body contained by the
second sheath. This would account for devastation of the side of
the Moon facing Mars and Earth and of the side of Mars that
locked its face upon Earth. Nor should we neglect the protective
capacity of the Earth's atmosphere against all types of bombard
ment.

The Earth's rotation brought repetition of the incident the next
day. Now, however, Venus is much closer than it was on the
day before and Mars is greatly retarded. It is said that today
Mars rotates at less than half its expected speed. Such may be

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 13: How the Gods Fly                            
202

an effect of one or more of the encounters. Here Venus actually
seems to catch up, watch, and then passes by. It is possible that
at this point, Mars was driven back by Earth and Venus, and
moved into its present outer orbit. That Mars is locked in on
Earth in its rotational speed and axial tilt may indicate that its
final pass by Earth came after Venus had sprung loose the
"loving couple."

Also, when Venus "loosed" them, it perhaps added a push to the
Moon that reduced its orbit, restoring the lunar month to very
much what it had been before the series of incursions by Mars
began, and to its present length of approximately 29 1/2 days.
Thus the electromechanical scenario may be synchronized with
the year -687, with calendar adjustments that began all over the
world after -687, and with the physical description of the Moon
following her devastating Love Affair. Concerning the last of
these, we recall that Aphrodite emerged more beautiful than
ever - bathed, anointed, and astonishingly clothed. That would
mean with "new beauty marks" and an aura caused by heat and
dust clouds.

In effect, both the destruction and the preservation of the bodies
in the encounter are due to the electric environment which lets
only a limited collision of spheres take place. At the same time,
the electrical theory permits one to explain how planetary
surfaces can be torn, exploded, and heated - including in all
cases the dissolution of the chemical bonds of matter - without
carrying the bodies implausibly close enough to call upon
gravitational pull alone.

The primary effects of encounter are the penetration of the
atmosphere and surface of the bodies by attracted oppositely
charged ions. A secondary effect is the retarded movement
(rotational and orbital speed), displacement (oscillations), and
orbital shift of all bodies.

The gravitational force, which, if the bodies were nearing in a
non-electric vacuum, would draw them together in inverse
proportion to the square of their distance, is canceled out by the
repellent negative charges on the surface of the bodies which
operate with quite opposite effect and force. (They are repelled
in proportion to charge and the square of the distance.) The

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 13: How the Gods Fly                            
203

"Battle of the Gods" resolves into a battle of the space-charge
sheaths.

The tertiary effects are heating of the bodies and their at
mospheres, resulting both from electric particle bombardment
and from atmospheric, hydrospheric, and lithospheric shearing
friction. New levels of surface crust are developed on all of the
bodies, new "scar tissue," new stratigraphy.

The effects upon the biosphere are grave. They have been de
scribed time and time again by the ancient observers, by early
students of the Deluge such as Whiston, Newton, and
Boulanger, by modern catastrophists such as Cuvier, Donnelly
and Beaumont, by contemporaries such as Patton and by Kelly
and Dachille [9], Lane [10], Schaeffer, and, in especially
systematic form, by Velikovsky.

There emerge, in the perspective of the human race, disasters
without number. The gaseous composition of the atmosphere
changes (a noticeable thinning and occasional mass
poisonings). Large-scale destruction of herds and crops, and of
wild-life and forests occurs. Basins are emptied or filled with
water. Tidal waves wipe out nearly all coastal settlements
(where perhaps 80% of the Greek-speaking population was
contained in 800 B.C.). Chasms are opened; volcanoes are
created and activated. Surface soils are ripped off by winds
traveling at hundreds of miles per hour. Communities are
obliterated or disrupted by showers of ash and debris, winds,
water, fire, and famine. The apocalyptic vision, historically
founded, is renewed.

The stupefaction and manias of the survivors are
understandable. Older, similar experiences are reinforced in the
memories of the group. That every aspect of human feeling,
thought, culture and creativity should be affected is to be
expected. To the explanation of these psychological and
cultural transformations, the next chapters turn. They continue,
at the same time and to the degree possible, with the exegesis of
the torrid Love Affair of Moon and Mars.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 13: How the Gods Fly                            
204

Notes (Chapter 13: How the Gods Fly)

1.     R. Treash, Pensée, May 1972, p. 22.

2.     Stecchini, op. cit., pp. 89-105.

3.     John A. Simpson, "Journey to Jupiter," The Univ. of
Chicago Magazine (Nov.-Dec., 1973), 6-11.

4.     "Reconciling Celestial mechanics and Velikovskian
Catastrophism," II Pensée (Fall, 1972), 6-12. The concept is full
developed by Early R. Milton and the present author in Solaria
Binaria.

5.     Ibid., p.6.

6.     Ibid., p.7. Recently, what are believed to be electrical dis
charges have been observed between Jupiter and one of its
satellites, Io, whose distance is many thousands of miles. The
heavens have settle since 687 B.C., but the same natural
phenomena may continue in a subdued form.

7.     Atreus and Thyestes (Miller, trans., 1917), quoted in W in
C, 217: and cf. p. 272.

8.     Ralph Juergens, Pensée, Jan., 1974, pp. 2-4, citing
Bostick, 16 Scientific American (oct. 1957), 87-94.

9.     The scenario of geological effects is well-delineated in
their book. Target Earth, The Role of Large Meteors in Earth
Science (Carlsbad Calif.; Box 225, Target Earth press, 1953).
See also this author's The Lately Tortured Earth (1983).

10.    Frank W. Lane, The Elements Rage (Philadelphia:
Chilton Books, 1965).

205

PART THREE

THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 14: The Uses of Language                     
206

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE USES OF LANGUAGE

The Love Affair is not a double entendre and was not viewed as
such in its ancient production. It is not an opera with two levels
of conscious meaning. If it were, it would have arrived in our
hands in a different version. But the Love Affair does not
permit a conscious second level. In order for the drama to have
been born at all, it had to become the mask of a historical
reality. It had to speak and sound and mean a love story, first
and finally.

Nevertheless, upon being created, the story still had to develop
in two contradictory directions. It had to retain its hidden
meaning, and it had to shed more and more of its hidden
meaning. It had to tell the truth and in the same breath deny it.
This formidable task of the unconscious was doomed from the
start, but yet it is perennially successful.

Such "success through failure" is achieved not only in the Love
Affair but in all myth. It is granted to few minds to comprehend
the mechanism. Even philosophers build defenses against its
comprehension. Some are rigidly obsessed with the attachment
of words to objects (nominalists), or with words to operations
(operationalists). Others, their opposites, insist upon the
correspondence of words to ideal images (idealists, Platonists);
to them the contradiction is anathema. It is intolerable, unphi
losophical, confusing, meaningless. To the anthropologist, psy
choanalyst, and psychological linguist, however, it is the veriest
grist for the mill.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 14: The Uses of Language                     
207

METER AND METAPHOR

Homer's 28,000 lines were six-footed, the hexameter, which
Paul Maas [1] renders schematically and typically as:

Each of the six long, stress syllables is followed by two short
ones except at the end of the line, where a stressed sound pre
vails. Besides the stress, there runs a pitch that rises on some of
the short syllables. The fifth and sixth syllables present a more
variable combination than the other feet; they often embrace a
"caesura," a pause or rhythmic division of the melody of the
line. "All methods of imposing an order upon discourse by
means of rhythm... are on a lower level, from the point of view
of metric, than the oldest type of Greek verse, the Homeric
hexameter." [2] Unfortunately, little is known about the
rhythmic feeling of these measures or how dynamic and tonal
accents were introduced as well. Furthermore, "we have no
means of reading, reciting, or hearing Greek poetry as it
actually sounded," [3] and can only form a shadowy notion of
it. And, to make matters worse, nearly everyone believes that it
is practically impossible to render English acceptable into epic
(dactylic) hexameter, a judgement with which we do not agree.
The reader may address the question by means of the author's
working carried in Chapter Two above or search out a now rare
translation by H. B. Cotterill done in 1911.

The rewards of metric and phonetic analysis of the Love Affair
may appear slender. One can listen time after time to tapes of it
recorded by a trained actor without the rhythms registering
more than the serious, singsong, long-drawn tread of the epic
narrative. The sophistication of the rhythm finds itself in the
length of the line and the large variety of subordinate rhythms
that emerge from the counterpoint of whole-word against metric
division, producing a harmonic unity and disunity at the same
time. No doubt it was this last that induced Aristotle and others
to affirm that the basis of poetry was the syllable; but the
syllabic structure, taken alone, would collapse unless coor
dinated with the word structure, phonetic structure, and
meaning structure. These all confirm the belief that Homer's
1     3        5        7    9  ___   11  ___

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 14: The Uses of Language                     
208

form is "advanced," technically, as Maas asserts, in consistency
with the total state of his culture, regardless of the remanent
social chaos of his times.

A little more is to be learned by investigating the technique of
metaphor. One might expect that, if there is a second level of
meaning to the passages of the Love Affair, it would crop up in
the guise of metaphor. W. B. Stanford writes that Homer
generally engages heavily in metaphor but that his metaphors
are ordinary and uninspired; "with a very few exceptions,
Homer seems always stilted and even deliberately archaistic
[liturgical] in his use of metaphors." [4] In the Love Affair, we
find only three "genuine" metaphors among the hundred lines:
"fine as a Spider's web" refers to Hephaestus' net; Aphrodite
"bridles not her passion" is an expression that may well have
had the ordinary meaning of "restrain" and therefore not be
metaphorical; and Poseidon speaks "winged words," a favorite
hackneyed Homericism.

Hephaestus goes home "with a heavy heart," but one may
regard this as literal, especially given Homeric physiological
theory. And the lovers "shamed the bed" of Hephaestus, which
illustrates a displaced object rather than a metaphor. Also there
are epithets that refer to the gods - Poseidon, "the earth
enfolder," among others - but these we again see as literal
adjectives and part of the divine names; the gods are described
"as they are."

Moreover, only the single simile is to be found in the passage.
Yet it would have been easy to conceal catastrophe in one of
Homers' famous similes. He might have chanted, "and as the
gods laughed, it was as when great thunderclaps and bursts of
light came from the blue skies, shaking the trees and setting the
rocks to trembling, alarming the shepherd to gather his flock
into the shelter of the cave."

Instead, the Love Affair is completely matter-of-fact. Hence
one may consider the opposite hypothesis: there must be reason
for the passage to be barren of metaphor and simile. The reason
is not slow to suggest itself. Since the parallelism between what
is said in the lines and what is happening in the sky and on
earth is so close, and, furthermore, so well-kept a secret, the
need for metaphor and simile is negligible. Indeed, the whole

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 14: The Uses of Language                     
209

passage is a single great simile ! And similes upon similes don't
go.

A second clue is intriguing. Stanford was cited to have praised
Homer's similes and depreciated his metaphors. "Why," one
asks, "would Homer be apt to this criticism?" A statement of
Stanford deserves repetition:

The essence of effective metaphor is a clear and definite
understanding of the two constituent ideas incorporated in
the metaphorical term, together with an appreciation of the
new concept integrated from those constituent ideas... In
order to insure that a reader or hearer will thus fully
appreciate his metaphors, a poet must be certain that his
audience understands clearly and precisely the meanings of
words as he uses them [5].

Then comes his thesis: "Because words lacked precise
definition in Homer's time, Homer could not, even if he had
wished, have used daring metaphors." [6]

Since Stanford is unaware of catastrophic theory and of this
book's alternative short-term theory of the Dark Ages of
Greece, he pursues his arguments in the typical manner. Homer
was building a primitive language and savage customs into the
dawn of Greek civilization. So again, Stanford's evidence
support unwittingly the 'Crazed Survivors' theory.

Stanford quotes C. M. Bowra who holds that Homer's language
is clearly not primitive but "in other ways he employs a speech
which has not settled to fixed forms and uses... This inexactness
of function is natural in speech which is still finding itself."
Stanford agrees and adds, "This is the common experience of
all readers of Homer. In his dialects, grammar, prosody, and
syntax, everything points to the growth of conciliatory order out
of chaos and not to deliberate variation of an existing
uniformity." [7] Demetrius long ago had written, "Homer
impresses his hearers greatly by the employment of words
descriptive of inarticulate sounds, and by their novelty above
all." Homer had to make the meaning of many words - "to
combine," as Stanford puts it, "with his poetic gifts the work of
a pioneer grammarian, semiologist, and rhetorician."

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 14: The Uses of Language                     
210

Another facet of the greatly and eternally confused "Homeric
question," it appears, is resolved by our theory. Homer is too
sophisticated to be a primitive minstrel, yet he is first and
foremost of the Greek poets, and nobody feels that he stood
upon the shoulders of great predecessors. Many contradictions,
both technical and sociological, characterize his work, his
subjects, his times. These are largely resolved if Homer is
regarded to be part of his times, at one with his subjects and
their fathers and grandfathers, and working in a new alphabet
upon a polyglot, untutored Hellenic population surviving from a
set of recent natural and social disasters.

HOMER: EDITOR AND PUBLISHER

Scholars have arrived at a fair concert of opinions about Homer.
"The prevalent theory today" is that the Odyssey is not the full
creation of one person [8]. Since it would be senseless for
Homer to have put on a somewhat different vocabulary for each
story, this evidence is weighty.

The Odyssey's language is more consistent than the Iliad's,
hence it is considered to be the later work. Its concepts are more
abstract, another sign of its being written later. However, both
these facts would also jibe with the two-author theory.

Page makes the telling point that the Iliad and the Odyssey do
not refer to each other. He repeated Monro's claim that the
Odyssey "never repeats or refers to any incident related to the
Iliad." [9] They neither boost nor knock each other. Yet they
are consistent; there is no discrepancy between them. Some of
the characters overlap, of course, and some of the statements
correspond.

Further, both epics are written from the same perspective of
time. Their parallelism with regards to the events described
extends beyond coincidental probability, whether these events
were 400 years or 30 years before Homer.

