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VELIKOVSKY IN AMERICA
_________________________________________________________________

Duane Vorhees

[T]he community and traditions of sciencemaintain it against the
barbarism, the chaos, the infatuation with novelty, and the wishes for
an easy victory over reality constantly assailing it. Science is
maintained by the discipline of apprenticeship. The continuity between
new and old is important to it; that which is new, no matter how well
established as fact or argued as theory, will be rejected if it does
not fit into what is known unless and until connections between them
can be demonstrated. In addition, the acceptance and rejection of
ideas in a realm where skill as well as knowledge is involvedusually
imply consequences of performance. The too facile rejection of an old,
perhaps inconvenient idea, the over enthusiastic espousal of another,
lead inevitably to oversimplification and may lead to practices that
erode the discipline

Marshall Edelson

The issue at hand, I submit, is vigilantism: the judgment of a work of
science according to whether it conforms to the political convictions
of the judges, who are self-appointed. The sentence for scientists
found guilty is to be given a label and to be associated with past
deeds that all decent persons will find repellent.

Edward 0. Wilson

When [stability] collapses, fear takes hold. The Bible recognized this
profound truth: when the law falls, heaven and earth tremble.

Guglielmo Ferrero

American Exodus

O n December 16, 1937, Simon Velikovsky died. Despite the intellectual
gifts and forceful personality his son had displayed on numerous
occasions, Immanuel Velikovsky, already in his early forties, had
accomplished little. That same year, Sigmund Freud began publishing in
serial form what would be his final book, Moses and Monotheism. The
book's central theses were that Moses was not Jewish but Egyptian;
that he did not originate the monotheistic principle that is at the
heart of Judaism but borrowed the concept from the heretical Pharaoh
Akhnaton; and that his followers, a throng of culturally inferior
immigrants, did not even create the distinctive rites and practices of
their religion but merely adapted the forms used by the Midianites of
Arabia to worship their volcano god. Velikovsky first read Freud's
early chapters on this theme in Imago in the summer of 1937 while he
was in Paris for the International Congress of Psychologists, but
apparently he paid them little mind, being absorbed in his
Introgenesis project and his medical career; he was still the only
practicing psychoanalyst in Palestine. Then came his father's death;
abandoning his own projects, Velikovsky resumed his efforts to reify
his father's dream. He was, however, permanently prevented from
bringing it to fruition when his reevaluation of Freud's final vision
took hold of his life.

Under the aegis of the posthumous Simon Velikovsky Foundation,
Velikovsky's first goal was the creation of a Jerusalem Academy
devoted to scientific pursuits. Just as he had earlier hoped to lay an
intellectual foundation for the Hebrew university by establishing an
international Jewish forum, so he hoped a new series of scientific
papers would perform a similar function for the Academy. By April 15,
1938, he had prevailed upon his former patron Chaim Weizmann, and E.
Bergmann, to contribute the initial monograph to Velikovsky's new
Scripta Academica Hierosolymitana. Entitled Polycyclic Aromatic
Hydrocarbons, the paper failed to initiate a Velikovsky Academy. But
it had a far-reaching effect upon Velikovsky's own work: it identified
the fundamental hydrocarbon of the polycyclic aromatic group (which
includes naphthalene) as being formed from cholesterol and similar
substances From this it was only a tiny step for Velikovsky to
conclude that naphtha and manna (a carbohydrate) were twin products of
the Earth's close encounter with the cometary protoplanet Venus.

Just as Velikovsky obtained Weizmann's support for institutionalizing
Simon's old scholarly pursuits, Weizmann apparently revitalized
Velikovsky to resume Simon's old Zionist goals as well. On March 8,
1939, Weizmann thanked Velikovsky for his concern during the
unsuccessful London negotiations of February and March:

I must apologize for having been so long in writing to thank you for
your very kind telegram of encouragement. You can imagine how
overwhelmed I have been lately with urgent work. But I would like to
send you a word of sincere thanks and appreciation for your assurance
of sympathy and support in the crucial hours through which we are now
living. It is only the knowledge that behind us stands the whole force
of Zionism throughout the world that gives us the strength and courage
to continue the struggle.

