mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== Vine Deloria I'd like to thank Richard Heinberg, the previous speaker, for proving that Western Civilization is composed of schizoid, paranoid, psychopathic killers! (Laughter) That saved me half an hour in my speech right there. Let's accept that premise and then we can talk about the wisdom of the gentle hunter-gathers in peace. I encountered Velikovsky's work shortly after Worlds in Collision and Ages in Chaos came out. I was then a geology students at the Colorado School of Mines and I would spend some class periods looking out the window at the hogback and Flatirons of the Front Range and half-heartedly listen to my professor explaining that these formations had risen a millimeter every thousand or perhaps million years. So I flunked out of the School of Mines in short order. The most convincing argument Velikovsky used was his query about the formation of fossils. From my days as a boy on the Pine Ridge reservation, hunting rabbits and prairie dogs, I knew that animals footprints and bones simply did not lie around waiting for the continent to subside so that gentle inland seas could wash in some silt and clay and preserve the skeletons of rabbits and birds. So I re-read Velikovsky's works quite often. In 1964 I stopped in Princeton and knocked on his front door. I was astounded when he answered it himself. He invited me in and talked briefly with me while his wife served me a cup of tea. I naively offered to help his research not realizing that he knew about a dozen languages and was working on extremely complicated things beyond my comprehension. Then Steve Talbott invited me to the MacMaster conference and I gave a paper on theories of myth interpretation. Velikovsky nodded approvingly and later invited a number of us to his suite where we mostly listened to him explain additional facets of some of his ongoing work. I remember someone whispering to me that his other books, never released, were of a much more spectacular nature. From time to time I have reviewed the way that Velikovsky used Indian traditions to bolster some of his arguments. The Skagit tradition of everyone lifting the poles which supported the sky and crying "Yahoo" was one memorable example. Another was the Pawnee story of Venus and the sacrifice of the maiden. The Pawnees were traditional enemies of my tribe, the Sioux, so we knew that Cosner's portrayal of them as bad guys in Dances With Wolves was really a documentary. But there is much to be gained from their tradition. There were also stories of the Makahs about how the ocean disappeared one day and then four days later a gigantic tidal wave destroyed just about everything. So there is much in the traditions of the Indian tribes that speaks directly to the catastrophic interpretation of earth history. I did find a Chippewa account of the Great Flood. It is a part of a creation story. The Great Spirit tried four times to create the world-three times he failed because there was too much ice-the fourth time, while there was ice, the human beings and animals managed to survive-and they did survive a flood that was caused by the rapid melting of ice. This scenario, however, is more at home with the planetary interactions described by Donald Patten which link the ice Age and the Great Flood than it is with the Venus scenario offered by Velikovsky. So I suppose I am a Velikovskian modified by Patten if I had to identify my present understanding of what might have happened to our planet some time back. Meanwhile, I have subscribed faithfully to Kronos and AEON although I must say I easily get lost in some of the more technical debates and squabbles you have had in recent years. I was informed by Ev Cochrane at lunch that no one follows the original scenario described by Velikovsky anymore, so I feel something like a relic here because I have not seen much convincing evidence, other than Patten, to encourage me to adopt another scenario. The first point I would like to make, therefore, is that it may be satisfying for people to quarrel over minor points of interpretation but it is not much help to lots of interested people to have a rejection of the basic scenario without having something else to put in its place. It seems to me that some of the original points-calendar reform, changes in ground level in Swiss lakes, reversal of star charts in Egyptian tombs-tie us rather tightly to the original scenario. Pulling apart particular parts of the chronology may be necessary to improve the interpretation of the match between Hebrew, Egyptian and Tigris-Euphrates chronologies but if we go too far we simply rip things apart and conclude that there really were no catastrophes of a planetary nature. People investigating Near Eastern records have a great luxury in using written materials so that a good deal of the chronology can be moved around as ideas surface. When you move to traditions that do not have chronologies, you are dealing with anecdotal data that can only be attached to the planet's time- line when the oral tradition description begins to match a much larger scenario that has already been critiqued by astronomers and physicists to determine its possibility. Thus some rather simplistic descriptions of possible, and then probable, planetary-cometary encounters would be extremely helpful. Apart from spectacular phenomena-the earth appearing to stand still-little can be gained from the other traditions on the globe without some reasonably tight analyses that would suggest planetary climatic conditions or unusual events-the volcanism or mountain-building events. Then