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    *Cultural Amnesia*


        The Submergence of Terrifying Events in the Racial Memory and
        their Later Emergence


I thank you Dr. Holmes for the introduction. My comments tonight consist
of informal remarks on material that I cover in a systematic fashion in
the book that I am writing. This book. /Mankind in Amnesia,/ elaborates
upon new aspects that follow from my other published works.^1 <#1>

*Catastrophes*

In /Worlds in Collision/ I describe two series of catastrophic events:
The first took place in the middle of the second millennium before the
present era, the second in the eighth century before the present era.
The last of these catastrophic events occurred on 23 March -686.^2 <#2>
Fortunately, men were not illiterate at the time of these catastrophes.

One of the first clues as to what had happened I discovered in a book
written over one hundred years ago, by a French missionary who worked in
Canada, but who wrote about Mexico, C.E. Brasseur de Bourbourg.^3 <#3>
He wrote several books on the subject of ancient Mexican beliefs and
ancient Mexican history. He also wrote a small book investigating
possible connections between Egyptian and Mexican beliefs.

When I read Brasseur?s books on the ancient history of Mexico I found it
strange that he, being a clergyman, did not observe, or did not dare to
report that in the Scriptures many pages deal with the very same events
he was describing. He reported that cataclysmic events had been found in
Mexican lore, events also described by several Spanish historians of the
sixteenth century. These were events of great violence. Mountains rose
and moved; many volcanoes erupted from the North-Pacific Coast of North
America all the way to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South
America. The ocean rose like a wall and moved, accompanied by terrific
winds. Fiery bodies were seen fighting in the sky. Stones descended from
above, followed by rains of naphtha. Men were maddened by the din and
the paramount danger. Houses collapsed and were carried away, hurricanes
tore out great trees of whole forests with their roots. If such a great
catastrophe occurred today, what impression would it leave in the survivors?

The catastrophe of the second millennium has been remembered on very
many pages of the Biblical Prophets and the Psalms. Our whole life is
pervaded by influences originating in these and other catastrophic
events that took place in earlier ages. The catastrophes survive in the
liturgy still used today, only we choose not to examine them as such.
Whatever area of life we select to explore we find some vestige of the
terrifying events of the past. The calendar is a good example, either
the Jewish calendar or the Christian calendar or that of any other
creed. Throughout the year the holidays are reflections of catastrophic
events. The midwinter holiday celebrated as either Christmas or
Hanukkah, the Week of Light, is a renewal of the Roman Saturnalia. If
you read about the Roman Saturnalia you recognize immediately almost all
of the rites of Hanukkah or Christmas, now celebrated at the end of
December. They commemorate events of the days when the planet Saturn
exploded into a nova, long before the events that I describe in /Worlds
in Collision./ Seven days before the Universal Deluge began, the solar
system became illuminated as brilliantly as if by a hundred suns. In the
Deluge, not only the Earth but other planets of the solar system were
engulfed. Nature was wanton: the destruction was great. Mars, Mercury,
and the Moon, as the space pictures now reveal, became flying
cemeteries. Nothing living remained, although probably there was once
life on those planets ? its destruction was complete. In comparison, the
Earth fared well and thus mankind could call itself the ?Chosen People?
: not because all men survived, not because there was no destruction; in
fact there was decimation, even extinction of whole genera, and massive
mutations, caused mainly by cosmic rays and X-rays emitted by Saturn.
Subsequent to the Deluge an environment was created on Earth in which
life could not only exist, but could flourish, with an abundance of
water, a change of climate with changed seasons, with a magnetosphere
now giving protection from cosmic rays and an ionosphere giving
protection from ultraviolet rays. The new orbit the Earth circled was
not too close to the Sun, not too far from it, a climate unlike that of
Mars (too cold) or Venus (too hot).

The Universal Deluge was not the first catastrophe to decimate life on
our Earth: other calamities preceded it. Dim memories from these more
ancient times survive in mythology. Before the age of Kronos (Saturn?s
?Golden Age?) there was the age of Ouranos.^ <#3> ^4 <#4> Egyptian myths
of great antiquity relate stories of battles and changes in the sky and
of vast destruction on Earth, changes that we neglect to investigate and
know in our desire to believe that we live on a planet that is stable
and safe.

*Amnesia*

The phenomenon of racial amnesia occupied Freud?s mind in the last
decades of his life, in fact it became his obsession.

Initially Freud claimed that the impressions made upon a child?s mind
dictate the child?s future and cause also neuroses in juvenile and adult
life. Later Freud reversed his thesis and claimed that man?s destiny is
triggered by images which exist within the racial memory, deep within
the unconscious mind.

From psychoanalytic studies we know that a traumatic experience, either
of a physical or psychological nature, leaves a strong vestige deep
within the human soul. Such vestiges are in the heritage that comes to
us from antiquity. They are found in most of the written documents that
survive from the civilizations of the past; from Mexico, China, Iceland,
Iran, India, Sumeria, Rome, Greece, Egypt, and ) idea. They also survive
from traditions carried from generation to generation, by word of mouth,
in races that do not know how to write. These latter traditions
eventually are written down by anthropologists, who collect together
stories of catastrophes from north and south, from west and east, from
Lapland and the South Sea Islands. We ask why we do not recognize this
evidence the vestiges of which exist within the souls of men. The answer
is that because these vestiges are buried so deeply we are unable to see
the evidence before us.

The story is repeated in the records of the stones and bones uncovered
at every latitude and longitude.