The hours were indeed crucial. Two months later, despite Zionist
efforts to save German Jewry from the wrath of Adolf Hitler, the
British government issued a White Paper limiting Jewish immigration
into the mandate to only 10,000 a year (plus another possible 25,000
refugees over the next half decade, if the high commissioner is
satisfied that adequate provision for their maintenance is ensured,
thus bringing the potential five-year total up to 75,000. However, any
nondeportable illegal immigrants would be deducted from the yearly
quota). Moreover, in 1944 all further Jewish influx would be suspended
unless the Arabs of Palestine are prepared to acquiesce in it. Despite
the seriousness of the situation, however, Velikovsky's talents were
soon again lost to the cause of Zionist activism.

In the same month that Weizmann wrote to him from London, Velikovsky
was strolling down a Tel Aviv street. By chance, he saw two intriguing
books in a store window, Hitler's Mein Kampf and Freud's recently
completed Moses and Monotheism. After a brief interior debate over
which one to buy, he decided to purchase the Freud volume. The
decision quite literally changed his entire life.

His initial (1937) perusal of Freud's theory on the origins of Judaism
had not aroused him to any particular activity. But his 1939 reading
provoked an immediate reaction. I disagreed with Freud and saw in the
octogenarian a still-unresolved conflict with respect to his Jewish
origin and his own father, Velikovsky recalled in his memoirs. A
psycho-historian would probably claim that this statement by
Velikovsky indicates the projection mechanism at work: it was
Velikovsky, after all, who may have felt guilty for failing to live up
to his late father's ambitions for him, particularly at that time of
great peril for his people. In any event, the immediate effect of the
book was the notion that Akhnaton, rather than being the precursor of
Moses, was actually the prototype of the legendary Oedipus.
Velikovsky, abandoning his other projects, began preparing his
response at once, although it would take him more than twenty years to
find sufficient substantiating evidence to publish his thesis equating
Akhnaton with Oedipus.

Alfred de Grazia, who would one day play Jung to Velikovsky's Freud,
wrote that Velikovsky was angered over the unpardonable disservice
Freud had done to his fellow Jews by depriving them of their great
invention, monotheism. Although de Grazia (probably anachronistically
[Warner Sizemore to Vorhees, March 16, 1987]) claimed that Velikovsky,
like Freud, was already an unbeliever who held religion to be a kind
of neurosis of fear and compulsion, but that Velikovsky (unlike Freud)
thought Judaism a useful Zionist tool: It had little other value but
to claim additional authority for Israel skywards as well as
landwards.

In essence, Freud had based his hypothesis on two lines of reasoning:
psychological/folkloristic and historical/philological; and Velikovsky
saw problems with them both. Freud's psychoanalytic approach to purely
legendary stereotypes was invalid in the case of Moses because Freud
regarded him as a real person; and the argument that Moses was an
Egyptian name, not a Hebrew one, does not prove that Moses was an
Egyptian after all, Sigmund was a German name, not a Hebrew one, but
Freud was no less a Jew for that.

Nevertheless, according to Velikovsky, Freud had his reasons for the
gentile Moses equation. Because of his ambivalence toward his own
heritage, Moses and Monotheism was a projection of Freud's
identification with Moses. During analysis, that which is emphasized
in the early sessions is often meant to mask the unconscious impulses;
so it was no accident that Freud introduced his essay with the words,
to deny a people the man whom it praises as the greatest of its sons
is not a deed to be undertaken lightly.

In Velikovsky's further analysis, Freud's degradation of his
traditions was almost his last testament:

On the eve of his departure from a long life he had to blast the
Hebrew God, demote his prophet, and glorify an Egyptian apostate as
the founder of a great religionat a time when Hitler had already made
known his plan to decimate, even to annihilate, Freud's own race.

Freud was also moved, in Velikovsky's opinion, by an act of
self-abnegation. Freud's insight, bound as it was to the notion of the
Oedipus complex, was incomplete.