there are almost insurmountable barriers prohibiting a linkage of American Indian traditions to time-lines of world history whether it is catastrophic or not. One immense barrier is the doctrine of human evolution. Although European anthropologists have mostly surrendered the idea that Neanderthal evolved into Cro-Magnon, American scholars cling to this idea as if it were gospel. No Neanderthal remains have ever been found in North America and consequently this fictional evolutionary link of Neanderthal preceding Cro-Magnon is cited as evidence that American Indians came to this hemisphere late and via the Bering Strait. Yet Leaky and others have demonstrated that Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal were at least contemporaries in many parts of the world. Werner Muller, in his book America he New World or the Old? suggests that the Cro-Magnon originally lived in the northern Canadian area and then migrated to Europe via the Greenland-Iceland stepping stones to invade northern Europe and rout the Neanderthals. Anthropologists who maintain the old theory then set an upper limit of 12,000 years for American Indian occupancy of the continent and reject the many finds that would suggest prolonged human occupancy, some locations returning as much as 250,000 years. This stubborn hewing to doctrinal lines then produces interpretation of human occupation that border on the ludicrous. All indications are that the Folsom Point tool was invented in the middle eastern United States-perhaps Kentucky, Tennessee or Pennsylvania. But many scholars suggest that Paleo-Indians invented the Folsom Point in Siberia and used it to clear out the megafauna who disappeared at the end of the Ice Age. The scenario, of course, requires that the Paleo-Indian hunters cross the Bering Strait, rush to Nashville or Knoxville to invent the new point, then migrate back to Siberia and re-cross the Bering Strait on hunting forays into immense herds of mammoths. The doctrine of evolution thus leads directly to the Bering Strait theory and now, in a bizarre twist, has led to the Big Game Hunters megafauna-cide. It seems quite obvious to us that immense tidal waves of catastrophic nature deposited all kinds of animal skeletons all over the world. Orthodoxy, however, insists that the animals "migrated" across dozens of mythical land bridges in order to leave their fossils on different continents. Thus orthodoxy has innumerable Ice Ages-the mechanics of which they cannot explain- in order to raise and lower sea levels and create land bridges across which they force these poor animal species to migrate. Now they have Paleo-Indian hunters slaughtering millions of animals. The scenario requires that Indians kill mammoths by the thousand in Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas and lug the carcasses to the islands off Siberia and unceremoniously dumped the animals where no one can investigate this nefarious extermination. In order to work with North American oral traditions regarding the changes in the land-some of which may be catastrophic in the planetary sense-it is necessary to begin with concepts that will change or at least modify the rigidly enforced orthodoxy concerning the peopling of the western hemisphere by establishing the earliest possible dates when an identifiable tribe can be located at a specific site. If enough sites can be identified, it may be possible to show such inconsistencies in orthodoxy that we can advocate long- standing occupancy of the continent-perhaps as much as 80,000 years-and effectively demonstrate that Indians were in this hemisphere prior to the onset of glaciation. I speak of course in the orthodox framework although I personally subscribe to Donald Patten's "ice-dump" scenario where we can get the ice deposited within a couple of years of intense cometary fly-bys. Demonstrating that some tribes witnessed the creation of certain geological events establishes one point and then showing that Indians also have memories of megafauna, memories which suggest that they were terrified of these creatures, suggests another point which hopefully will be admitted by orthodox scholars. We would then be in a position to suggest that faunal and floral change was quicker than originally believed and that some geological events occurred in the very recent past and not millions of years ago. There is an immense amount of material available that can be linked to a planetary scenario but first the material must be taken out of the fictional folklore- myth categories are recognized as valid human memories of real planetary events. The Pacific Northwest is the best area in which to work in this initial stage. The tribes in this region have stories about the various mountains, some of the rivers and lakes, and considerable geological work has been done on individual peaks and volcanoes so that the sequence of geological activity has been reasonably established. We can therefore match Indian accounts with scientific accounts and draw conclusions. Crater Lake, for example, erupted around 6500 years ago. The Klamath account and scientific storylines match. But the Klamaths include additional data which cannot be derived from geological versions. According to the Klamaths the eruption occurred simultaneously with an eruption at Mount Shasta and this was preceded by a strange cloud with quickly covered the California peak and must have played a part in its eruption. Moving up the Cascades we come to the Three Sisters which are visible from Eugene just down the road. The Warm Springs Indians say it was once the largest of all Cascade peaks