Both poems carry a style that is agreed to be oral. That is, they
were intended for oral recitation, in parts and as wholes, ex
tending over some days of recitation, if needs be. The major
internal evidence of this rests in the great number of formular
phrases that are employed time after time. "If the poet wishes to

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 14: The Uses of Language                     
211

begin his verse with the thought 'But when they arrived...', he
has one way, and one only, of expressing this..." He has to deny
himself all other ways [10]. In a sense unappreciated by modern
writers, who search unendingly for an expanded, particularistic
vocabulary and a way of avoiding cliches, the Greek epics were
built upon collections of phrases, not words. The conclusion is
that "the creation of the vast number of formulas, adaptable to
almost all possible emergencies, must have been the work of
many generations of poets... This is the memory technique of
verse-making." But many formulas might be adapted to any
long poem; ancient formulas would be the bricks that a mason
could use quickly to erect a house; more closely similar is the
practice of popular musical composers of folk, rock, fox trot
and blues music in America who turn out great numbers of
songs from a certain number of stock romantic lines and
musical phrases.

A number of elements of both poems were explicitly
Mycenaean. They are idiomatic, even identical, They are so
tightly linked with the Mycenaean culture that they could not
all have been carried orally over 500 or 400 devastated, savage
years. But they could represent what was destroyed one or a
couple of generations before and still obtruded in the culture of
the Homeric people. Further, it is agreed that many elements of
the poems were non-Mycenaean, meaning contemporary or
Near Eastern or Western Mediterranean.

Here, our explanation is that the shocked society of Homer car
ried various cultures within itself, having no control over their
incongruities. The oral technique would have been a
continuation of centuries of recitation from memory that can
prosper alongside any bureaucratic society, such as the
Mycenaean, in which scribes could write, but the people could
not.

C. M. Bowra believes of Homer "that since he himself was
alive when the wonderful art of writing returned to the Greeks
in the form of the Phoenician alphabet, he dictated his poems to
someone who knew it and the written texts were guarded by
professional bards who recited them to later generations." [11]

Page puts the Odyssey not later than -700. We would guess its
composition at about -650, its transcription soon thereafter. He

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 14: The Uses of Language                     
212

mentions the possibility that the poet of the Odyssey may have
been a contemporary of Archilochus, Callinus, and Alcman,
two generations or more later [12]. He says there may in fact
not have been any written version of the Odyssey before the
sixth century [13]. The Iliad would have preceded this event by
several generations. We suggest that just as the Iliad preceded
the wanderings of Odysseus, the Iliad preceded the story of
them. One then arrives at dates for the composition of the Iliad
in several stages between -700 and -670.

The great literary historian, Aristarchus, places Homer some
sixty years after the return of the Heraclids, whom we have
assigned to the late Eighth Century. Arie Dirkwager, in an
unpublished manuscript lent to this author, has reasonably
calculated that Homer "lived somewhere between 715 and, let
us say, 640;" he connects Homer with Archilochus, whose
grandfather Odysseus is supposed to have encountered when he
visited Hades, and with Lycurgus, the "Spartan lawgiver, who
we think owes his fame to his work in social reconstruction
following upon natural disaster."

Despite the ancient's insistence upon the single identity of
Homer, Page considers finally "the relation between the two
poems to be that of father and son: is it not much more probable
that they are elder and younger brother, living in different
places and developing in different ways? I suggest that this is
so, and that it can be proved to be so."

Of course he does nothing of the kind, but the concept of a
family shop is congenial. It reminds one of Robert Graves' ef
fort, possibly heuristic only, to place the authorship of the
Odyssey in the hands of a daughter of Odysseus, named
Nausicaa! The opinion of the present study is that Homer was
unique. This is maintained not so as to ride free on the wagon
of the traditionalists but because of what has already been said
in this section and in this book.

Homer was a trained Greek bard living in the seventh century in
Asia Minor. The skies were settled and society was coming out
of a century of shocks. Like Shakespeare, not only could he act
but he could also invent poetry. His age was not like ours, an
age of personalized authorship and copyrights. His inheritance
of poetry was both his and non-his; it mattered little.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 14: The Uses of Language                     
213

Homer was alert to the future. Thus he succeeded well in
binding up the past. Moreover, he witnessed the new
alphabetization of Greek [14]. Excitedly he seized upon its
practice and went to work. Like an editor of today, he brought
into the shop what he regarded as the most vendable story in
Greek culture - "Achilles and The Siege of Troy." It was an
epic that he himself could recite, checking now and then its
lines with another bard, discovering frequent inconsistencies
and correcting as many as he could, losing patience often
perhaps with the scribes of the new alphabet who must have
had to make hundred of linguistic decisions in collaboration
with him.

The epic in writing was an instant success. In the beginning, he
who writes things down is the author, with all due regard to the
gods and muses. So Homer was the author. He was more the
creative editor and publisher. Probably no sooner had the
original version been produced than it was copied - under his
supervision for he would not have let out his treasure.

If the Iliad was such a success, would there be a second epic of
like proportions to transcribe? There would be. Homer, Editor
and Publisher, would be sought after by other bards who lacked
his editorial genius and workmanship in the new literary genre.
Would he help them - at a price, of course? The work would be
in his name, but his patronage would be valuable. So one may
conjecture that after he had created the Iliad in written form, he
sought out and selected a second epic coming from another part
of the Greek world, singing of Odysseus, a character whom he
favored beyond all others.

The signs of a common editorial hand in the two works exist;
they have encouraged the belief in a unique "author" over the
whole time. There is evidence of deliberate tampering with the
two poems to make them consistent and related, but never
duplicative. Thus Nestor's story of his early life in Pylos, found
in the Iliad, is "remarkably Odyssean in style." [15] The
Odyssey, coming from another bard or geographical area than
the Iliad, would not be so familiar to Homer and a number of
inconsistencies would escape his editorial scrutiny. Or perhaps
he was anxious to complete its transcription and get it out on
the market. The major inconsistencies of plot and dialogue are

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 14: The Uses of Language                     
214

found in the meshing of the Telemachus story into Odysseus'
return, although Professor Page adds analyses of other
contradictions and lapses [16].

Inconsistencies of general outlook, ethics, theology, and philos
ophy scarcely exist. Homer may have made his greatest
contributions here. He would have been not only copy-editor,
but also moralist, bent upon securing the larger Greek cultural
community to its ultimate values in human relations and the
human in relation to the divine. It is for reasons like these, and
because the terrors of continuous disaster stretch their
penumbra over the actors, that Mircea Eliade diverges from his
contemplation of the remotest antiquities and calls the Iliad a
kind of creation epic. It is a new age whose story Homer
reorders and edits for publication, one that begins a century
before he deals with it.

TRADUTTORE TRADITTORE

By the time the first Greek grammarians went to work, the lan
guage of Homer was quaint. The language changes. The
references of words change. Associations are formed and join in
the same word. Words expand their meanings and
simultaneously contract them. Words are invented by new
combinations of sounds, relating to the events referred to, and
to familiar sounds of nature, and previously exciting words of
like character.

Take the word "brazen." It connotes 'bronze.' It also means 'hot.'
This is easy enough.

Examine the epithet "golden-bridled Ares." It means to Murray,
"Ares of the golden rein." Both are "correct." Why, as the au
thoritative translator (Murray) would have it, does it mean the
latter, when a translation bearing in mind the hidden construc
tion could picture Ares as a darkly ruddy planet with electric
flashes and belts playing across its face, bridling it like the head
of a warhorse [17]? Alexander Pope, puzzled, finds it, "He
glows, he burns," (with love, of course). Fitzgerald gives simply
"golden Ares."

Graves discovered that Hephaestus can be rendered as "He who
Shines by Day." Phaethon, of the same root, means "shining,

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 14: The Uses of Language                     
215

the shining one, radiant" and was the name of the mythical son
of Helios who, paralyzed by fright, let the chariot of the Sun
scorch the Earth and plunged to a fiery death, an occasion that
quite probably corresponded to an earlier catastrophe,
associated with the planet Venus. One should also note that
Phaeacia is the Shining Land, land of Fire, the Phaeacians being
"Phaecixikos." The words of "shining" and "fire" are dear to
Homer. He uses them on hundreds of occasions in his epics,
perhaps ninety percent of the time in symbolism of passion,
heroism, and death [18]. He calls Hephaestus "the fire of the
world."

The early Greek philosophers, reports Burnet, called the planet
Saturn "Phaenon," the planet Jupiter "Phaethon," Mercury "Stil
von" (Brilliant), Venus "Phosphoros" (light-bearer), and Mars
"Pyroeis" (Fiery one) [19]. Perhaps someday a scholar will go
back to the symbol and root of the  and find there only "fire,
feuer, fuoco, feu, phaeton, etc." with perhaps an astral
significance in the birth of the language and perhaps even
search out the origins of other root sounds in the same vein. We
should know, however, that  seems to have had phallic
associations as a letter of the Greek alphabet [20]. And 
means creativity, talents, and the penis. At Lemnos, in probable
reference to Hephaestus, there was found a medal with the
inscription, "kabeireia pythia phi," or "the strong one, python,
phi." [21]

Moreover, the () of Hephaestus is close to the modern symbol
of the planet Venus. But this is also close to the apparition of a
comet,

with its tail; a planet could better be a circle or a star. Many
ancients designated the planet Venus by the same symbol. And
Aphrodite contains in her name the same letter, and, generally,
is described by a number of words conveying brilliance and
light.

The symbol

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 14: The Uses of Language                     
216

is a hieroglyph of Egypt but is also found around the globe, in
ancient Mexico, for example. In Egypt it may also be rendered

or

And as it was ascribed phallic meaning in Greece, so it was in
Egypt. The statue of Horus at Coptos has a phallus in his hands
which is said to have been taken from Typhon (the monster, the
part of Venus-Hephaestus, that crashed into Earth).

Isis-Athena and Typhon-Hephaestus are recalled unconsciously
in the symbol of the ankh,

both as comets and as dismembered comets. It then recalls
terror and can join with the castration fear, so that the phallic
symbol and the astronomical symbol unite in a syllable that is
both pornographic and anxiety-causing. But, with typical
ambivalence, the ankh comes down to us in a long procession
led by the Christian church, where the ankh is the symbol of
"life." Still, the Egyptian 'Ankh', the symbol of life, is a
combination of male and female.

Moving to line 273, one finds a complicated sentence;
Hephaestus fashions a device to capture the secret lovers in
flagrante delictu. No translator feels the need to indicate that
the original meaning of akinon is thunderbolt, not anvil (from
which sparks fly). It also means a meteoritic stone. The
mundane word derives from the astral; the significant aspect
here is not the precedence, but the insistent astral atmosphere of
the passages. Hephaestus, after all, might have woven a net of
cord, or dug a collapsing pit; or "bummed a ride" on Helios'
chariot: he is a versatile genius, not only a blacksmith. The
device is of copper, again not of fibre, as fishing nets are.

A slightly different sentence emerges than the other translators,
who are in rough consensus, give. Murray studiously emerges
with "But straightaway one came to him with tidings, even
Helius, who had marked them as they lay together in love. And

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 14: The Uses of Language                     
217

when Hephaestus heard the grievous tale, he went his way to
his smithy, pondering evil in the deep of his heart, and set on
the anvil block the great anvil and forged bonds which might
not be broken or loosed, that the lovers might bide fast where
they were."

And we read:

Straightaway then went with the news, of course,

Helios, who'd spotted them loving,

Shocked and dismayed was Hephaestus to hear of the painful

story.

Deep down below the depths of his forge he proceeded; there,

placing a thunderbolt stone on the block of the anvil, he struck

and

struck off unbreakable fetters that no one could hope to dis

solve, for

fixing the lovers in bondage, right where they loved, was his

fierce aim.

Little can be done with the most common verb of the passage;
Ercomai meaning simply "to go and come," and Homer uses
almost no other word of movement. "Why not 'fly'?" one asks,
for, in general, Homer is fond of metaphors of birds and flight.
Or even "rushed." Alexander Pope translates the word into airy
and flighty language, indeed gives the whole play a fully
heavenly treatment. Still, although the language openly
describes events in the skies, the word "go and come" is just
that and one has to be resigned to the correct perception that
these heavenly bodies did not fly; they came, moved, stood,
departed. The personages were huge masses, not birds or
"shooting stars."

To conclude, a slight tendency exists for the translators to
reduce the instances when the words and phrases of the original
might have suggested hidden parallels of an astral and cata
strophic character. To this they are driven not only by their own
preoccupation with the evident and conventional, but by
lexicons that are a product of the establishment, in effect, a
guarantee that when in doubt they will follow the consensus.

It is of little use to appeal to "The Original," dismissing all
translations. A thoroughly versed classicist would be similarly

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 14: The Uses of Language                     
218

tempted to "read" or "explain" in classical Greek the meanings
of the words in their singular romantic sense. One can imagine
Homer himself, half composing, half reporting the story; even
he must have contributed to its integrity as romance at the cost
of greater ambiguity as history.

For basically all words describing events are a translation ab
initio (See above, page 29). Even the most rigorous scientific
language begins to wash out meanings through metaphors. Only
in the subconscious minds of the earliest singers of the song and
their audience would there exist openly sensible connections
between the event and the signs, and between the denotating
signs and the connotating signs. And soon only these latter were
permitted to bubble up into awareness.

THE THROES OF ORIGINAL PLOT

Thrusting at these arguments from another point, a critic may
offer the reasonable observation that the Love Affair is only an
instance of the ever popular plot of the love triangle. Two
people owe each other love. A third in fact captures the love of
one of the pair. The third is out-raged at being excluded from
the prior love. And, naturally, preceding this plot came many
familiar personal histories from time immemorial.

At the risk of offering a theory of literary creativity that cannot
be amply defended here, I would say that we are treating of
time immemorial and even of the rise of language and literary
forms. Long before the Love Affair could be composed, there
had to be a language; that language, to be invented, had to be
preceded by and based upon a ritualized culture fascinated by
repetitions and order.

The "obvious plot" had not only to be experienced, but had also
to be perceived as important in two regards: to be certified by
higher authority (i.e. the behavior of the gods); and to be
translated from common occurrence into Symbolic form. (More
will be said of this later.)

The Oedipus story, from which the important psychiatric
complex derived its name, had occurred innumerable times in
the dawn of humanity. But it took a particular episode of
Egyptian history, involving a God-Pharaoh, which I.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 14: The Uses of Language                     
219

Velikovsky has brilliantly detected in Oedipus and Akhnaton, to
sponsor the translation and elevate into literature, first spoken
and then written, the general human experience and anxiety
over the sexual love between mother and son.