But, rather than completing his work in a satisfactory manner, Freud
chose to write Moses and Monotheism instead. Salvaging much of the
book's interior frame, but replacing its entire foundation, Velikovsky
would use Freud's last testament to construct his own testament. He
would, as he came to believe, complete Freud's work on a new basis.
But he was never able to deny Freud's influence or his greatness.
Velikovsky once wrote of his master something that perhaps equally
applied to himself: If Freud is wrong he is wrong as a historian. He
remains, however, in the right as a poet, ruling over his poetry by
virtue of his imagination.

Whatever motives lay behind Velikovsky's actions, his response was
sharp and swift and eventually all-consuming. His uncompleted
Introgenesis (or The Masks of Homosexuality or The Hatred of Nations
it had various working titles) had already been tentatively accepted
for publication. But Velikovsky set the manuscript aside. An
already-prepared second paper in the new Scripta Academica series (
Researches on the Chemical Structure of Proteins and the Action of
Proteinases by Andor Fodor [1939]) was published, but Velikovsky
abandoned further work on his proposed Jerusalem Academy, just as he
halted his newfound Zionist activism and ended his
medico-psychoanalytic practice. None of these projects ever reached
fruition. Instead, in the summer of 1939, he took his family out of
Palestine, the Home Ancestral as he called it in his autobiography, in
order to research his new book Freud and His Heroes, a study of Moses,
Oedipus, and Akhnaton in the light of psychoanalytic theory and
Freud's own dreams. This book also he failed to complete, it being
subsumed by the more grandiose ideas that came out of it.

This period of Velikovsky's life was marked by a strange and
uncharacteristic indecision. His last two nights in Palestine were
sleepless despite his attempts to find serendipitous solace by
randomly opening his Bible. Initially, he had planned to travel to
Trieste for study, but there was no vacancy on the boat. Since he was
already at the Tel Aviv harbor, he booked passage on the only ship
with an open cabin, a ship bound for Haifa. There he transferred to a
ship heading for the United States. But at Cyprus he changed his mind
again, and Jonah-like, disembarked, only to change his mind once more
and cable Paris that he would engage the next available boat to New
York after all. He arrived there on July 26, 1939, aboard the
Mauritania, with money enough to support his family for two years if
necessary. He expected, however, to end his American sojourn within
eight months.

Those eight months were uneventful enough, although Velikovsky kept
busy with his research and, at least marginally, his other projects.
Velikovsky always knew how to make influential contacts. Getting off
the Mauritania, he was greeted by the son-in-law of the great American
anthropologist Franz Boas. Velikovsky soon persuaded Boas and then
Enrico Fermi (and in 1940, Albert Einstein) to agree to participate in
the foundation of his still-planned Jerusalem Academy. He quickly
renewed his acquaintance with old psychoanalytic friends Walter Federn
(the self-designated heir of Freud, the only member of the old guard
to remain in Vienna long enough to see the aged master depart for
safety in England) and Emil Gutheil, the closest collaborator of
Velikovsky's training analyst Wilhelm Stekel. He also met with other
notables such as Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis and judge Morris
Rothenberg, who introduced him to Horace Kallen, one of the founders
of the New School for Social Research (which at about the same time as
Velikovsky's arrival opened its classrooms to another newly-arrived
analyst-migr with pronounced ideas of his own, Wilhelm Reich). Kallen
became one of the few leaders of the American intellectual
establishment to publicly support Velikovsky's activities. In Kallen's
own words, he was one of the tasters mentioned to protect [astronomer
Harlow] Shapley from intellectual poisoning from the fruits of
Velikovsky's labor.

Velikovsky also made some effort to get the Macmillan Company
interested in his book on Introgenesis, as the following pair of
letters attest [errors in original]:

New York, N.Y.

March 10, 1940

The Macmillan Company, Publishers, New York.

Dear Sir:

In answer to your letter of February 29, I like to give here an idea
about my book The Hatred by attaching 1. a short resume of my paper
read at the International psychology Congress, Paris, July 1937, and
by adjoining 2. A chapter about jealousy (the only chapter printed).