but it erupted rather violently, featuring tidal waves of lava that engulfed many villages. When the smoke cleared only fragmented roots of the peak were seen. Since three were very prominent, the Indians remembered the event by casting it in a story of a chief with three wives and, needless to say, a considerably serious domestic problem. The Indian stories were told to whites around 1850. It was not until the 1920s when Edwin Hodge of the University of Oregon did a report on the Three Sisters are announced that these peaks were remnants of a volcano that must have been another mile in height. Three Sisters is presently dated at 25-27 million years ago, although Hodge in his report suggested that the lava looked so fresh it could have been laid down a few years before. If it was really 2.5-27 million years ago, what ever happen to those gentle giants of erosion, ice, snow and wind that used to reduce rocks to fragments or at least produced signs of weathering. Here we have a pleasant and exciting choice of interpretation. If the Warm Springs people cross the Bering Straits and moved into central Oregon, they must have done it prior to the explosion of mount Multnomah as the location is now called-which would place Cro-Magnon Indians in the western hemisphere very early indeed. They could not have come later or they would not have known the peak was the largest in the Cascades. In the alternative, we should just admit that the Warm Springs Indians invented geological science and had already devised an accurate explanation for the three peaks. I would prefer the first explanation but would not be disappointed if we chose the second reading of the situation. If the Warm Springs people simply made a lucky guess, they should be given charge of the Bureau of the Budget for they have incredible intuition that has not been seen previously on this planet. Stories abound in the Columbia River-Puget Sound area concerning the origin of some of these mountains and rivers. At least four tribes relate that mount Rainier was once on the western side of Puget Sound. He got o feeling crowded because other volcanoes were growing too large so moved over where he is presently located. It so happens that some scientists are now trying to trace out the prehistoric earthquake activity of the Seattle area and have found evidence of many large earthquakes. The Bridge of the Gods in the Columbia river has many stories about it which suggest longstanding occupancy of the area by Indians. Some tribes say there was once a great tunnel under the Cascades and they used to go to the sea in rafts with pitch torches. Then severe volcanic activity at Mount Hood and mount Saint Helens caused massive earth movement and the bridge fell in. Since modern geologists suggest that the scablands flood virtually scoured the Columbia river valley at this point in the river, it would appear that these Indian tales go back prior to the scablands flood. The scablands flood itself is the subject of several Indian traditions. Most intriguing is the Spokane account of the flood. According to these people, Lake Missoula was once so large that it took several days journey to traverse the northern bank. Mount Spokane was an island in the lake and one day intense volcanic activity began. Before long earthquakes started to happen and the lake began to drain rapidly. They called mount Spokane the little mountain that rose out of the water because it seemed to them that the mountain was rising whereas the lake was draining and revealing the mountain. Yakima, Nez Perce and other tribes have stories about the immense flash flood that ravaged their lands further downstream from Spokane, Washington. Orthodox science now suggests that there were as many as 40 floods. An ice arm of a glacier is hypothesized as the agent that periodically dams up the melting water and causes the floods. But intrusion of an ice arm would not be sufficiently water tight to allow much buildup of water. Today we have to go deep into bedrock when we build dams on these rivers. That a chunk of ice, no matter how large, could casually slide into a valley and prove to be so firmly in place as to allow buildup of water thousands of feet deep is simply another orthodoxy fiction made palpable by a lack of critique. Once you leave the Cascades and Columbia plateau, scientific writings get more generalized and Indian traditions become fewer because of the landscape. Not much is published and some stories are still preserved but kept secret by people of the tribe. I have heard many rumors of a Ute account of the lake Bonneville flood but I have not been able to find anyone to tell me about it. The same can be said for the Idaho lava flows and the Shoshones and Bannocks. We don't want to pressure Indian elders to talk about these things if they want to keep them secret but it does substantially hamper research. Stories center on unique geological features-the Devils Tower in Wyoming being a primary example. Since these places were also often used for ceremonial purposes, it is often difficult to separate religious information from what we would call secular knowledge. For example the Acoma and Laguna have stories about a volcanic flow which might be tied to the lava tubes which are to be found between Albuquerque and Gallup, New Mexico. But the story is now incorporated in the traditional stories of these Pueblos and the sequence of natural events has been overshadowed by the new materials which have religious significance. If you stand at the base of the Devils Tower and look up you will observe that about a third of the way down the column