Among the several facets of Homer's genius is that he carried
wars, sex and feasting into the humanly experienced life of the
gods so that divine behavior could be at least partly understood,
though full of contradictions that themselves created, including
a contemporary practical wisdom and a later "rational"
philosophy. Too late after the events, in the third century, A.D.,
Quintillus wrote a sequel to the Iliad. It is insipid, uninspiring.
It affords no sense of the presence and reality of the gods when
compared with the Wrath of Achilles or the "Return of the
Heroes" sung to Odysseus before he hears of the Love Affair. It
is as if our primeval myth-maker knew the crude principle of
stardom in Hollywood. "If they can't remember the story, they'll
remember who starred in the movie."

Hence one speculates that the enduring plots and themes of the
arts, including history, were invented with great effort and
through a real-perceived event, sparking a combustible mixture
of instruments and institutions - linguistic, behavioral, and tech
nical.

HUMAN STRESS AND LANGUAGE

A child likes to repeat words, phrases, and sentences. One will
chant the same line indefatigably. It may be newly invented or a
thousand years old. It may or may not "make sense". A relief of
anxiety occurs in the repetition.  The speech of the old and
dying often becomes repetitive, and an old person who has
spoken an acquired language will often revert to the sole use of
the language he first learned. When pinned down by enemy fire,
a soldier will often chant words incoherently, or if he had
instruction, say, in the Catholic Church, will repeat the "Hail,
Mary" prayer times without end. Sad folk ballads and neurotic
"rock-and-roll" songs are obsessively simple in word and beat
and prolong themselves to the agony of anyone not afflicted
who must endure them. The language of sudden grief and
disaster is often "No! No! No!..." or "She can't be dead! She
can't be dead..."

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 14: The Uses of Language                     
220

The sacred dream recital and liturgy, plus many institutional
offshoots, are a repetition of events that once occurred. That the
original event was a terrible event followed by great anxiety is
evidenced in many ways, as in the punitiveness with which
unbelievers are regarded, for the unbeliever is saying that "the
tragedy that once happened to you is insignificant." In the realm
of rhetoric and linguistic pragmatics, the sacred expression is
using symbols as a way of regressing to stress, reenacting it,
rememorizing the events, and ultimately releasing tensions.

Insistence upon correctness in detail prolongs the generation of
memory and at the same time insures that the gods realize how
faithfully these humans have remembered their lesson. The
repetitiveness, another aspect of obsession, and another means
of insuring memorization, progressively fixates the ritual
participant upon the root of his ailment. "She can't stop
scratching her mosquito bite," "He wallows in his misery;"
these are trivial obsessive actions. The original recital of the
Love Affair would have taken hours; Homer cut it and shaped it
to a new form of art, but note well that he lets one know that it
is far form the original version; he did not steal, abridge it, and
present it as original.

The sacred originates in a stressful and tragic condition. In the
process of sublimation, the tragic stress gives way to liturgical
language, promoting the development of language itself, in both
"hieratic" (priestly) and popular ("demotic" ) forms. Tragedy is
never lost. Its final triumph is to give birth to comedy.

THE RULES OF MYTHICAL LANGUAGE

The rules of scientific language are well-known. They should
actually be called "ideals," since they cover far less of science
than they "should," and necessarily so, because scientific lan
guage cannot generate its highest flights unless it resort to
philosophic language. To the scientist, the rule is: "one event
should receive one signification." Further: "the signification
should be the same for anyone to whom it is communicated."
Moreover, "the signification should be testable, by repetition of
the event sequence in experiment, etc." Finally, "events should
be described and combined in forms of signification that do not
add external meanings;" that is, no extraneous feelings or
meanings should slip in by design or surreptitiously to spoil the

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 14: The Uses of Language                     
221

purity of the generalization. All of this began with Aristotle's
nominalism (words are distinct from, and refer to, objects) and
has arrived at Whitehead's operationism (the meanings of words
can only lie in the events they describe).

Aristotle had another side, also. He understood rhetoric and
pragmatics. While developing a rational grammar of science, he
was preparing a science of influencing. Given a particular audi
ence, what symbols should be chosen and manipulated to
produce a desired effect? Here words are signs of mental
affections, not exclusively of the dualities of things. Once
pursued, this line of thought has ever more fearful implications.
Not until the latest stage of the modern scientific outlook has a
body of scientific work been permitted to arise that would
inquire into the reasons for reasoning, the meaning of meaning,
the ideology behind every body of action, including the
activities of science itself.

When science has come this far, it is capable of analyzing the
language of myth scientifically. The first rule for the interpre
tation of myth is that symbols in their content will have a
determined and possibly determinable meaning. The second is
that "what the symbols mean" contains, besides other things,
"the psychological effects produced by them." Thirdly, there is
an "unconscious science of myth," as well as certain principles
of the "conscious" science of myth that we have dug out and
can apply with predictable effects. Just as the athlete, poet, ora
tor, and composer may not know the scientific rules of their
successful performances, so the myth-teller and myth-hearer
will not usually understand what rules of linguistics and
psychology he is applying.

The most important of these unconscious rules, all of them
practiced and evident in the Love Affair, are perhaps the
following:

1. Make a myth of any collectively experienced event that had
tragic consequences in order to give symptomatic relief to the
perpetual illness. (The myth of the Love Affair exemplifies this
rule.)

2. Remain steadfastly true to the event. As the consensus that
perceived the event then and there defined it, so relate it. (As a

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 14: The Uses of Language                     
222

result of this rule, many generations later, we can behave as
cryptographic detectives in relation to the historical character of
the myth. We are trying to replay this rule as it guided the
producers of the Love Affair.)

3. Conceal the truth of the event insofar as it is disturbing. (We
are seeking the truth of the Love Affair in many areas, not the
least of which is in the language, where we observed a number
of techniques of concealing the truth while telling it.)

4. Use methods of concealment that contribute symptomatic
relief. (We find in the Love Affair a thoroughly satisfactory plot
that amuses, a suggestive language, reiteration, ritual, collective
reassurance.)

5. The therapy should last for the duration of the pain. (Over a
span of forty memorial generations and eighty reproductive
generations some portion of humanity has obtained
symptomatic relief from the Love Affair. However, the myth
has lost impact steadily from the settling of heaven, and from
more philosophical methods of coping with the symptoms. The
doctrines of the eternal constancy of the heavens, the practical
timelessness of earthly change, and the gradual evolution of
humans - sometimes referred to altogether as the ideology of
uniformitarianism - have proven a more effective repressor and
a partial therapy in the long run. They have made the Love
Affair mainly a salacious tale, told in a thousand forms, whose
insistent threats and memories linger only vaguely.

As for adults, so for babies.

So turkey-lurkey turned back, and walked with gander
lander, goose-loose, drake-lake, duck-luck, cock-lock, hen
len, and chicken-licken. And as they were going along, they
met fox-lox. And fox-lox said "Where are you going, my
pretty maids?" And they said, "Chicken-Licken went to the
wood, and the sky fell upon her poor bald pate, and we are
going to tell the king." And fox-lox said, "Come along with
me, and I will show you the way." But fox-lox took them
into the fox's hole, and he and his young ones soon ate up
poor chicken-licken, hen-len, cock-lock, duck-luck, drake
lake, goose-loose, gander-lander, and turkey-lurkey, and
they never saw the king to tell him that the sky had fallen!
[22]

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 14: The Uses of Language                     
223

The story is much longer, of course, because one after another
of the little animals is added to the fearful procession following
chicken-licken, and the list is repeated liturgically. The sky is
beginning to fall; the people are frightened; they seek the
religio-secular authority to ease their fears or perhaps to do
something about it.

But they encounter the fox who, ancient myths relate, "nibbles
continuously at the thong of the yoke which holds together
heaven and earth" (Proclus) and "German folklore adds that
when the fox succeeds, the world will come to its end." This
same fox can also be a wolf, and a dog. It is a star. It is also
called "Electra, mother of Dardanus, who left her station among
the Pleiades, desperate because of Ilion's (Troy's) fall, and
retired above the second star of the beam... others call this star
'fox.'" So write Santillana and von Dechend, from their sources,
calling finally upon the great expert on ancient astronomy, F. X.
Kugler who had said: "The star at the beam of the wagon is the
fox star: Era, the powerful among the gods. In astrological
usage, it represents above all the planet Mars/Nergal." [23]

The same story, whose origins disappear into the immemorial
(read "memorial") past, has been altered over the last century of
time. Today, people may read to their three-year olds in a new
version [24] that the little animals encounter, not a fox, but a
wise owl, and that the owl skeptically asks to be shown the
fallen piece of sky: heaven cannot fall; it turns out that it was
only an apple that had fallen. They found the apple and
Chicken-Licken ate it and was happy.

Alas, they are back to the owl, which happens to have been a
paramount symbol of "owl-eyed" Athena [25], and they are
eating the forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden. Once more,
"success through failure."

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 14: The Uses of Language                     
224

Notes (Chapter 14: The Uses of Language)

1.     Greek Metre (trans. from German ed;, 1927 and addenda,
by H. Lloyd-Jones, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 59.

2.     Ibid., pp 1-2.

3.     Ibid, pp. 3-4.

4.     Greek Metaphor (1936, reprinted New York: Johnson
reprint. Corp., 1972), p. 120.

5.     Ibid., p. 121.

6.     Ibid., p. 121.

7.     Ibid., p. 65.

8.     D. page, The Homeric Odyssey pp. 52, 72 et passim. The
Iliad and the Odyssey do not seem to have written by the same
person either. The two epics have divergent vocabularies.
Ibid..pp.149-57.

9.     Ibid.,p. 158.

10.    Page, Ibid., p. 139.

11.    "Problems Concerned with Homer and the Epics," in
Thomas, op.cit..pp.16. 18. 42.

12.    Op. cit., pp. m147-8.

13.    Ibid., p. 97.

14.    A. J. B. Wace writes in the Foreword to M. Ventris and J.
Chadwick's Documents in Mycenean Greek (Cambride, Eng.:
Cambridge Univ. Press. 1959), XXViii. that Linear B probably
carried over until driven out by the more efficient Phoenician
alphabet. We Would agree that both alphabets were
concurrently used, and, moreover, the success of the new
alphabet was precipitated by the natural disasters and social
destruction.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 14: The Uses of Language                     
225

15.    Page, Ibid., p. 161, fin. 8.

16.    Summarized, Ibid., p. 159, 53 ff.

17.    This construction is supported as conceivable in an
electric encounter in the study by Franz Xavier Kugler of the
Sibylline oracles, Stecchini, op. cit., p. 143. "The Battle of the
stars began with the appearance in the eastern sky of a body as
bright as the sun and similar in apparent diameter to the sun and
the moon. The light of the sun was replaced by long streams of
flame crossing each other."

18.    Cedric H. Whitman, "Fire and Other Elements; "in
Steiner and Fagles, op. cit., pp. 40 ff. Cf. also D. page, The
Homeric Odyssey, 152-3.

19.    J. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophers (London, 1920), 3rd
ed., p. 23; Plato's Epinomis (Harvard edition, Oxford:
Clarendon press, 1928, lines 986a-987d) first gives the planets
their Greek Present names.

20.    W. B. Stanford, Greek Metaphor (Oxford, Eng.:
Blackwell, 1936), 67, 81, citing Franz Dornsieff, Pindars Stil
(1921). Cf. supra, p. 175.

21.    Isaac N. Vail citing Eckhel, p. 45, of Mythic Mountain
(Santa Barbara, Calif.: Annular publications. 1972). see also
above. p. 160.

22.    This last part of the typically repetitious (liturgical) story
for tiny children called "Chicken-Licken," is quoted from James
O. Halliwell-Phillips, Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales
(London: J. R. Smith, 1849), p. 31. The story is found in Africa,
India, all over Europe. Cf. my own note in The Burning of Troy.

23.    G. de Santillana and II. van Dechend, Hamlet's Mill: An
Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time.(Boston: Gambit, 1969),
p. 385.

24.    Chicken Little (Racine, Wisc.: Whitman Publ. co., 1958).

25.    The owl is a marvelous tranfiguration of a blazing-eyed
twin comet that may have been one source of the duality of

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 14: The Uses of Language                     
226

Athena-Hephaestus and the many twin serpent symbols of
antiquity.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 15: Memory                                      

227

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF MEMORY

In Pieria, Memoria, ruler of the hills of Eleuther, gave birth
to the Muses out of union with Zeus, son of Chronos, and
thus of the forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow.

So writes Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer in his Genealogy
of the Gods. The Theogony was composed after 730 B.C., that
is, during or after the era of troubled skies; but it was a mythical
work, "reporting" on events that had occurred hundreds and
thousands of year before. "The ordered pantheon of Hesiod
ended in supplanting the anarchic society of the Homeric
Gods." [1]

A functional psychology rests in the quoted passage.
"Remembering" was no mere scratching of experience upon a
tabula rasa of the mind. Memoria or Mnemosyne or
"Recollector," is the mother of history (Clio). She has as her
progeny the means of controlling herself, for Zeus is the
ordering paternal force. There are nine (some said three or five)
muses governing the arts and sciences - dancing, music, and
singing, but also history and astronomy. They will lend human
memory its possibilities of selective attention, delusion,
illusion, abatement, extension, a shadowing and heightening 
all that is necessary to achieve that combination of
remembering and forgetting which makes social life possible on
a level that is higher than the level of non-remembering or total
amnesia. Significantly, Memoria is the daughter of Uranus, who
was the grandfather of Zeus; she is no mere sprite. Her Eleuthe
rian Hills are the realm of freedom, so she governs freedom.

Without further ado, we may assert that the muses were created
"by Zeus" to control the human memory so that humans should
forget their catastrophes, and in so doing get surcease from
sorrows. The word "muse" by itself has a meaning of happiness.
And that the Muses will achieve this by transforming events
through art and song, through myth. The memory of disasters is

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 15: Memory                                      

228

doctored "by Zeus" ultimately to brainwash humanity and to
present the new order of heaven as proper, lawful, and
beautiful. Hesiod, reciting this profound truth, goes on to
describe how the muses work, reminding us of a combined
team for domestic propaganda and psychological warfare.

As a result, all the arts and sciences have been manipulated by
the muses. What we know of the catastrophes must come from
a "natural history" - geology, biology, physics and astronomy 
and a politics, philosophy, and theology that have been
censored by the Muses. Additionally, we must obtain our
historical material from myth, song, dances, and drama that are
similarly screened. It is well to insist upon this premise,
whether we come to the problem from an acquaintanceship with
the natural sciences or the social sciences. The gods and
especially Zeus, who seems under various names to have
developed the patterns of anthropological psychology among
most cultures, have required this premise of us.