The book about the hatred is a new approach to the social psychology
and the psychology of the unconsciousness. It reveals the most
important part which the not unfinished struggle between the masculine
and feminine ingredients of an embryo continues to play in the life
and activities of a single personality and of the collectives. This
idea brings me upon the origin of moral feelings, the source of
religion, the sexual life, the behaviorismus, the hate of nations; a
series of essays illustrate it, and the personalities of Michael
Servetus, Michael Angello, J. J. Rousseaux, Leo Tolstoi and other are
implied.

A chapter is dedicated to the modern warfare; another to Hitler with
quotations from his description of his childhood which brought
together make clear the origin of his ideas.

My Hatred of Nations is, I think, the only one psychological approach
to the problem of war and peace in existence; it opens a better chance
for influencing than the sermon of the peace preachers since ever.

The Presses Universitaire de France (Alcan and Company) wrote to me
before the beginning of the war they agree to print this book. I would
prefer to let it appear in U.S. in English language previously.

March 20, 1940

Dear Dr. Velikovsky:

We appreciate your sending us, with your letter of March 10th, the two
reprints of your work, in order to give us an idea about your proposed
book, The Hatred of Nations.

This company is always interested in new projects, and we have been
glad to go over your material and discuss in our editorial conference
the possibility of such a book fitting in with our future publishing
commitments. Since we can see little chance of finding a place for
your work on our forthcoming schedule, we do not feel we can, in all
fairness, suggest that you forward the complete manuscript to us to
consider.

May we not thank you for thinking of us as possible publishers of your
work? We are returning your reprints, herewith.

Very truly yours, Lois Dwight Cole,

Associate Editor

But mainly Velikovsky spent his days and evenings at the New York
Public Library on 42nd Street, sifting through the al-Amarna letters
and other materials relating to the great monolator Akhnaton, looking
for evidence that the Pharaoh was the prototype of Oedipus, not the
predecessor of Moses. One day there he chanced to meet Herman Ranke,
one of the leading Egyptologists of the time, and entered into a long
discussion with him about his still embryonic ideas. Ranke tried
unsuccessfully to convince Velikovsky that his thesis was not tenable.
This incident is typical; Velikovsky, over the next four decades,
would often confront leading scholars with requests for information or
clarification, gladly using their insights for his own purposes but
rejecting their expert opinions if contrary to his own. He would,
however, generally acknowledge both his debts and his disagreements.

Velikovsky completed his analysis of Freud's dreams by September and
was preparing to send the manuscript to London for Freud's comments
when news arrived that the father of psychoanalysis had died. Because
of the intensive nature of the professional training imparted in those
days, when prospective analysts were induced to virtual self-immersion
in the tenets of The Interpretation of Dreams and other works of the
master, in psychic terms this demise amounted to the death of a second
father. Although this study is not psychoanalytically oriented, it is
relevant to note that a remarkable burst of creativity following the
demise of a powerful parent figure is not an uncommon phenomenon. In
Velikovsky's case, we have seen that the death of his mother led him
to the study of psychological problems, and that of his father to
challenge Freud's auto-anti-Semitism. It may also be significant that
Velikovsky's other, rather disreputable, father figure, Wilhelm
Stekel, committed suicide in London the next year, 1940. Freud's death
preceded and perhaps precipitated Velikovsky's war against modernism
itself.

A BOOK IS BORN

Early in the spring of 1940, having finished his research into Freud's
dreams and still unable to find anything of interest on Moses,
Velikovsky prepared to return home. It was at this time, after his
initial enthusiasm for his project had become perhaps somewhat jaded,
that he resumed his contact with Einstein and sought to find an
American publisher for The Hatred of Nations. Macmillan formally
rejected the manuscript on March 20, but Horace Kallen offered to help
him find a publisher for Freud and His Heroes, which, like the earlier
book, was unfinished. On April 6, a Friday, discouraged and
disheartened, Velikovsky booked passage on an Italian liner that would
take him to Naples. From there he would travel to Rome and then fly
back to Tel Aviv.

While waiting for his travel agent, inexplicably late, to open his
office that morning, Velikovsky decided to retrieve his manuscript
from a Kallen-recommended private publisher, whose office was only a
few doors away. The man had only had the material a few days and
Velikovsky assumed that he had not yet read it.