the rock looks very weathered, as if it stood out in the elements for quite a while. The lower two-thirds of the formation appears to be virtually untouched by any weathering process. The Kiowa, Sioux, and Cheyenne stories of this feature all involve a bear chasing a group of little girls who are out gathering berries. Only the Cheyenne story seems to deal with the emergence of the volcanic plug to reveal the final two thirds of the formation. Like the Pueblo lava tubes, the Devils Tower has related volcanic features in the near vicinity. It appears that near the town of Sundance the volcanic cones are in sets of two, that is to say, twin cones which resemble each other are to be found. The origin of this evidence of vulcanism is hidden in the religious traditions and involves complicated beliefs which deal with a multiplicity of worlds and locations. Consequently while there is a lot of information about the area, none of it can be used in a geomythological sense to date when the respective tribes might have been resident in the area. Nor can we connect this vulcanism of the northern Plains to any planetary event unless one of you is able to prove planetary vulcanism as a specific event. The Badlands of South Dakota have a story connected to them and it may be extended to include the skeletal remains of the Agate Quarry in northeastern Nebraska which Velikovsky cited as evidence of a planetary catastrophe. The Sioux story involves a massive earthquake, preceded by a tremendously darkened sky and extensive thunderstorms and torrential rains. The location, now a barren but spectacular erosive canyon about 60 miles long, was originally a grassy prairie but suffered complete destruction, in the Sioux version as a result of human conflict. Complete forests were buried in this catastrophe and until very recent times the ground had many columns of smoke rising from it where underground fires were still burning. The contemporary interpretation seems to be that lightning strikes ignited buried lignite deposits and caused the smoke but that hardly seems possible. I would suggest that this formation could be linked to the Exodus disaster since it involves two tribes, the Sioux and the Salish, who were very early inhabitants of the area. The Sioux used to visit the White River which runs through the Badlands in order to instruct their children in tribal history, comparing these columns of smoke to the volcanoes they had seen in the southern reaches of North America. In fact the river is called "White" because of the white smoke, not because of the color of the water. One tradition suggests that Harney Peak in the Black Hills was smoking about a century ago so it is strange that the elders would insist on visiting the Badlands when talking about living in a land of volcanoes. A theme that is not usually associated with American Indians stands out in many of these stories and that is the presence of a larger species of human. Many folklorists have translated this concept as "giant" but I don't use the word because it brings to mind all of the European folklore about giants, maidens and dragons. The Indian words used to describe these people more accurately translate as "the tall ones" and I suspect these are people who were around 7 to 8 feet tall-unusual but not really out of the range of possibility for our species. These tall ones were curious about people our size but most tribes reported that they did some wonderful things. The Sioux stories are quite detailed. The tall ones lived during a time when there was no thunder and so rivers, the ground appeared to be moist, and the tall ones were credited with establishing many new things. Then climatic conditions were changed, this group vanished, and rain started to fall-thunder and lightning became a familiar phenomenon and the Sioux said that the new climate was caused by these people who had gone back to live in the clouds. From this tradition I surmise we are talking about a planet that had few if any mountains, possibly a watery canopy and a generally homogenous temperature-and conceivably a lesser gravitational pull. Some kind of catastrophe occurred which involved considerable rainfall-although the tradition clearly establishes that this is not the flood. The rainfall then carved out the basic the continent and following the catastrophe there was sufficient temperature differential so that thunderstorms could take place. I would use any connection between this scenario and whatever other catastrophists could suggest primarily to date the location of the Sioux and then relate their memories to traditions of other tribes until some kind of network of stories demonstrated a continent-wide occurrence. Beyond that, unless new data was forthcoming, it does not seem possible to take these traditions any farther. Now we are seeing a few younger Indians become interested in connecting tribal traditions to outside bodies of knowledge. I fear that for the most part they will follow orthodox thinking and become apologists for mainstream thought, supporting evolution, the Bering Strait and other fictional enterprises in order to gain favor with establishment science. That is the down side. They may also develop enough respect for their own tribal traditions to give these accounts the respect they deserve. But giving this respect entails accepting not only the secular knowledge of events of both a local and planetary nature but accepting religious traditions which are sometimes intertwined with these accounts of the earth changes. I will briefly discuss some of these things, things I personally believe because