The science of remembering and forgetting - what shall it be
called - mnemonology? Its scope ranges from the ridiculous to
the sublime; from the "psychopathology of everyday life," as
Freud put it, to the "collective amnesia" that Velikovsky asserts
of ancient catastrophes and that German educators observe as
they try to teach the history of Nazism.  It must deal with the
Love Affair of Ares and Aphrodite that masks a world disaster,
and with nursery songs that mask the murder of kings.

We may quote what Katherine Elwes Thomas found when she
explored The Real Personages of Mother Goose:

The lines of Little Bo-Peep and Little Boy Blue, which to
childish minds have only quaint charm of meaning, which
suggest but the gayest of blue skies and rapturous-hearted
creatures disporting in daisy-pied meadows, hold in reality
grim import. Across all this nursery lore there falls at times
the black shadow of the headman's block and in their
seeming lightness are portrayed the tragedies of kings and
queens, the corruptions of opposing political parties, and
stories of fanatical religious strife that have gone to make
world history.

For instance, the child sings of "four and twenty blackbirds,
baked in a pie." And "when the pie was opened the birds began

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 15: Memory                                      

229

to sing," now, "wasn't that a tasty dish to put before the King?"
The child is singing of actual history that was never heard or
learned, of an incident in the grim struggle between the English
Crown and the Church, during which, to appease the greed and
hostility of the King, twenty-four deeds of church land were
sealed into a pouch of dough and delivered to his castle. In old
slang, the dough was handed over; in new slang, the "bread."
The elapsed time from event to amnesiac song might have been
less than a century.

The Oedipus myth, to take another instance, is capable of
providing an accurate account of an episode in the history of
Egypt. Its central figure was the Pharaoh Akhnaton. The story
survived its original obliteration at the hands of the theocracy of
Egyptian Thebes. It held intact as it was transferred across cul
tures, probably via Ugarit whose King Nikomedes may have
founded Grecian Thebes, as Cadmus. By the time of Sophocles'
tragedy, Oedipus Rex, seven mnemonic or fourteen
reproductive generations had passed, that is, about four hundred
years.[2].

Heavy trauma, it is here proposed, is at the source of many
features of the higher intellectual operations and "advanced"
social institutions of humankind.

An experience which we call traumatic is one which within
a very short space of time subjects the mind to such a very
high increase of stimulation that assimilation or elaboration
of it can no longer be effected by normal means, so that
lasting disturbances must result in the distribution of the
available energy of the mind [3].

TRAUMATIC ORIGIN OF MEMORY

In a prescient passage Friedrich Nietzsche (Genealogy of
Morals, 1887) stabs into the heart of the matter. He asks, "How
can one create a memory for the human animal? How can one
impress something upon this partly obtuse, partly flighty mind,
attuned only to the passing moment, in such a way that it will
stay there?" [4]

And he continues,

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 15: Memory                                      

230

"One can well believe that the answers and methods for
solving this primeval problem were not precisely gentle;
perhaps indeed there was nothing more fearful and uncanny
in the whole prehistory of man than his mnenotechnics. If
something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in;
only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory 
this is a main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most
enduring) psychology on earth. One might even say that
wherever on earth solemnity, seriousness, mystery, and
gloomy coloring still distinguish the life of man and a
people, something of the terror that formerly attended all
promises, pledges, and vows on earth is still effective: the
past, the longest, deepest and sternest past, breathes upon
us and rises up in us whenever we become 'serious.' Man
could never do without blood, torture and sacrifices when
he felt the need to create a memory for himself; the most
repulsive mutilations (castration, for example), the cruelest
rites of all the religious cults (and all religions are at the
deepest level systems of cruelties) - all this has its origin in
the instinct that realized pain is the most powerful aid to
mnemonics." [5]

Unfortunately, after this amazing passage, Nietzsche's genesis
collapses. Although he immediately goes hunting for the acts
that provoked such mnemotechnics, he shoots a little rabbit: the
primitive forms of contract between buyers and sellers. In order
to trade, men had to keep promises; in order to ensure obliga
tions, the failure to repay had to be punished severely: thus the
genealogy of morals.

One is reminded of Sigmund Freud's alternate route to
fundamental error in Totem and Taboo: that in the oedipal
conflict and the slaying of the father, man achieved a (bad)
conscience and the need to justify and to punish. The Oedipus
myth, as was said above, has much breadth and staying power,
but a still greater and universal fear had to be imposed to
support its recollection, and this was the fear of (devotion to)
the god of Akhnaton. And it is difficult to conceive of anything
more grand and durable than the catastrophes attendant upon
encounters between Earth and other heavenly forces.

It is significant that Freud, perceiving an inadequacy of general
sexual theory, moved Beyond the Pleasure Principle [6],
searching out a deeper fear that he termed the death instinct and
observed to be present especially in veterans suffering from
"shell-shock," whose nightmares and hallucinations found them

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 15: Memory                                      

231

continuously repeating what, after all, could hardly be called a
pleasurable wish. Nor did such "symptoms vanish when their
unconscious antecedents have been made conscious," as Freud
remarks concerning obsessive fixations, following his earlier
theory [7]. He and many others would have done well to stick
with Nietzsche's brilliant premise and continue the search for
historical psychological experiences of great stress befalling
humankind when it had arrived at a complex state of organic
potential.

The Love Affair involves both a disgraced contract and a dis
graced sexuality. But these are cover-ups for a disaster too great
to talk about. Indeed, by the time that the Love Affair occurred,
only sexual imagery and violence were sufficiently eloquent to
use as disguises, at least in literature; beyond that, one would
have to resort for the patterning and recapitulation of such
traumas to religious and political institutions - hierarchic,
obsessed with the symbolism of violence, compulsively
repetitive. The Love Affair, one must bear in mind, was only
the latest in a series of catastrophes over thousands of years,
from which human nature as we have known it was born and
which shaped the physical world in which we live today.

Man's memory itself, the prototypical remembering, is a conse
quence of catastrophe more than of any other incidental or
habitual interest of humanity. The Love Affair, in reflecting a
catastrophe, reflects a late event in a series of catastrophes that
created memory. It was perhaps the last of the qualitatively
distinct mass events on the basis of which memory was institu
tionalized, routinized, and socialized. Humans now remember
(and forget) according to rules in which social forces play a
continuous role, but this role evolved from catastrophes.

THE RULES OF MEMORY

All memory occurs under conditions that guarantee its
imperfection. Given its mode of creation, remembering must
function compatibly. No datum will enter the mind
photographically. Rather the inputs will be screened not only by
the senses, which themselves, in large part, perceive because of
their prior social conditioning, but by the willingness to admit
only censored data.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 15: Memory                                      

232

This holds true, as many careful studies have shown, for the
most noncontroversial and trivial kinds of experiences. Who
says remember says select, who says memory, says forgetting.
By the time of Homer, numerous natural disasters had befallen
humanity; the perfect ease of the whole Phaeacian episode,
including the Love Affair, attests to the approaching
achievement of "perfect imperfection": nothing of the original
truth need be omitted, so well under control are the conditions
creating imperfections. We are on our way to the climax of
artistic sublimation.

The concept of "perfect memory" is a useful fiction. One is
compelled to say that it is a theocratic fiction. For the content of
what is remembered is in the broadest sense religiously and
politically determined. The ideal canons of registering and
remembering, set by modern science, are evidence in
themselves that "you cannot trust your memory" and
"independent observers have to confirm the same facts." But
also the establishment of scientists as a social system lays down
the rules of what is to be watched for, what is to be ignored, and
what is to be distorted. The Homerids were the practitioners and
teachers of "accurate memory" as defined to protect society
against its anxieties.

The intensity of remembering is directly proportional to the
gravity of a trauma. By intensity is meant sharpness, detail, and
durability in conscious and unconscious form. By gravity is
meant how deeply and adversely one is affected in the major
regions of his life: his physical being, his cherished ones, his
group, his wealth, his control, his beliefs about good and the
true. Machiavelli said to the rules: it is better to be feared by the
people than to be loved, if you cannot be both. Fear and anxiety
drove primeval humanity to invent and to organize. Fear mixed
itself early with love, and produced the continuous ambivalence
towards sexuality that is exhibited in the Love Affair.

The most intense memories are likely to occur without
"willing" them. This is understandable once we consider that no
one will willingly subject himself to the conditions that produce
intense memories. But one will try to will a pleasant memory.
How many times do people think: "I shall never forget this
beautiful sunset... I shall always remember this kindness... I
shall never forget this orgasm," only to lose their grasp of the

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 15: Memory                                      

233

memory shortly thereafter. If a person remembers "a kind act"
done to him long ago, it is in the context of a generally unkind
and fearful environment of acts. The most that can be done to
"will" the memory is to tie it consciously and unconsciously to
disasters and especially institutionalize the disasters so that the
group will continuously reenact them. All great historical reli
gions are based upon these psychological operations.

The most intense memories are most likely to be unavailable to
the conscious mind, and to be buried in dreams and myths.
These latter act to suppress and control anxiety. The dream and
myth language is likely to approach as close as possible to the
ultimate universal, traumatic experiences, without becoming
unbearable. It rides on the tracks of birth throes, the fearful side
of sexual copulation, death scenes, violence and conflict,
including all the conventional transformations of these
materials into religious and social activities, routines and
institutions. This "step-down" principle works on the descent
into the depths of the unconscious; it works, that is, on the
depth of burial, and it brings about the selection of the next less
traumatic kind of material as the screen for the more
traumatizing type.

The speed of remembering is proportionate to the intensity of
the trauma. "The experience burned itself indelibly upon my
mind," one says. A single experience is enough to cause
remembering, if it is grave enough. If it is too grave, physical
collapse occurs and no further memorization is possible. At the
other extreme, in the absence of fear, interest or even
recognition - as in most classrooms, an abundance of
knowledge moves, as they say, "from the notes of the teacher to
the notes of the student without passing through the minds of
either." If our physical analysis is correct, the astral Love Affair
occupied a few hours among many years of experiencing all
sorts of things.

The phenotypes of the myth are functions of the archetypes of
the cultural personality, which is merely to say that the kind of
story told, together with its details, are characteristic of the
culture. Some more ancient pre-Greek and proto-Greek cultures
practicing group marriage would have had to find a different
plot and details to screen the reiteration of the Moon and Mars
encounter. It is characteristic of "Western man's" partially

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 15: Memory                                      

234

Greek-born culture, and a proof of his cultural ancestry, that the
adulterous love triangle, descended from the Greeks, is still a
favorite artistic theme.

FORGETTING

Forgetting is subject to the same rules as remembering. We
remember to forget. That is, amnesia is activated in the same
way as memory. Glancing at the list of rules of remembering,
one can substitute forgetting for remembering and get the
following rules of forgetting.

Like remembering, forgetting is guaranteed to occur under all
conditions, and to be imperfect, never complete. Nor is forget
ting accurate: it is ragged, affected by many particular causes. If
the popular metaphor speaks of the stream of memory, one can
speak as well of the stream of forgetting. Forgetting occurs
proportionate to the gravity of a trauma, and forgetting occurs
without willing to forget.

The most intense forgetfulness is most likely to be available to
the conscious mind; one must admit "we cannot recall what it is
that we have forgotten," when the thing forgotten is a matter of
grave threat to the mind.

Forgetting, too, speeds up with the intensity of the trauma.

For this reason one can believe that events that occurred
perhaps only a generation before Homer, or even in his lifetime,
might achieve a complete aesthetic screen at his hands. Of
course, a multitude of local scenarios are possible; but let us
imagine what may have happened in a typical disaster of the
"Age of Mars" that is, in the eighth and seventh centuries [8].

An ordinary person is alerted and examines the sky with a fore

boding of evil. A brilliant speck grows larger from day to day.

He is told that it has done so before, with terrible consequenc

es. The memory is already excited. Calendars are studied and

worked over. Oracles are consulted. All group efforts are mo

bilized to control the menace: rituals of subservience and devo

tion; the stricter punishment of any suspected deviants in all

areas of law and conduct; the destruction of enemies if they can

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 15: Memory                                      

235

be promptly engaged; the sacrifice of more and more valuable

properties and persons.

Relentlessly the menace approaches. The sky is full of lights,

shapes and turbulence. The Earth begins to respond - to live, to

move, to smoke, to blow up strong winds, to shriek, to take fire.

Thunderbolts strike on all sides. Our hero watches, bemused.

He is exceedingly frightened, as are his family and neighbors.

There may be a pandemonium in which he faints or is struck

dumb; he may scramble into a temple or house or cave; he will

cover his head. The young will observe more than the old. "The

disaster occurs in successive kinds of turbulence, in all the

various destructive forms of earth, air, fire, and water, the

primordial elements. Animals, both tame and wild, crowd in

upon people, terrified, unaggressive, unhungry. Eardrums are

blown in or sucked out by abrupt pressure changes. Some are

struck blind, others gassed. Strange objects and lifeforms drop

from the sky. The sky reels. The waters gyrate madly and rush

to and fro."

The vista is one of unmitigated disaster. There is nowhere to go.

The survivors regroup after each incident. They are partially

paralyzed with fear and despair, partly striving for survival and

control.

"What god is angry?" they wonder, if they don't already know.

What other gods can they appeal to and how? What trait of a

god should they address themselves to? The most important

religious and political decisions of their lifetimes are made; the

most sacred instruments and skills of the immemorial past are

called upon in the crisis. Nothing, nobody, will ever persuade

him to behave differently, or his children or, if they can help it,

their descendants into the eternal future.

When the disasters subside, the survivors are crazed. They must

regroup, recollect their thoughts, and do something about the

memory. This is not a task for an astronomer sitting in the air

conditioned hall of a giant telescope in Arizona. Nor for a

sober historian. It is a task for any surviving priest rulers: "We

have been visited by the gods. The figures they strike in the sky

are their various apparitions when destructive and punitive...

Good gods and spirits fight evil ones. Our conduct displeases

them: we must strengthen our observance of rituals: purify

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 15: Memory                                      

236

ourselves; expiate our sins; sacrifice ever more precious

possessions; kill more enemies; control the libertarian; guard

the names by which we call a god; and remind ourselves

forevermore of the events of these days while we watch for their

eventual recurrence."