The publisher was not in his office either, but his wife was. And she
assured Velikovsky that her husband had indeed read the book and was
very interested in it: wouldn't Velikovsky stay in town for a few more
days in order to arrange a contract? At last, somewhat reluctantly,
Velikovsky agreed to postpone his return home for a few days so that
he and Kallen could make the necessary arrangements. He canceled his
bookings, redeposited his money in the bank, and celebrated the
Sabbath the next day in his usual manner.

But when he met with his prospective publisher on Tuesday, the man was
no longer as eager as his wife had intimated. Instead of tendering a
contract right away he advised Velikovsky to first finish the book.
Velikovsky let him keep the manuscript but he never again contacted
him about it; a year later the publisher sent it back to him without
comment.

Within two weeks of the unfruitful meeting with his prospective
publisher Velikovsky became, in his own words, the prisoner of an
idea.

The period of wandering in the American wilderness was nearly over.
Taking the experiences and prejudices of a lifetime and transforming
them into what amounted to a radical new construct of space and time,
he was about to recast his own role from frontier physician into
would-be universal prophet. This reformulation of the mazeway, as
Anthony Wallace calls the prophetic process:

generally seems to depend on a restructuring of elements and
subsystems which have already attained currency in the societyand
which are known tothe prophet or leader. The occasion of their
combination in a form which constitutes an internally consistent
structure, and of their acceptance by the prophet as a guide to
action, is abrupt and dramatic, usually occurring as a moment of
insight, a brief period of realization of relationships and
opportunities. The reformulation also seems normally to occur in its
initial form in the mind of a single individual.

In mid-April, at his fifth-floor apartment at 5 Riverside Drive,
Velikovsky was visited by a European rabbinical scholar named
Gruenbaum. The conversation somehow turned to the hills of coagulated
lava that lay along the Jordan river. Velikovsky pointed out that,
according to Genesis, the Dead Sea had been a plain, the valley of
Siddim, at the time of Abraham. He wondered what sort of geological
catastrophe had transformed it into a lake by the time of the Exodus,
just a few generations later. He also recalled that on his fortieth
birthday, five years earlier, his father had given him a book
suggesting that Mount Sinai had been an active volcano at the time of
the Exodus. Velikovsky realized that perhaps some research along these
lines could shed useful light on the still-amorphous Moses section of
his book.

He began this new line of research immediately, seeking to discover
the age of the Dead Sea. The Encyclopedia Britannica referred him to
Wilfrid Irwin's 1923 study of the lake. Assuming that the Jordan's
composition and rate of flow have remained constant through recent
time, Irwin calculated that the Dead Sea, which has no outlet, would
have acquired its present supply of magnesium in about 50,000 years.
This was far less than the million or so years usually given as the
lake's age. But even so, this date would not fit any sort of Biblical
time frame for either Moses or Abraham. But, Velikovsky hypothesized,
if sodium were taken as the basis of computation and other sources of
accretion were reckoned with, the age of the Dead Seawould be less
than 6,000 or even 5,000 years.

Three hundred years earlier, Edmund Halley had suggested making
longitudinal studies of the saline buildup of the Red Sea in order to
measure the accretion rate and thus determine the age of our planet
this procedure, he was sure, would demonstrate the falsity of James
Usher's 4004 BC date of Creation, derived by computing the lifespans
of Adam and his descendants. Velikovsky, of course, sought to
demonstrate the essential correctness of the Old Testament as a
historical record, hoping that a recent creation of the Dead Sea would
help him in his task. He did not, however, wish to associate the age
of the Dead Sea with the age of the Earth, only with the age of the
Exodus.

Velikovsky's next step, then, was to find Egyptian corroboration of
the Biblical account. The conventional histories all insisted that
Egyptian documents are silent about the Exodus, the central event in
the history of Judaism, and either assumed the Old Testament account
to be a fabrication or tried, on the basis of circumstantial evidence,
to build a case for some tentative Exodus date. None of the proposals,
however, met Velikovsky's requirement: a date that would enable Moses
to precede Akhnaton, thus giving the lie to Freud's betrayal. He
reasoned that an event as crucial as the Exodus could not pass
unnoticed, especially since it was so closely associated with a series
of unusual natural phenomena plagues, darkness, floods, and the like
that led first to the death of the heir to the Egyptian throne and
then to the death of the pharaoh himself and to the destruction of his
army.