I have experienced some of them and have heard about them from people whose reliability is beyond any question in my own mind. These ideas hint at an entirely different universe but one which seems to find great compatibility with Alfred de Grazia's quantavolution concepts. Since there is no particular order in which these ideas need to be discussed, I will simply mention them as they occur to me. First. Many tribes speak of a manifestation of physical forms with the primary importance of these forms being in the content of knowledge they represent. Thus some early accounts say that men and animals could exchange shapes, in doing so they could spend time with each other and spoke the same basic language. Some holy people can still change into animal shapes; others report that they have experienced what it means-physically-to be some other creature. This feeling has occurred most commonly when the people are dancing in honor of a bird or animal. Thus people tell me that in doing an eagle dance they sometimes find themselves in the body of an eagle, high above the dance ground, looking down at their own bodies. As I read de Grazia the life forms are manifested in particular shapes because they represent both a specific content of electrical energy and a determinable form-perhaps the only form that charge of energy can take if it is to be manifested in a physical form compatible with our planet. ( As an aside I find that would be a satisfactory way of explaining whole new sets of animals in strata-we are otherwise condemned to explaining how virtually non-existent species survived obviously planetary disasters and repopulate to provide fossils for the next major geological time period.) Second. Some specific human groups-tribes if you will and certain animals shape a spirit which, if manifested in another dimension, would be a single unity whereas this spirit becomes bifurcated in our physical world. The Sioux say we are really the buffalo in another physical world which has more simplicity of form than our present world. The Salish say they are related in this way to the bluejay, the Apaches the eagle. The animals with whom we are related act often as guardians and warn us of the impending dangers of the physical world. Thus some flood stories concern not particularly an ark or boat but the ability of the people to go underground-or into another world-to escape the disaster and to re-emerge once the crisis has passed. Third. This planet may well have been a frozen drifting bit of cosmic debris for a while-or it could have been attached to a larger planet-perhaps even Saturn since that is the popular planet at this conference-and then have achieved its present orbit in a very early disruption of the solar system. The Hopi do suggest this scenario and the descriptions of early life by some tribes seem to hint in this direction. Whether it was so or not, I do not know, I am simply reporting what people appear to have said about the situation. Fourth. The universe, or perhaps our portion of it, may have been originally matter which expanded rather than energy which either cooled or began to form physical elements through some kind of contraction. The Sioux speak of an original "Rock" who manifests himself by expansion and separation to create the kind of universe we have. The creative deity is always represented by granite rocks here on earth and these rocks while they were used, were never re-shaped because they reminded people of the creation. This language may sound strange and mythical but medicine men did-and still do-continue to use rocks of a certain kind in their ceremonies and healings. I can assure you that they do perform a variety of functions and do their jobs with great efficiency. To conclude, there is a desperate need today-and I suspect there always will be a need-or a temporary, or at least preliminary cosmic scenario to which people can relate their individual investigations and research. It is fine to discuss, even with great heat, various interpretation of different subtopics of the catastrophic scenario of the origin of the solar system, any of the various chronologies of the Near East, and the possible polar configurations which a different arrangement of the solar system might suggest. However we need a general framework from which to work, even if that framework has occasional sidebars, as the O.J. Simpson court has used, in which unresolved interpretations are given equal time and/or space before moving on with the remainder of the scenario. No single scholar can possibly cover the multitude of facts that will be needed to get orthodox scientists to look realistically at catastrophism- although more and more of these people are now entering the field with ad hoc theories to discuss isolated data. Most of us are not skilled researchers as are those of you who compose the core group of Velikovskian scholarship. But in our little way we at least want to follow the lines of development and, if possible contribute something more than journal subscriptions. Perhaps there are some obscure materials that would be useful in putting together the grand scenario-materials that you would not ordinarily encounter. So you need us foot soldiers also-even if we carry blunt or useless weapons. I hope before things get much more complicated that someone will undertake to do an overview of where the general theory of catastrophism has gone in the last half century, what would be a consensus position on the things that we believe have happened in earlier times in our solar system and on our planet, and some suggestions on where we go from here.