Again history is quickly subverted: indeed, it has never existed.

Instead memorial activities are planned by the community that

will register whatever intensity on the memorial-screen is suffi

cient to suppress the pain of the memory of the original experi

ence plus all the preceding related and similar traumatic

experiences.

It is well to be quite explicit: No sooner is a disaster experi
enced than it is remembered: no sooner remembered than it is
forgotten. All the rules of remembering are rules of forgetting.

What? Is memory a forgetting while to forget is to remember?
One seems to be approaching this paradox; if it is not indeed an
absurdity. Yet, if we resolve this paradox we shall better under
stand the great mystery of myth, which bids us remember fero
ciously in order the more firmly and securely to forget.

The paradox disappears with one fact, well appreciated. The
fact is that a memory can enter the mind, but can rarely leave it.
Except by organic lesion, there is little forgetting. The biolog
ical system can scarcely throw off a memory; it can readily ma
nipulate it.

What is called "forgetting" is the eternal bookkeeping system of
memory.  From conception to dissolution and death, the system
will always show a net profit. But, like many a bookkeeping
system in commerce, memorial bookkeeping has numerous
ways of casting the balance so as to conceal the surplus. It is
with the forgotten material that the mind works to create myth,
art, and hypothesis. The concept of forgetting is needed to
describe the handling of the transactions of memory that permit
consciousness, instrumentally rational conduct, and normal
behavior.

Where is the balance cast that makes these two opposites indeed
opposite? In the functional machinery of the mind, where oppo
sites are coined according to the needs of the moment.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 15: Memory                                      

237

Whatever stabilizes the organism's "normalcy" is chosen; and
the organism remembers or forgets conveniently.

AMNESIAC PHILOSOPHERS

Whatever the finesse with which memory and forgetfulness
may be explained, there must remain some incredulity in the
modern mind. Scientists believe proudly that they can read any
evidence unflinchingly. If the human mind that experienced
catastrophe should not remember consciously, and discourse
liberally and frankly upon it, what then of those tough
intellectuals of ancient times who conducted inquiries
afterwards? Why have they not handed down frank evidence of
catastrophes? The disbelief of the theory of the Love Affair that
was based upon archeological, geological and astronomical
grounds may have changed to acceptance. But what of the
silences of ancient history?

Though certain biases of languages and philosophy that formed
after the catastrophes have already been noted - several addi
tional suggestions may be offered as to why Hesiod, Homer,
Thales, Pythagoras, Plato and other illustrious ancient Greeks
do not frankly tell their curious descendants of the true deeds of
Mars and the Moon.

In the first place, natural disasters and sudden change did
occupy the minds of ancient thinkers (sticking still to the
Greek-speaking area). Homer's Iliad is replete with accounts of
god-enacted and god-caused disaster. In Aristophanes' comedy,
"The Clouds," the gods reprove the Moon for having brought
disasters to the calendar and their cult. Plato begs us to take him
seriously when he relates the story of the destruction of Atlan
tis. (One may infer that there were a great many spoofers of old
myth in Athens.) In The Laws, he asserts that mankind has been
reduced to marginal survivors on numerous occasions owing to
natural disasters.  Conversely, he is angry at the "immorality" of
Homer, which he takes at face value, and in the same dialogue
he proclaims the god-given harmony and regularity of the
heavenly spheres and would punish severely offenders who
claim disasters have come or will come from the skies. Plato's
self-contradictions in respect to catastrophism are serious. They
reveal great doubts in his mind, and what in an ordinary person

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 15: Memory                                      

238

would be called "typical neurotic aggressiveness to resolve the
tensions provoked by his doubts."

In the Epinomis, Plato is again exhibiting his anxieties, in a
form that has not been generally appreciated. As mentioned in
an earlier place, he gave the present Greek names of the planets
for the first time. He offers the lame excuse that the fiery terms
used for the heavenly bodies were so similar because the
Greeks did not know the planets and did not want unfairly to
give names to some but not to others.

Perhaps the whole matter of naming was controversial,
involving as it did ancient psychological associations,
theological theories, and intercultural contacts with Egyptians,
Syrians, and others.

In any event, attention should be called to Plato's statement that
the heavenly bodies are gods without souls. He distinguishes
these from the Olympian gods, whom he dislikes, precisely
because of their reputation for immorality and uncontrollability.
He is, in effect, trying to rid the mundane scene of these gods,
by exiling them in the eternal immutable astral regions. He
would then fix the calendar of festivals to their periods. This
would seem to be a major unconscious philosophical step
towards controlling the gods and paving the way for a lawful
universe. Thus it happened that Plato usurped the Olympian
gods.

Aristotle, over three hundred years after the Love Affair, was
still conscientious, if serene, in his study of the skies: heaven
and the planets are self-moved movers executing perfectly
regular motions; they are substances immune to change and far
more perfect than man. He is nevertheless impelled to write of
planets:

Our forefathers in the most remote ages have handed down
to us, their posterity, a tradition, in the form of a myth, that
these substances are Gods and that the divine encloses the
whole of nature. The rest of the tradition has been added
later in mythical form with a view to the persuasion of the
multitude and to its legal and utilitarian expedience; they
say these Gods are in the form of men or like some of the
other animals, and they say other things consequent on and
similar to these which we have mentioned. But if we were

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 15: Memory                                      

239

to separate the first point from these additions and take it
alone - that they thought the first substances to be Gods, we
must regard this as an inspired utterance, and reflect that,
while probably each art and science has often been
developed as far as possible and has again perished, these
opinions have been preserved until the present, like relics
of the ancient treasure. Only thus, then, is the opinion of
our ancestors and our earliest predecessors clear to us [9].

Moreover, the ancients were habituated to a level of natural
disaster that would astonish moderns. Earthquakes, erupting
volcanoes, and "rushing stars" (meteorites and comets) were
much more common in the era following the settling of heaven.
Earthquakes were ordinary in Rome, for instance, even five
centuries later. The Greeks did not develop a tradition of
geological and astronomical reporting until the scientific period
began, over a century after Homer sang (seventh century).
Herodotus carries remarks about disaster in his Histories (fifth
century); Thucydides, who could describe plagues in acceptable
modern medical style, flourished 250 years after the Love
Affair. He reported no astral phenomena of consequence during
the Peloponnesian Wars.

Third, the number of survivors was small. Many storage and re
trieval systems of memory were blasted or drowned out. If the
many dutiful clerks of Pylos, Mycenae, Knossos, Troy, and
other centers had continued their bureaucracies, the records
might be ample.

Furthermore, astral encounters and an earthly turbulence would
provoke dense or brilliant atmospheric conditions that would
render stable observations rare. Encounters would often be ob
scured and only partly visible in the areas where there would be
potentially competent observers. One would always expect
disputation as to what occurred when the celestial armies
clashed.

The printing press was unknown and only the bark of the
papyrus, clay tablets, stone, and several types of leaf were the
media for the inscription and transmission of messages non
orally. Although more durable than modern books and film,
they lacked the widespread dissemination that can be achieved
with the printed word. Records were always few and a great

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 15: Memory                                      

240

burden was placed upon accurate memorization and repetition
to the young, to an extent quite unappreciated today.

Oral accounts, like writing to be sure, have intrinsic mnemonic
techniques, which, to the discredit of our scientific age, have
not been adequately analyzed, and which lend, therefore, a
greater semblance of error that actually exists in the accounts
told. Personification of events, for example, is a technique of
illiterate memorization, as well as a psychological process that
is pervasive of mental operations in nearly all cultures.

There has been an almost total destruction of records, both from
the time of the catastrophes and later. Only several thousands of
the clay tablets from several locations carrying the language
"Linear B" have been rescued from the ruins of Mycenaean
culture. These tablets, by their paucity and scorched condition
offer mute testimony that a well-administered civilization
became a shambles of fire, destruction and death perhaps in a
few hours, and a few events.

The classical period produced thousands of volumes by
scientists on most subjects. Almost all of these have been lost
owing to carelessness, barbarian depredations, and political and
religious fanaticism [10]. Of 150 known Greek authors of tragic
drama, we have full plays by only three of them and only thirty
three of the 297 creations of these three men remain. From this
ancient treasure would have come a number of plays such as
Seneca's Thyestes, which could only be a pale later replay of
Sophocles' lost Atreus, both concerned with the devastating
commotions of the globe in the period of the Love Affair.

Owing to the rules of memory and forgetting, one should not
expect an elaborate literature of catastrophe to have existed in
scientific form, but the writings of Pythagoras, Eudoxos, Alc
maion, Eratosthenes and many another author would have
established ample foundations for a set of modern sciences that
would admit of catastrophism in their theories.

When the great modern astronomer, Schiaparelli, reconstructed
the planetary theory of Eudoxos (408-355), the colleague of
Plato (427?-347) and Aristotle, he had this to say:

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 15: Memory                                      

241

For Jupiter and Saturn, and to some extent for Mercury
also, the system was capable of giving on the whole a
satisfactory explanation of their motion in longitude, their
stationary points, and their retrograde motions; for Venus it
was unsatisfactory, and it failed altogether in the case of
Mars. The limits of motion in latitude represented by the
various hippopedes were in tolerable agreement with
observed facts, although the periods of the deviations and
their places in the cycle were quite wrong." [11]

We would surmise that Eudoxos' problem arose from an
absence of data concerning the classical and present celestial
order. For the other planets, he may have had access to several
centuries of observations from Egypt or Mesopotamia. For
Venus, and even more for Mars, there may have been fewer
ancient sources and less lengthy series of observations available
to him. These planets, too, in their present motions, are more
difficult to plot than the others. Perhaps the problem of theory
was even more important than the problem of data; he might
have had to disencumber himself of a theory of motions and
cycles that was more adequate for an earlier sky than for a
classical sky.

If this speculation about Eudoxos is tenable, one may dissever
in him the factors of amnesiac relief through abstraction, a lack
of fundamental data from the past and puzzlement owing to
incorrect theory. Eudoxos was striving to order the cleared
skies; he would in any event have found ancient evidence of
erratic skies a nuisance and impediment.

These several reasons why direct scientific observations of
ancient catastrophes have rarely reached us complement the
primary and most striking reason that has already been
discussed: massive instantaneous amnesia in direct proportion
to the pain and horror of disaster, followed by heavy ritualistic,
aggressive, and expressive displacement of the fear and
avoidance involved. Nichomachus of Gerasa and Lucian
agreed; the divine Orpheus was the founder of astronomy and
the inventor of the harp. "The harp, that had seven chords,
discoursed the harmony of the errant spheres." [12]

The "errant spheres;" the disasters; the memory and the forget
ting; the muses; the harp for the sublimation of memory; and
the "holy dreamtime songs" like the Love Affair.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 15: Memory                                      

242

Notes (Chapter 15: The Birth and Death of Memory)

1.      Mireaux, op. cit., p. 429, who acutely perceives that
Hesiod is a "futurist," not a" reactionary," and that his book on
farming and farm life, Works and Days, was a treatise searching
for justice and orderly existence.

2.      Cf. I Velikovsky, Oedipus and Akhnaton (New York:
Doubleday. 1960); Cyrus Gordon, "Oedipus and Akhnaton," II
Pensée, no. 2(1972), p.30: also notes in the same issue. We are
using Velikovsky's revised chronology; John Holbrook, Jr.
interprets this in III Pensee, no. 2(1973). I use term "mnemonic
generation" to denote a sixty-year "memorial generation" in
which the oldest members of a group can convey information to
young children.

3.      Sigmund Freud, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
(1916-7: Eng. trans. 1929), New York: Washington Square
press, 1935), p. 286.

4.      p. 496 of the Kaufman edition.

5.      Ibid., p. 497. Cf. Carl J. Jung, "Approaching the
Unconscious," in Man and His Symbols (New York: Dell, 968),
1-94, for related material on fear, and on memory, pp. 34, 52-3.

6.      1920, published in English, 195-, rev. ed. 1961, New
York: Liveright; Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses(1919),
Stand. Ed:, XVII, 207;

7.      General Introduction, op. cit., p. 291, 287.

8.      Frank W. Lane's book, The Elements Rage (Philadelphia:
Chilton Books, 1965), Can be used as a kind of reference
manual for all that happens when the forces of nature intensify
into their disastrous forms.

9.      Metaphysics (W. D. Ross trans.) Vol. II, L. 1074b.

10.     Cf. H. Bellamy, Moon, Myths and Man (London: Faber
and Faber, 1936), pp.44-7, for details of the destruction of
ancient records.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 15: Memory                                      

243

11.     Quoted in Ross, op. cit., II, P. 390. Cf. Walter Burkert,
Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, trans. by E. L.
Miner (Cambridge Harvard U. Press, 1972), part IV, regarding,
inter alia, Eudoxus' influence on Plato.

12.     Lucian (second century, A. D.), "Astrology," in Works,
Vol. V, A. M. Harmon, trans. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Univ, Press, 1936), p.355. Nichomachus (first century A. D.)
was famous for his mathematical accuracy.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Trauma                                      

244

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE TRANSFIGURATION OF TRAUMA

One thunderstorm does not make a great god, nor does one
volcano. Further, ordinary nature does not make a great god,
neither its abundances nor its famines. The struggles of old
bulls with young bulls over cows do not make a great god. A
great god dwells in heaven, but can be everywhere. A people
will recognize another people's great god as kindred but, too,
the god is often hostile. Every great god emerges out of an
apparently universal disaster in which the skies are involved,
not excepting the great Mother - Earth Goddess, oldest of all,
who cast off from her heaving body the oppressive Heaven,
Uranus.

The gods of the Love Affair are great gods. And to the skeptic
who deplores the deceit, adultery, an generally libertine and
human deportment of these "stars," one might remark: "You
cannot imagine how really badly these gods behaved; it was
inutterably worse... Anyhow, no one is saying that these are
your gods, and we had better not get onto that subject."

The gods of Demodocus opera theater behave as they do to
cover up their real behavior which is infinitely more
destructive, indiscriminate, and punitive. The next problem of
this stage is to show how their more intolerable behavior works
itself out as a bedroom farce. How was the traumatic disaster
transformed?