At a party given by Paul Federn, Velikovsky discussed the problem with
Federn's Egyptologist son Walter, who suggested that he might find
some clue in a book by Walter's mentor Hermann Junker. At the New York
Public Library the next day, Velikovsky found the book, in which
Junker mentioned an Old Kingdom papyrus written by an Egyptian sage
named Ipuwer, who lamented that the Nile had turned to blood. The
so-called Old Kingdom, the Pyramid Age which according to expert
consensus ended at least half a millennium too early for any link-up
with Moses, seemed an unlikely source of support. But Velikovsky was
determined to pursue the only lead he had. On April 20 or thereabouts,
William C. Hayes at the Metropolitan Museum spent an hour trying to
find further references to Ipuwer, with no success. Left to himself
among the stacks, however, it did not take Velikovsky more than a few
minutes to locate Alan H. Gardiner's 1909 English translation of The
Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage. Upon its perusal, Velikovsky was
convinced that Ipuwer gave an eyewitness account from the Egyptian
perspective of the same events that the Old Testament described as
leading up to the Jews' departure from Egypt.

Comparing the papyrus with the Scriptures, he found no fewer than
sixteen close concordances between them. By extending his comparative
method to include another Old Kingdom Ermitage papyrus, a Ptolemaic
monolith found at al-Arish, and diverse Biblical and rabbinic accounts
of the Exodus, he was able to make an apparently impressive case that
all these sources described the same series of events. If so, then the
Egyptian chronology accepted by virtually all modern authorities for
decades and most other Near Eastern/Mediterranean chronologies that
depend upon it through archeological methods of relative dating are in
serious error. If, on the basis of Velikovsky's research, Ipuwer was
moved up to the End of the Middle Kingdom and the Exodus moved back to
that time from one of the usual New Kingdom choices, and if the
traditional Biblical date of ca. 1500 BC were retained, then either
the Old Testament or the Egyptian chronology was about 500 years out
of step with reality.

For Velikovsky it was an easy choice. He naturally assumed the Jewish
sequence to be correct.

But to make any major shift in one period entailed making numerous
others all along the chronological continuum. And Egypt would not be
the only country affected, since all non-Mesopotamian and
non-Israelite histories, lacking documentary dating systems of their
own, were pegged to the Egyptian time frame.

Within a few days of this discovery Velikovsky was able to draw up the
basic blueprint and even many of the minute details of a chronological
reconstruction extending from the Exodus to the Exile in Babylon.
Every day at the library seemed to bring fresh confirmation of his
scheme. By 1942 or 1943 he had extended his Revised Chronology
backwards to the Noachic Flood and forwards to just after the death of
Alexander the Great, some two millennia of ancient history.

Because of the disruption of synchronism, many figures on the
historical scene are ghosts or halves and doubles. Events are often
duplicates; many battles are shadows; many speeches are echoes; many
treaties are copies; even some empires are phantomsThus the histories
of Assyria, Babylonia, and Media are disrupted and spoiled; the
history of the Hittite Empire is entirely invented; the Greek history
of the Mycenaean period is displaced and that of the pre-Alexander
period is lacerated and Spartan and Athenian warriors, even those with
well-known names, appear once more on the pages of history as archaic
intruders out of the gloom of the past.

[W]e cannot let Ramses III fight with the Persians and keep the hinges
of world history in their former places What a slide, what an
avalanche must accompany such a disclosure: kingdoms must topple,
empires must glide over centuries, descendants and ancestors must
change places. And in addition to all this, how many books must become
obsolete, how many scholarly pursuits must be restarted, how much
inertia must be overcome? It is not merely an avalanche but a complete
overturning of supposedly everlasting massifs.