DREAMWORK

The best available model for the interpretation of a myth is the
dream. As was shown in an early chapter, the staging of the
telling of myth creates a collective Holy Dreamtime. The
audience is prepared to dream, to engage in dreamwork
themselves, and to emerge with a sense of heightened reality.
For reality is the unreality that enable people to compose their

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Trauma                                      

245

anxieties. In The Interpretation of Dreams, his admitted
masterwork [1], Sigmund Freud told how dream functions to
keep one asleep, and one can only stay asleep so long as the
unconscious problems that bother him most are censored and
reworked into a form, which, while often disgusting and
disturbing upon recollection, is nevertheless better than the
unconscious reality.

To discover the latent wish whose fulfillment keeps one asleep
is not always easy, as many a psychiatrist will attest. Homer
tried his hand at it, in an astonishing scientific leap over two
millennia:

It is dark. Odysseus has returned to his palace. He presents
himself to Penelope, his wife, in the disguise of an old beggar
who has some knowledge of her husband, the long-wandering
king of Ithaca. He wins her confidence. Penelope speaks to him
(in disguise as an old beggar):

Let me ask you to interpret a dream of mine which I shall now

describe. I keep a flock of twenty geese in the place. They come

in from the pond to pick up their grain and I delight in watching

them. In my dream I saw a great eagle swoop down from the

hills and break their neck with his crooked beak, killing them

all, There they lay in a heap on the floor while he vanished in

the open sky. I wept and cried aloud, though it was only a

dream, and the Achaean ladies, gathering around me, found me

sobbing my heart out because the eagle had slaughtered my

geese. But the bird came back. He perched on a jutting timber

of the roof, and breaking into human speech he checked my

tears. "Take heart," he said, 'daughter of the noble Icarius. This

is not a dream but a happy reality which you shall see fulfilled.

The geese were your lovers, and I that played the eagle's part

am now your husband, home again and ready to deal out grim

punishment to every man among them.' At this point I awoke. I

looked around me and there I saw the geese in the yard pecking

their grain at the trough in their accustomed place.

"Lady," replied the subtle Odysseus, "nobody could force any

other meaning on this dream; You have learnt from Odysseus

himself how he will translate it into fact. Clearly the suitors are

all of them doomed: There is not one who will get away alive."

[2]

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Trauma                                      

246

The cunning and cautious Odysseus agrees quickly, in an
uncharacteristic way. (Or can one believe that Homer was so
extremely subtle as to make him here super-cunning?)

A psychiatrist does well to avoid counsel where his own private
involvement is deep. Penelope's wish may not have been that
her husband return and the suitors be slain, but quite the
contrary, that her legendary patriarchal husband not return so
that her beautiful geese could continue to play about her and eat
from her board. This latent and ambivalent wish has been
bothering her and making her sleep badly, we hear. Perhaps the
best that the dream could contrive for her was to act out what
she feared, followed by a hysterical awakening; and then came
the half-asleep explanation, with which Odysseus emphatically
agreed [3].

It is perhaps one of the signal achievements of humanity to
have discovered and applied the principles of collective
dreamwork. The sacred conscious dreamers of ancient Phaecia
do stay asleep and it is an amusing dream. They are awakened
gently by the boys leaping into the air after a ball. Odysseus,
one might think, should have been upset by the Love Affair
dream. It would not stretch the imagination to put himself in
Hephaestus' place, long absent, with his wife rumored to be
consorting with various suitors, enjoying his bed as they were
his board. Instead he was "glad at heart, following the Song of
Demodocus." There was fundamentally more at stake in the
dream than his Penelope and possessions.

The reduction of the gods to human terms in the Love Affair
myth under examination is basically a way of coping with them.
It is universal in religion, as annoying as it may be to rational
philosophers. All religion is a dream; the actions here analyzed
are a mere flicker played upon a universal human screen.

Within itself, however, the present myth has an external logic
that most dreams do not possess. Freud speaks of the occasional
reorganization that occurs in dreams so as to reassemble the
transmuted pieces into an acceptable form that fools one with
its facade of "really the way things happen." The myth has been
worked upon consciously. It is not Kafka-esque or Ionescu
esque; it does not double back upon itself like the theater of the

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Trauma                                      

247

absurd. Homer had gone far, but not that far. His myth is classi
cal, "rational," "normal."

His handling of the material gives a clue as to how the Greek
and Western mind will work from then on in transmuting its
unconscious material into its fictional components: "realism,"
romanticism (in the vulgar sense), explicit motivation, clarity of
plot. At least, this has been the leading thrust of western
literature, especially of popular literature, until now.

Freud mentions also the reversal of cause and effect in dreams.
One is uncertain, for example, exactly "how the gods flew."
The astrophysical uncertainty leaves one uncertain whether
such a reversal may have affected the myth. Since destruction
was mutual among the parties, the myth-work could have
enjoyed some leeway in deciding "who did what to whom" and
thereby ease its task.

Other features of dreamwork that Freud analyzed have already
been treated. He says that the dreamer is always present in his
dream, although somewhat apart as a kind of third person, and
our myth contains its dreamers as well, from Athena and
Odysseus, down to the ordinary household retainer crowding at
the periphery of the audience, the ordinary man beset by the
disastrous conduct of the gods.

Freud says, too, that the dreamer commands symbolic language
which he has never been aware of learning. And George
English has neatly stated that "a dream is a tool for rubbing
information against information." So, although the ordinary
Phaeacian was not a master of the ceremonies, he was, as a
community member, entitled to identify himself with the action;
the symbolism of the myth may have meant as much to him or
her as it did to Odysseus, or more.

Freud discovered that when the wakened dreamer recites the
dream, he is prone to deny most vociferously those elements
that are exercising the dreamwork censorship. Everything may
be made clear except that which is most obvious - the purpose
of the dream. What might have been going on in the
unconscious mental operations of the Phaeacian dreamers was
described in the pages on "The Love Affair as the Mask of
Tragedy." But if Odysseus or any Phaeacian were to be

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Trauma                                      

248

questioned about the myth, his most assured remark would be
that it was comedy, not a tragedy; that disaster was not his
concern, that the gods had everything under control and didn't
mean what they were doing anyhow - in short, a total
contradiction of the covert meaning of the myth.

Elsewhere in these pages, other Freudian injunctions as to the
components of dreamwork were considered: the transmutation
of catastrophic symbolism into the symbols of the smithy and
the bedroom; the matching of plot with reality, and reality with
wish; the uncovering of the levels of meaning.

Freud can help on at least one more perplexing point, because it
bedeviled him too. One cannot help but wonder at the sanguine
piling up of levels of different meaning upon single words,
phrases and symbolic deeds; this author must seem like a table
waiter setting upon his arm an alarmingly tall stack of plates.
Freud talks in The Interpretation of Dreams of the genius of
dreamwork.

It is, indeed, not easy to form any conception of the
abundance of the unconscious trains of thought, all striving
to find expression, which are active in our minds. Nor is it
easy to credit the skill shown by the dream-work in always
hitting upon forms of expression that can bear several
meanings; My readers will always be inclined to accuse me
of introducing an unnecessary amount of ingenuity into my
interpretations; but actual experience would teach them
better [4].

Even when the mind is carefully trained to perceive and under
stand by one sign only a single referent, it does so under duress.
For such perception and cognition is not only inhuman; it is
false to "reality." And when freed from the bonds of an
everyday meaning, the mind exhibits an astonishing genius for
combinations and patterns of "unreal reality." Hephaestus'
lameness means all that we have said it means, and perhaps
even more. The movements of the plot of the Love Affair are of
the number and variety of the movements of great bodies in the
sky, a double-tracked reality that scarcely strains the myth
making mind.

Given that Ninevah and Sparta were designed by their rulers to
imitate various celestial archetypes, can one still be amazed that

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Trauma                                      

249

the same archetypes will have been working within the uncon
scious mind to produce many other manifestations, concealed
as well as overt?

Where Freud cannot help one, or rather, where one would not
want his help, given his theories, is in the interpretation of the
larger framework of sexualism and catastrophe. For here, as
mentioned before, Freud, like every other authority except the
rare predecessors of, and those of the circle of, Velikovsky has
not known or been willing to acknowledge the priority of cata
strophes over other drives and behaviors in the creation of
human nature and institutions as found today. Freud may have
postulated an instinct for "ego-survival," but he did not
conceive how catastrophically the ego had been threatened.

SEXUALITY AND DISASTER

The Love Affair is especially appropriate for the analysis of the
causal forces in human history because it seems on its face to
show that sex is so important that even disasters are translated
into sexual terms. This is true only in a quantitative sense;
sexuality is a step down from catastrophe in the mental turmoil
associated with it, and, as such, is a logical deflator of cata
strophic anxiety. The Love Affair, paradoxically, reveals
sexuality to be secondary in the definition of human nature.

At the beginning one must of course grant the obvious: the
Love Affair is saturated with sexuality. It would be difficult to
conceive, furthermore, of any area of behavior that would
provide such a complete analogy to the latent action and at the
same time one that would communicate so readily with the
audience of ancient Greeks. We have already remarked on the
Grecian fascination with the struggle between the sexes.

Sexuality is primeval, familiar, a continuous source of conflict.
It is both marvelous and understandable, surrounded with
mishap, steady, dangerous and humorous. It lends itself to
moods, to sharing and exclusiveness, to love and hate. It is
endlessly diverting and suggestive with respect to ordinary
nature. In its reproductive aspects, it is profoundly meaningful
to short-lived and disease-prone people. But, one should not
forget, sexuality points "downward," to the animal kingdom,
further to the plants. What has sex to do with the astral gods?

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Trauma                                      

250

No. The philosophers are right in their way, Sex is tossed by
man onto the laps of gods. It is an expiative and control
mechanism. "You shall have all we have, and, (cunningly) you
will be controlled by it, too."

One must not go too far afield. This ground should be left for a
later ploughing. One is faced in the Love Affair with a sexuality
thousands of years beyond its first ramifications into human
nature. Here it is necessary only to throw up a barrier against
interpreting the Love Affair as a love affair because sexuality is
deemed to be the fountainhead of myth.

Sexuality can also be a cloak of disaster. It stands here with all
of its traditional and well-developed imagery in place of the
true story. There is reason for its use. Catastrophe can be buried
well beneath sexual imagery; there are enough intimations of
fright, noise, violence, love, hate, strangeness, explosiveness,
conflict and damage in the "primal scene," the "birth trauma,"
the lust to mate, and the competition for mates to inspire the
most profound analogies. Still, they are partial analogies, not
"the whole real thing."

And when the direction of causation is reversed, there is addi
tional reason to believe that the catastrophes of the gods are the
teachers of sexual conduct, as they are the teachers of religion,
of politics, of war, of the arts and crafts. Catastrophe reinforces
sexuality, provides taboos, devises perversions, excites sexual
orgies, and poisons relations between the sexes even while it
exalts them. That the often repeated song of Demodocus must
have taught the audience something about sex, marriage and
justice is quite likely. The "calloused attitude" toward such
affairs may have been Dorian Greek but where did the Dorians
get it from?

The sexual psychoses, which Sigmund Freud and every doctor
from the shaman to the Park Avenue psychiatrist have treated,
are aggravated by the uncontrolled amnesia of disaster and by
many of the transfigured forms of behavior that man invented
to ameliorate the symptoms of disaster. Not having yet
uncovered the source of the infernal angst that crouches ready
to produce psychotic behavior, therapists, whether specialized
in sexually oriented crises, or religiously inspired, or war-peace

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Trauma                                      

251

directed, or of any other inclination - alienation, materialism,
etc. - can go on in endless circles, curing when easing of
symptoms will occur in any event, curing through authority, or
passing along through symptomatic relief a psychosis from one
object-fixation to another [5]. Withal one should not deny that a
skillful cutting of the brain and drugging of the glands may
someday excise the primeval angst; it may be that the stone-age
men of many areas were up to treating a catastrophically
induced psychosis with their frequent resort to trephination of
the skull.

IN ILLO TEMPORE

It is common for persons who have suffered a personal disaster
to have a recurrent dream respecting it. The same dream or one
like it may repeat itself for years, disappear for years, and recur.
Similarly, every known human group has developed in its
prehistoric period various myths that have to be retold and
rituals that have to be repeated. All of them go back to the great
times of destruction and creation, illud tempus, a phrase that
Mircea Eliade finds useful as a pivotal point in his far ranging
studies of comparative religion.

Writing of the activities of archaic man, which would include
Homeric man, he declares that "their meaning, their value, are
not connected with their crude physical datum but with their
property of reproducing a primordial act, of repeating a
mythical example. Nutrition is not a simple physiological
operation; it renews a communion. Marriage and the collective
orgy echo mythical prototypes; they are repeated because they
were consecrated in the beginning (in those days in illo
tempore, ab origine) by gods, ancestors, or heroes." [6]

"We must do as the gods did in the beginning." [7] Time must
be regenerated periodically, in endless cycles; in accord with
the temporal period, many things are renewed: fires are put out
and rekindled, the dead return to visit, the original combats
between gods and devils are reenacted, and orgies
commemorating the destruction of all values are held to precede
the new year. The year in illo tempore ended in a catastrophe of
earth, air, fire, and/or water.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Trauma                                      

252

"In fact, among many primitive people, an essential element of
any cure is the recitation of the cosmogonic myth." Also, it is
recited on the occasions of birth, marriage, and death, indeed
for practically every occasion when a person needs to build up
morale [8].

Yet this same "archaic man" dreads history. He wishes only to
recapitulate his beginnings, the sacred events, not the profane
events that have happened since. He is not simply a
conservative, a traditionalist; he is superconservative, obsessed
with what happened in illo tempore. For there was a dreadful
thing then, beyond all historical measure and until it is
controlled, nothing else is controllable.

With all his acumen and learning, Eliade himself does not pene
trate the iron curtain illius temporis. Something Big Happened!
He writes one work entitled Myth and Reality, but the "reality"
is not what happened; it is the interposed reality of a revisionist
philosopher, not the reality of which the myths speak in
deafening language and blinding imagery. And he entitles
another of his works The Myth of the Eternal Return, but here,
too, he confines himself to providing valuable illumination
from all quarters of the globe on the obsessive need to make the
great leap backwards to the traumatics events, not to the actual
conditions that mankind returns to.