Not finding at the New York Public Library a German book on
pre-Islamic Arab traditions that he needed, he succeeded in tracing it
to Columbia University. Thereupon he shifted his base of research
operations. In the fall of 1940, to be nearer to Columbia, he moved to
a twelfth-floor apartment at 525 Riverside Drive. His wife Elisheva
began studying sculpture at the university under the direction of
Oronzio Maldarelli; and daughter Shulamith became the only female
graduate student in a class of fifty prospective nuclear physicists.

But one revolution was not enough for Velikovsky. Some six months into
his Ages in Chaos research he began an even more grandiose project, a
radical reconsideration of the nature and history of the entire solar
system.

On October 20, 1940, he was reading the Bible at his new Riverside
Drive home. For the first time he noticed that Joshua 10:11 <=2
FACE="Geneva"> refers to great stones being cast down upon the
Canaanite kings and that Joshua 10:12-13 reports that the leader of
the Israelites caused the sun and moon to stop in the sky. Since the
chronicler of those events could not have known that a huge train of
meteorites could theoretically cause a disturbance in the Earth's
rotation, Velikovsky reasoned that the combination of events was not
poetic fancy. He also realized that if the sun seemed to remain in the
sky over Palestine then there would have been a simultaneous prolonged
twilight in China and an extended night in America.

A cursory library search of Chinese and Mesoamerican legends confirmed
the conditions he sought. But the Mexican accounts rather strangely
connected large-scale periodic natural catastrophes with the planet
Venus. Intrigued, he consulted with Franz Boas. Boas held firmly to
the doctrine that superficially similar tales, customs, artifacts,
etc., often derived from very different conditions and premises and
that the mere occurrence of stories with certain general
characteristics in common is not proof of a mutual origin: proof would
require 1) identical stories of sufficient complexity that their
independent creations would be improbable; and 2) geographical
separation such that any continuous contact would be unlikely.
Velikovsky however, agreeing that identical story elements would
indicate cultural diffusion, pointed out that descriptions of the same
wondrous events described in very different terms would demonstrate
independent accounts of genuinely historical happenings. Despite this
disagreement over basic anthropological assumptions, Boas recommended
experts on early American civilizations that Velikovsky might consult
for further information.

The more Velikovsky read, and the more ancient traditions he
investigated, the more convinced he became that the Earth had
repeatedly suffered widespread destruction and drastic changes in its
climate, geology, life forms, and position in space; that there is
abundant geological evidence for such events; that some of these
catastrophes had occurred since the emergence of Homo sapiens upon the
planet, even well into historical times; that memories of those
cataclysms have been preserved in myths and archives; that these
occurrences are global in nature and may thus be used as chronological
milestones; and that the repressed memories of a world gone mad are
part of the psychic makeup of the human race, a root cause of our
psychoses, wars, institutions, literatures, and religions and a
possible agent of nuclear self-destruction as well.

It is probably no accident, as Martin Sieff has already pointed out,
that Velikovsky developed his catastrophic world-view between April
and October of 1940, the months of seeming Nazi invincibility. In
April the Germans invaded Norway and Denmark, in May they began their
blitzkrieg against Western Europe. The June evacuation of Allied
forces from Dunkirk paralleled the story of the fleeing Israelites at
the Sea of Passage, while Isaiah's description of the Assyrian wars
seemed directly applicable to the summer-long air Battle of Britain.
Through his reconstruction of the past, Velikovsky could wage
sublimated warfare against the defeats of the past and the dangers of
the present. His Hyksos/Amalekites were the Bronze Age Nazis who went
down to defeat at the hands of the first Jewish king. The heroes of
his epic reconstruction were Jewish nationalists who stood for the
physical defense of the physical Jewish people.

In that summer of 1940 <=2 FACE="Geneva">, Velikovsky conceived both
the historical reconstruction of Ages in Chaos and the cosmic drama of
Worlds in Collision. In the former, he could march as the conquistador
of history, righting the wrongs of the past to balance the evils of
the present. In the latter, he could call fire from heaven, just as
Isaiah had done, in judgment of the past, to dwarf the terrors of the
present.

BEFORE WORLDS COLLIDE

For decades, from even before his public humiliation at the hands of
Macmillan and the astronomers, until his final years, Velikovsky would
be a prophet without much of a following, a seer with few disciples.
His prophetic spirit was an intellectual one, not one which claimed
divine revelation as its source. In the early days of his research,
and long after his name became associated with quackery and crankism,
he sought out expert advice as well as professional support. Dr.
Schwartz of the New York Public Library Oriental Department discussed
parts of Velikovsky's theories with him and advised him not to try to
write in English; Velikovsky admitted that his English was ferocious
(atrocious?), but he was determined to present his vision to the
Americans in an idiom they could comprehend. Ralph Marcus, a Columbia
translator of the Jewish historian Josephus, more pointedly advised
Velikovsky to quit history and stick to psychology. On the other hand,
Jericho excavator John Garstang read an early draft of the first
chapter of Ages in Chaos and accepted Velikovsky's conclusions
regarding a common origin for Egyptian and Jewish accounts of the
plagues. Occasional queries were also answered by notables such as
Cyrus H. Gordon (who publicly supported the Akhnaton-Oedipus
identification, and whose Helleno-Semitic comparative studies
Velikovsky once took credit for inspiring [Rosen to Vorhees, 11 Sept.
1988]). In February, 1941, Velikovsky finally confided in Walter
Federn. Federn was long skeptical about Velikovsky's reconstruction it
took him over six years even to concede that conventional chronology
was not built on unshakable foundations but over the next fifteen
years he answered hundreds of Velikovsky's inquisitive letters
regarding bibliographic or philological matters.

Sometimes Velikovsky's pursuit of confirmation went to embarrassing
extremes. Shortly before Worlds in Collision was published, he wrote
for advice to cosmogonist Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker, who had
suggested that turbulence could resolve some of the difficulties
inherent in the Kant-Laplace nebular hypothesis. Weizsaecker, familiar
with Velikovsky's ideas as presented in a recent issue of Harper's,
was not eager to correspond with him. But when the physicist was at
Columbia to address the American Physical Society in February, 1950,
Velikovsky called him, and they agreed to meet at Pennsylvania Station
before Weizsaecker left for Harvard. The two men rode together to
Grand Central Station and even as far as New Haven, Connecticut.
According to Weizsaecker, Velikovsky forced me to talk with him during
several hours. Despite his calculations on the strength necessary for
a magnetic field to halt the Earth's rotation, Weizsaecker was unable
to convince Velikovsky that his views were erroneous. Not much later I
received from him a cheque of $25 which I returned. Then Velikovsky
resumed his conversations with Columbia physicist Lloyd Motz; at whose
urging Velikovsky reluctantly scrapped the concluding chapter of his
book (outlining, in a nonquantitative way, his disagreements with
Newtonian celestial mechanics) in favor of a few sentences in an
epilogue.

In March, 1942, with the help of his Columbia physics department
graduate student daughter, Velikovsky had worked out his
electromagnetic alternative to gravitation. In the summer of 1942,
Velikovsky sent two early chapters of A Chimerical Millennium (his
original title for Ages in Chaos) to Harry A. Wolfson at Harvard, who
passed them on to the curator of the university's Semitic Museum,
Robert H. Pfeiffer. Encouraged by Pfeiffer's response, Velikovsky soon
began sending him new chapters as he wrote them. On August 22, 1942,
Pfeiffer wrote the budding prophet:

I am delighted to hear that you have made some progress in the plans
for the publication of your revolutionary reconstruction on ancient
history and chronology. I sincerely hope that some University Press or
reputable publisher will accept your manuscript for publication. I
regard your work provocative as it is of fundamental importance,
whether its conclusions are accepted by competent scholars or whether
it forces them to a far-reaching reconsideration of the accepted
ancient chronology.

In late November, 1942, while in Washington, D.C., to discuss
astronomical problems with F. R. Moulton, Velikovsky tried and failed
to persuade the National Academy to accept for safekeeping a badly
written manuscript summarizing his findings. Returning to New York, on
December 11, he had the manuscript notarized and then instructed the
clerk of courts to authenticate the notary's signature.