The terror in illo tempore, the fact that "for archaic men, reality
is a function of the imitation of a celestial archetype," the
association of the return with cures that practically scream out,
"If we survived chaos and creation, we can survive anything!"
the fixation upon cycles of disaster and revival and the
incompetency of humanity over millennia to get onto a
longitudinal temporal plane - all of these facts and many more
constitute evidence that unspeakable disaster governs the so
called "archaic mind" and carries through to modernity.

Indeed, one must credit the doctrine of uniformitarianism, and
all of its ramifications in the sciences and philosophy, as being
the first successful counterattack of the human mind against the
fetters that catastrophes imposed upon it. It was largely this
modern doctrine in astronomy, geology, biology, and finally
religion and politics that smoothed out the external cycles,
made the proven details of history important, claimed millions

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Trauma                                      

253

of year for human development, and set up the idea of progress
- all of these being achievements that would have been difficult
without denying the importance of what happened in illo
tempore.

The myth of the Love Affair is not a basic document to
establish the general theory of the first days because it is not a
myth of creation. That it is in direct line with cosmogony may,
however, be asserted. It is a tale told in a newly settled land
under semi-cosmogonic conditions of dream, dance, rhythm,
and verse. The gods struggle; the Moon is renewed.

It is a second-level myth in the last series of catastrophes. Its
relationship with the events in illo tempore is apparent, but it is
of the last days of that time. In the next century and a half, the
first group of uniformitarians will have appeared, with the
colossal nerve to say, with Plato, that "the ruler of the universe
has ordered all things with a view to the excellence and
preservation of the whole." [9]

THE KERNELS OF HISTORY

Millions of words of myth have been born of the human mind
through the ages. Myth is still being created, not only among
the so-called primitive peoples whose numbers are so rapidly
diminishing everywhere, but also in the sophisticated editorial
rooms of giant newspaper and television monopolies and in the
halls of law and bureaucracy. The myth that "the President
works with great energy and command of information" is
comparable to the myth that "Hercules cleared the Augean
Stables." (Amusingly, Hercules was accused of a conflict of
interest for taking pay from two sources for his work.)

This is so if we take, as the superficial rendering of the word,
that myth is a factual narrative whose aim is to some important
degree to stabilize the ever-flowing stream of anxiety of the
organism within itself and in regard to the outer environment. It
is like a dam that commands the flow of water from the rains
and streams above in the interest of the consumers of the water
below. By using common symbols, the system operates on
behalf of a community. As a result, a myth will perform little or
no functions for a person who belongs to another community, to
a different hydraulic control system. One should not be put off,

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Trauma                                      

254

therefore, when a scoffer exclaims, "All these myths do nothing
for me."

The greatest sources of trouble and fear are the greatest and
most enduring sources of myth. The doings of the gods
(nature), supplemented by the dynamics of sexuality and the
competition for the other scarce values of power, respect,
wealth, knowledge and health provide both the anxieties and
the linguistic references used to compose myths. The
combinations and permutations of expression that give rise to
particular myths are infinite, especially when one adds the
universal factors of wish fulfillment, already mentioned, and
functional design, by which different types of myths are to be
used as supplications, expiation, lessons to children, augury,
dramatic entertainment, and so on. Myth is adapted, also to
create the type of person a society's ideology needs.

That millions of words have been composed for such personal
social reasons over 10,000 years, say, is not at all surprising.
and that most myth is untranslatable without knowledge of its
culture, its language, the context in which one myth is
employed, and its typical audience is also understandable.
Which is to say that the problem of the historic message
contained in a myth is to be solved only when these features of
its expression are known.

Afterwards, the historic content of the myth can be approached
directly. In this sense all myth contains history about a group; it
could only come about as a result of experiences, whether one
or many; and its detail contains empirical and linguistic refer
ences. Ares does not "bridle" in a horseless culture, nor does
one smite a rock to get water in swampland. That Achilles is
known by 36 epithets and Odin by fifty names, gives some idea
of the variety of traits of a hero or god in a given culture.

But now to the most difficult problem; the portrayal of an actual
event in a myth, as in the Love Affair. If one has arrived at the
historic message contained in the Love Affair, what is to
prevent him from putting all of Greek myth or any other body
of myth through a historiographical sausage-grinder, emerging
with thousands of little links of Greek history? It is conceivable.
But much is trivia and repetitive. Or the history involved has

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Trauma                                      

255

such vague parameters of time, space and references when
treated as history as to be useless.

Also, a great, if unknown proportions of myth consists of refer
ences to cultures, sub-cultures, priesthoods, temples, occupa
tions, and schools that are lost to history. Their local contexts
are missing. Furthermore, many myths are hopelessly
successful in their function of telling about something while at
the same time concealing it (the opposite of scientific
communication which aims at telling something and only that
something in a special language designed to communicate it
clearly and exactly).

Still, the impression of impenetrable jungle and inescapable
labyrinth that the first sight of the body of myth makes upon
one retreats remarkably upon application of the tools of the
sciences and the virtues of patience and imagination to
particular segments.

Then the questions occur: "Who cares?" and "What resources
are we willing to devote the task?" For most people, and
experts, too, the use of myth is largely that of symbolic poetry:
the mind reacts to it, is startled, pleased, achieves a
phantasmagoria or pandemonium akin to the effects of various
drugs. Enough.

On the other hand, where there exists little of other types of
knowledge of important historical problems, natural or social,
resort to myth analysis is necessary and its techniques will be
continuously improved.  To the degree that such systematic
work is accompanied by an equally alert and extensive
archaeology, considerable advances in a number of sciences
might ensure. As the expert on Babylonian and ancient science,
Otto Neugebauer, once commented to the author in a few
moments of smoking of the peace-pipe between exchanges on
the work of Velikovsky, we could dig up the whole ancient
world with a fraction of the funds of the space program, and
thus find out what it has to say to us. The art treasures to be
excavated would, of course, be also of value.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Trauma                                      

256

Notes (Chapter 16: The Transfiguration of Trauma)

1.       (1900). Vols. IV and V of the Standard Edition (London:
Hogarth press, 1953; New York: Basic Books; Avon Books,
1972.

2.       Lines 531-590, Murray, op, cit.

3.       An alternative reconstruction, more Jungian than
Freudian, is that Penelope was suffering a crisis of Character, in
which the eagle (her stronger, more dictatorial, dogmatic
aspect) was moving bloodily to dispose of the geese (her inner
weakness), and, in the course of the resolution, identifying with
her absent husband. George English, who pointed out this
interpretation to me, thought as well that the transition was a
bloody bridge that often is crossed at the presumed age of
Penelope age of, between 35 and 45.

4.       Page 562, 332 fn., 560, 60, 534 ff.

5.       Cf. Sebastian de Grazia, Errors of Psychotherapy (New
York: Doubleday. 1952).

6.       Myth of the Eternal Return, p.4.

7.       Ibid., p. 21.

8.       Ibid., pp. 66, 68, 73, 82-3.

9.       Plato, The Laws, book X, p. 290, loc. cit.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Sky and Mind                                

257

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

SETTLED SKY AND UNSETTLED MIND

Great myths are the stories of human tragedy on a grand scale.
If mankind no longer exists in an age of myth, it is not because
of a new intelligence or style but because of the lack of terrible
stimulus. Even so, the ages of myth-making have left a legacy
of serious problems. One does relive the ancient terrors; they
have left deep tracks in minds and glands, regularly revived by
a horde of customs and rememorized. Furthermore, man is a
myth-maker and he will always find sufficient personal and
social crises to inspire individual and collective repressions of
memory, though not on the original grand scale.

WHAT HOMER REMEMBERED

Earlier, we decided to place Homer's "publication" of the
Odyssey around 630 B.C., two generations after the end of the
Martian catastrophes. We mentioned in another place that
amnesia can set in abruptly following a grave event and the
sublimation of the troublesome subconscious memory could be
accomplished quickly as well. We alluded to nursery rhymes
based upon atrocious political acts for an example.

Still, the question gnaws at us: "Did Homer really not known of
the disasters of the century before him?"

The catastrophist reaches, all too easily at times, for the "proof
by non-existent proof," which comes close to begging the
question. Thus, physical and biological destruction, if complete,
makes memory non-existent, therefore impossible. Psychic
destruction (total amnesia) also makes proof impossible in the
sense that the remembering mind cannot remember any of the
events one is called upon to remember. Total Psychic
Destruction and/or Total Physical Destruction equals Zero
Proof, hence zero recall of the catastrophic events.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Sky and Mind                                

258

We have advanced in these pages and elsewhere many
conditions approaching the Zero Proof formula, but never has
history been totally obstructed. Therefore Homer must have had
some means of knowing the catastrophic events of two
generations earlier, even in his childhood.

We now can suppose that he did remember terrific destruction
and social turmoil, directly or through his elders. Why would
these memories not enter into his work directly? Why would he
not attach the Greek gods (except Helios, the Sun), to their sky
bodies?

In the first place, he would not dare to or wish to tie the gods
explicitly to their bodies. The gods were much more than the
bodies, much older than the events in which they acted, and
hostile to presumptions (hubris) of humans about them. Homer
and other dramatists might also have agreed to a convention not
to portray the gods in this manner.

On the subconscious level, Homer may have written of the gods
in such a way as to display their natural histories, even knowing
of their history in some part and consciously, without realizing
that he was writing the history of the gods. He could describe
Ares as Ares, actually appreciating that he was doing so, pro
testing (as writers accused of libel or of autobiography
sometimes do), "I am only writing fiction," and furthermore
they will believe it and so will their hearers.

This is no more than happens with children, who, in their play,
will often reenact disagreeable experiences with cruel
attendants or playmates in a comic or brutal scenario with toys,
and, when questioned, will sincerely deny that they were
reenacting the real experiences. I need only mention similar and
well known behavior among persons who are mentally ill. Nor
need I discuss again the technology of dreams, whereby the
dreamer translates the experience into a detailed representation,
which he may promptly forget, or he is unable to retranslate
into real terms, or which he may refuse in either event to accept
as connected with his experience.

We conclude that, behaving typically, Homer could know both
subconsciously and to a degree consciously of a horrendous his
tory, could rewrite the history as poetry, could refuse to make

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Sky and Mind                                

259

explicit connections that would be obviously revealing, and
could deny that his story was historical. "How can you doubt
me," we hear Demodocus and Homer crying, "am I not blind?"
There is no end to the self-deception and deceptiveness of the
schizoid human.

THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE

Scientific theories are metaphors that, when pursued, place their
users into a position of control and prediction. Scientific
theories are also consensuses in as much as they cannot be
communicated or believed, much less worked out and
routinized, unless a number of competent persons accept them
as a basis for conducting operations.

Modern science has made great efforts to put aside, first, the
primitive metaphoric systems such as are found in the myth we
are studying, second, the mystic metaphorism, though much
more agreeable, of Pythagoreanism and Platonism, and, third,
though with great reluctance, the empirical nominalism of
Aristotle and of the Newtonian Laws.

Now it moves uncertainly on a stripped-down linguistic and
mathematical basis, purely operational and denotative, so far as
particular small areas are concerned. Ironically , the bigger the
library and the greater the equipment of a university or research
center, the more likely the scientists in it will be utterly
specialized and isolated from each other's group. Their
metaphors will communicate with the smallest number of
persons.

Then it happens that many chasms are created which no one
dare approach and the bridges over these chasms become and
will remain forever the operational constructions of metaphor.

Pythagoras and his associates, who flourished early in the sixth
century B.C., give us a crucial lesson in the transformation of
"true myth" into "false science". We say that until the 7th
century (687 B.C.), the planets moved erratically from time to
time. This fact was known to "pre-scientific" Greeks. Planos,
the root word, means leading astray, cheating, deceiving; a
wandering, roaming, straying; (metaphorically a wandering of
mind), a madness, in uncertain fits (of disease). (These all from

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Sky and Mind                                

260

Liddell-Scott Greek-English Lexicon.) Wanderer meant as
Odysseus wandered - without knowing what would happen
next. (And, of course, Odysseus, complemented by his mentor,
Athena, is the greatest deceiver, the trickiest of men, "the born
trouble-maker.")

The eminent historian of science, George Sarton, says that
Pythagoras aimed to prove that the planets were not "planets".
He points out that "as their Greek names implied; planaò means
to cause to wander, to mislead; planètès is a wandering, erratic,
misleading body." [1] To Pythagoras, " the planets cannot be
'errant' bodies; they must have circular and uniform movements
of their own.. If one could not but analyze those complicated
motions they would be reduced to uniform circular ones . The
whole of Greek astronomy grew out of that arbitrary
conviction."[2]

We begin to perceive what happened. Even though Sarton sees
the origins of Pythagorean astronomy in an idée fixe - that
heavenly bodies must move regularly and circularly, he
believes that his arbitrary idea had a true result- namely to
"discover" that the planets do have such motions.

Hence, astronomers and public now agree that, as the
contemporary popularizer Asimov puts it, "the Greek
astronomers realized that there must be more than one canopy.
For while the 'fixed' stars moved around the Earth in a body
apparently without changing their relative positions; this was
not true of the Sun, Moon, and five bright starlike objects
(Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn)-in fact, each moved
in a separate path. These seven bodies were called planets (from
a Greek word meaning 'wanderer'..."[3].

So the word "planet" means "wanderer" but wanderer on a path,
a contradiction in terms. Pythagoras asserted their paths to be
regular. We know that they have been so, since then.

Two events have occurred. The first is that the planets, which
were originally named correctly, have stopped acting so as to
deserve their name.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Sky and Mind                                

261

Pythagoras denounced the meaning of the name and postulated
their orderly movement. Modern astronomers accepted his
meaning and introduced their order on top of his order.

Pythagoras indeed was far more anxious than they to reduce the
planets to order. He was obsessively concerned with the
development of all abstractions in accord with fixed formulas.
Not content with abstraction, he founded a secret society to
contain his truths and avert public examination. Propelled by
"the Great Fear," he led the search for absolutes of order, a
search that led Plato less than a century later to propose
imprisonment in a "House of Better Judgement," and even
death for those who would deny the immutability and harmony
of the heavens.

Laplace is regarded as the founder of the science of probability.
Writing two centuries ago, he disposed of the providential hand
that Newton had postulated to set the solar system in orderly
motion and maintain it. Order there was, declared Laplace, but
it may be explained as originating in natural causes and as
preserving itself by regular motions whose disruption was quite
unlikely.

However, he declared, in passages rarely quoted, the probability
of a comet striking the earth in the course of centuries is great
and its result could be devastating if the comet were very large
[4]. Besides, he warned that his own calculations, reinforcing
Newton's conception of regularity in the movements of the
orbs, did not take into account "various causes that can be
ascertained by careful analysis, but which are impossible to
frame within a calculation;" such would be comets, meteors,
and even electric and magnetic forces. "The sky itself, despite
the orderliness of its movements, is not unalterable." So spoke
Laplace.

However, because the heavens have "settled down" in recent
millennia, major displacements and encounters are increasingly
unlikely. The celestial encounters of 2700 years ago may have
been the last for some time to come.

In 1974, Robert W. Bass went beyond this self-critique of
Laplace into a critique of Laplace's famous calculations of
stability for the solar system [5]. Instead of confirming the

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Sky and Mind                                

262

practical immutability of the planetary motions, Bass emerged
in agreement with W.M. Smart's thesis that the theoretical term
of assured reliability of the planetary orbits is in the hundreds or
few thousands of years. The fabric of mathematical "proof" of
the orderly skies has been torn to shreds.

A CLAIM OF SUCCESS

When the lines of the Love Affair were read, of a summer day
on the island of Naxos in July of 1968, the hypothesis of this
book sprang to life. Nowhere, whether in writing or in
conversation, had I come upon a parallel between the song and
external events. Nor, for that matter, had there ever been, to my
knowledge, a predecessor to the story itself in ancient times.
Overtime, the means of providing theory occurred in three
forms, each depending upon a number of theories, techniques
and facts.

One method would be to draw up all parallelisms (and lacks
thereof) between the Love Affair and the celestial disasters that
contemporary quantavolutionists, particularly Velikovsky, had
described as occurring around the time of Homer. This has been
done and a close parallelism discovered.

A second method would be to translate the myth by
psychological and linguistic theories into a set of events that
would most closely adhere to the characters, setting, dynamics
(plot), and language of the myth. This has been done and the set
of events that was most satisfying to the myth was the aforesaid
catastrophic period of encounters among Mars, Earth, Venus
and Moon.

The third method would be to search for the effects of the ev
ents, both upon human behavior and the cosmic bodies
involved. The human avenue led into a stream of effects that
has been accumulating from previous disasters; indications of
collective behavior expected under the circumstances of the
Greek disaster were also found. In the geologic and
astrophysical areas, recent explorations of all three extra
terrestrial bodies, together with revised theories of cataclysmic
changes on earth, tended to confirm the historicity of the Love
Affair. As Isaac Newton would say, "To the same natural
effects we must as far as possible assign the same causes." [6]

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Sky and Mind                                

263

The probability of the theory as a whole being correct is en
hanced by the concordance of the three results of the three
methods. One should remain critical, however because in each
area of method, theories are being developed and employed that
are controversial, and also because in each methodological area,
much less than an "ideal" amount of factual material is
available.

Also this study attempted to do what Laplace avoided doing, to
introduce many factors whose quantification for the purposes of
a calculus of probabilities was impossible. Considering the
confusion of theories and the onrush of incompatible facts in
every related area of knowledge, it may appear to have done
rather well.

From time to time, in the course of research, a question would
return to haunt the author: suppose that an older version of the
Love Affair were to be discovered.

If there were a predecessor to the Love Song of Demodocus, it
would be Homer's work, a work well known to Homer, and/or a
fable known to other contemporary cultures or preceding ones.
Thus far, none has appeared. However, the effects of such a
hypothetical discovery would be considerable. It would
undercut my logical insistence that this particular plot is a
screen for historical events of the early seventh century.

Almost certainly "love triangles" were observed and caused
trouble for millennia before Homer. For that matter, walruses
and apes snorted and grunted their way through similar affairs.
Adultery found itself condemned under laws that were
promulgated before Homeric times; Deuteronomy bans it, and
also Genesis. Depending upon the culture, the emotions evoked
by such triangles might be no less than the outrage of
Hephaestus. The fearfulness of earlier catastrophes may have
helped to build up the emotions. So the preconditions of the
particular plot-the triangle and the emotional charge-were
known and diffused.

In order to nullify the theory, however, the structure of the pre
existing plot would need to be closely parallel, and analogous
gods would need to participate in it.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Sky and Mind                                

264

An Egyptian creation myth, much older than "the Love Affair,"
has a marriage between the Sun (Re) and the Heaven god (Nut,
Roman Uranus) that is disturbed by copulation between Heaven
and Earth (Geb). The Sun forbids Heaven giving birth to
children during the year (360 days), but clever Thoth (Mercury)
gambles with the Moon for Time, wins 1/72 part of the day, and
hands over to Heaven five extra days (365) in which to give
birth, whereupon Heaven bore Osiris (Saturn), Horus (Jupiter),
Set, Isis, and Nephthys (the last three Venus-connected) on 5
successive days. Many events are incorporated here, but the
major characters are from an earlier age and the plot is not
analogous or homologous with the plot of "The Love Affair".

Respecting divine participation in Genesis, God does intervene
against Abimelech to prevent his consummation of a
relationship with Abraham's wife, Sarah, whom he has taken in
god faith and with the consent of Abraham. It is plausible that
other plots of adultery of a historical and fictional character,
involving deities, should have existed.

There is no reason to believe that Homer had written (as Patroni
insists) or knew of an original Opera Ballet of the Love Affair,
parallel to the plot found in the Odyssey, and including the
same gods as characters. The details of the story of the song are
stuck off so firmly that a complete version resounds from
behind the lines. Assuming that Homer or another had
presented the Opera Ballet before, would this fact preclude a
late dating of the underlying historical catastrophe? I think not,
if it is in the same generation, and especially if it were the work
of a younger Homer. Hence, the haunting question can be
answered by a denial: this certain plot probably did not exist
before the celestial events that it represents in disguise took
place.

FROM SAVAGERY TO SUBLIMITY

If it is true that mankind suffers infinitely from the gods, it has
become human because of them. They are in a sense, then,
entitled to do with man what they will. As the old-fashioned
property- owner used to say: "It's my property. I can dispose of
it as I please."

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Sky and Mind                                

265

Many will assert that man would have been better off without
the gods. No. This is a materialistic, mechanical view of human
origins and human nature, more in keeping with tight
suppression of memory and uniformitarian ideology, than with
the lessons of catastrophe. Man was created by catastrophes and
made to some degree what he is by them. This is a point on
which pragmatists, phenomenologists, and idealists may agree.

But - it is more doubtful that the species would have become
human if it had not humanized the gods. It is almost impossible
to conceive that humans would have become humanly
intelligent if they had been physiologically capable of
experiencing the disasters mechanically, "in cold blood". They
could have forgotten the disasters more easily over the
generations. They would not have developed the arts and
sciences. That is, there are few, if any, grounds for believing
that they could have become scientific before they had passed
through a stage of being monstrously human.

If people are able now to become "rational" and view ancient
catastrophes and natural history as truly natural, it is only
because they did not have the capacity for viewing events as
natural in the first place.

The first humanoid who pointed at an active natural force with
a capacity to impress a whole people and said: "There is our
god. He made us and is now sending us a message" - that
humanoid became the first person.

After the dreamtime dance and song of the Love Affair ends,
and the dance of the spheres completes the ceremony, a
peaceful and generous mood pervades the audience. King
Alcinous announces that all the nobles must give fine personal
gifts to Ulysses. This they do: cloaks and tunics and bars of
gold. Euryalus, who has slandered Ulysses, gave the best gift of
all, a gleaming copper sword with a silver belt in an ivory
sheath. All these are heaped before the visitor. A hot bath is
prepared for him and preparations for dinner are made.

I allude to these lines to stress once more the effects of the
dance. The sublimation of unconscious effect has been well
nigh perfect. The ancients who heard these passages would
imagine the full and blissful original scene, the way in which a

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Sky and Mind                                

266

sacred song and dance should ideally be conducted, the effects
upon the participants and audience that should ideally occur.

This no one may deny. All that may be said by way of criticism
is that such is the intent and result of great literature, of music,
of dance, of plastic art, of liturgies, indeed of all constructive
crowd behavior whose aim is social internalization. In the
group, an anxiety is present whose specifications are hidden for
fear of their depressive and disruptive effects. A spell must be
cast; the symptoms will be displaced, discussed and alleviated;
and everyone will feel better afterwards.

Objectively one can appraise the effect; it is good therapy;
people are kinder to each other; possible alternative means of
handling the anxieties are rendered unnecessary. Amidst the
frequent crowd panic and madness of the Iliad and the Odyssey,
of the Bible, of aggressive, ritualized, stupefied, and senseless
self-sacrifice and others sacrifice, the Song of Demodocus in its
context, for all that the gods misbehave, is superior therapy.

It is well that those ancient censors who called the story false
and sacrilegious and would have ripped it out of the Odyssey
did not have their way. This is said, not alone on behalf of
many bored and salacious schoolboys, not even for the sake of
Truth, but for the realization it can bring of how ancient
cultures, no less than primitive and modern ones, strove for
alternatives to the labyrinthine rites, collective murder and
bloody offerings by which societies sought to extirpate the
hidden anxieties of catastrophe.

The present age is fraught with anxiety; still it has not reached
the levels of our ancestral disasters. Up to this moment, the
settled skies have allowed scientists and poets in free countries
to move ever more boldly in exploration of the world within
and the world without. The most radical investigations of nature
and human nature have been permitted. The most radical
experiments in the expressive arts have been tolerated. It is no
longer true that the human mind cannot face, at least
intermittently and "for the record," the evidence of ancient
catastrophes. On this account one may predict that, within a few
years, much more proof than is presently available will be
collected and advanced in favor of the general theory of

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Sky and Mind                                

267

quantavolution and catastrophes and that the theoretical
reconstruction will proceed apace.

When Odysseus is about to complete the slaughter of the
suitor's relatives, Athena gives him pause: enough of bloodshed
[7]. And when Eurycleia caught sight of the slain suitors in the
palace hall, "she was about to cry out in exultation, beholding
so great a deed. But Odysseus restrained her...'Rejoice in your
heart, old woman, and restrain yourself and do not cry aloud. It
is an unholy thing to glory over slain men. These men the
destiny of the gods and their own merciless deeds have
overcome.'" [8]

The Hero resigns. The Moon is in place. The Goddess Athena is
in her heavenly sphere. And Mars in his. Mercy begins once
more.

And 2500 years later, the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, writes:
"Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe,
the more often and the more intensely one's thoughts are drawn
to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within
me "[9].

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 16: Sky and Mind                                

268

Notes (Chapter 17: Settled Sky and Unsettled Mind)

1.      History of Science, V. I, op. cit., p.13.

2.      Ibid.

3.      An Intelligent Man's Guide to Science, p.17.

4.      Stecchini, p. 107.

5.      "Did Worlds Collide," and "Proofs of the Stability of the
Solar System," IV Pensée (1974), 8-20, and 21-6.

6.      Principia, Bk. III, Chap. V.

7.      Even if someone later than Homer wrote these last lines
of the Odyssey (D. Page, op. cit.) and they lack poetic merit,
their moral function is apparent.

8.      Rieu trans., Is. 411-17.

9.      Quoted by Stecchini, op. cit., p. 44.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Appendix                                            

269

APPENDIX

CHARACTERS OF THE BOOK

(Italic-faced ones have a direct part in the plot and action in
THE LOVE AFFAIR)

GODS

Athena (also Athene, Pallas Athene): Greek Goddess of
wisdom, war, and the arts and sciences, "officially" declared to
be the same as the Roman goddess, Minerva; identifiable in her
planetary aspect with the planet Venus. In other cultures, she
carries many names, including Ishtar (Babylonia),
Quetzalcohuatl (Mexico), Lucifer (Rome), Helel (Judea), Aten
(? Egypt), Subari (India). Protector of Odysseus.

Hephaestus (Hephaistos): Husband of Aphrodite. Greek god of
fire and of the crafts and sciences, comparable to many smith
gods, also a solar deity; called Vulcan by the Romans and
probably is Tuchulcha of the Etruscans. Identifiable with
Athena and planet Venus.

Ares: Lover of Aphrodite. Greek god of war, called Mars by the
Romans, Nergal by the Babylonians. Identifiable with the
planet Mars.

Aphrodite: Lover of Ares. Greek goddess of the Moon and of
love. Also, Greeks called the Moon "Selene" and partially
transferred Aphrodite from the Moon to planet Venus and
called the planet Aphrodite; meanwhile, the later Romans
transported the name of the Italian goddess, Venus, to the
Goddess Aphrodite and named the planet Venus. The Roman
"Selene" was "Luna".

Hermes: Messenger god and god of luck. Identified with the
Planet Mercury.

Apollo: God of Far-Distances and music. Personifies detached
Wisdom. May represent a destroyed planet, now the meteoroid
belt. Was later identified with the Sun.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Appendix                                            

270

Zeus: Son of Kronos and called the Father of the Olympian
Gods in Homer. Identifiable with the Planet Jupiter.

Poseidon: God of the Sea, of Earthquakes, and ultimately of the
Earth. Brother of Zeus. Enemy of Odysseus.
Helios (Helius): God of the Sun.

HUMANS

Demodocus (Demodokos): Great singer and harpist of
Phaeacia, who recites the story of The Love Affair, and may be
a self-portrait of Homer.

Odysseus: Hero of Homer's Odyssey. Epic poem of wanderings
after the Trojan War. Known in Western Europe also as
Ulysses. Guest of King Alcinous. His name, in American
vernacular, would be "the born trouble-maker."

Penelope: Wife of Odysseus.

Alcinous (Alkinous): King of Phaeacia.

Nausicaa: Daughter of Alcinous.

Halius: Son of Alcinous. Dancer.

Laodamas: Son of Alcinous . Dancer.

PLACE AND TIME

The ancient Mediterranean and the ancient skies above,
possibly 687 B.C.

Phaeacia: Realm of King Alcinous, probably based on real
places in the Western Mediterranean, but fictionalized by
Homer.

Scheria: The larger land of which Phaeacia formed part.

Troy: Fabled site of the Trojan War, identified by most
archaeologists and classicists on the site of the town of Hisarlik
in Turkey, near the Dardanelles Straits.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Appendix                                            

271

Lemnos: Island in the upper Aegean Sea where the Sintians
lived, favorites of Hephaestus.

========================
End of
The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars

========================

Home