Chief Mountain^5 <#5> that you can see from here, was once overturned.
The fossils that belong near Chief Mountain?s summit are found at its
base. The Matterhorn in the Alps has been moved to its present location
northward from Lombardy and overturned. In several different places in
the Bible you can find verses describing mountains moving or overthrown.
Such biblical verses appeared even to fundamentalists as metaphoric
expressions. Today many theologians prefer to regard the Old Testament
as a book of poetry rather than what it seemingly is. The inability to
see evidence which is clearly written down and evidence so clearly
presented by nature is a psychological phenomenon. Because the evidence
was so clear, it was not necessary for me to look far to find it. When I
started to collect the material for /Worlds in Collision/ it was not the
scarcity of material but its abundance that was my impediment. I was
able to use but a small fraction of what exists in the surviving literature.

Amnesia is one of the defense reactions of man. Those who immediately
survived did not necessarily become victims of amnesia, though this may
have occurred. We know the effects of battle-shock on soldiers. It is
likely that the larger amnesia took some time to develop.

In the older Greek authors, the Pythagoreans and the Stoics, you find
definite statements indicating that catastrophes which occurred in the
history of the human race and in the history of our Earth were not
abnormal events, they were actually dominant, repeating themselves again
and again. But from the historical records we see that the knowledge of
the catastrophes disappeared slowly into oblivion.

Plato described cataclysms in several works; he wrote about worlds
destroyed and rebuilt. In his Timaeus he noted that the Greeks do not
remember ancient catastrophes, besides the Deluge. He adds that the
people of his time, as the priests of Sais told Solon, were unable to
remember these catastrophic events. In another work, whose authorship is
probably wrongly ascribed to Plato, he is presented as believing in a
peaceful universe. Plato?s pupil Aristotle refused to believe in
catastrophes. The scholarly world has accepted Aristotle?s view that the
planets can never change their motions. He, more than anyone else is
responsible for the continuing belief that we live in a safe world, on a
planet to which nothing like collisions can happen. Aristotle argued
that those who believe in celestial catastrophes should be brought to
trial, and if convicted, punished by death.

In the first century before the present era Lucretius knows of, and
writes about these catastrophes and their terror. Cicero, like
Aristotle, denies the possibility of the planets changing their orbits
and advocates that people believing this should be brought to court and
severely punished.

*Armageddon*

At the beginning of the Christian era, or in the century before it,
mankind awaited another catastrophe. This catastrophe was expected
because seven hundred years had separated the last series of upheavals
of the eighth-seventh centuries from the one of the fifteenth century.
This expectation created an eschatological literature and the appearance
of Messiahs. The Book of Revelation is one of the great books of this
eschatological literature. The end of the world is painted with the
experience of the past serving as a model.

Look at Michelangelo?s /The Last Judgement./ Sadism is as predominant as
masochism in this Christian description of the events of the Last Day.
The catastrophe, the Last Day, has now been transferred into the sky,
into heaven, but not an astronomical heaven; these are different
heavens. In reality Michelangelo is painting events already described by
the prophets Isaiah, Joel, Amos, and Micah, who lived during the
catastrophes of the seventh and eighth centuries before the present era.

Because of man?s aversion to knowing his past, science has been greatly
retarded, pretending unreality to be as truth. This explains the fury of
the opposition that declared war on my book. /Worlds in Collision./ If
the book were fantasy, would it not have had its season and died down?
It has not died down. It survives. But scientists have not investigated
my claims nor tested the evidence presented, nor have they searched for
new evidence. Instead, scientists have chosen to oppose me and my book
in most ingenious ways, substituting name-calling and mockery for
discussing and testing. Scientists are followers of a cult, defending
dogmas with which they do not wish to part. Scientists have proclaimed
these dogmas to be established laws, when in reality they are nothing
but views, and erroneous ones at that.

In my book /Worlds in Collision/ there are footnotes which allow the
reader to check the sources of my claims. In twenty-four years those
scholars who have taken time to check my sources have found that my
quotations have not been taken out of context. But, of course, I do not
claim infallibility. Establishment scientists, despite their proclaimed
idealism, deserve to be labeled pseudo-scientists. In science, claims
are accompanied by proof; in pseudo-science proof is omitted and any
discussion that questions the dogma is suppressed. In the discoveries of
the Space Age there is now an independent proof of the claims made in
/Worlds in Collision/ and /Earth in Upheaval./ The Moon, and Mars, and
Mercury, and also other planetary bodies went through paroxysms.

The subconscious desire of man to know his past was the basis of
progress which led to the development of science. The aversion to
accepting the truth about the past inevitably blocks the road.
Scientific efforts are directed away from the right channels, and so
science briefly progresses, and then regresses. For a full hundred years
Darwin not only advanced, but also retarded the development of science.
My work has also produced both a positive and a negative effect. Claims
have been maintained that would not have been maintained if the
scientists had not felt obliged to contradict the iconoclastic views
expressed in /Earth in Upheaval/ and /Worlds in Collision./

*Suppression and Regression*

In postulating that the Earth was a planet travelling around the Sun,
Aristarchus was the precursor of Copernicus. Copernicus realized this,
because in the original preface to /De Revolutionibus/^6 <#6> / he/
referred to Aristarchus, but removed the reference before the book was
published in the year of his death. Between these men are seventeen
centuries yet both were opposed by the scientific minds of their day.
Mankind has the need to live in an unreal world. Men did not wish to
believe that their planet travels through space. A moving planet might
not be safe, it could collide with something. The thought that the Earth
could collide is by itself traumatic.

No ancient scientist is considered greater than Archimedes. Archimedes
was irreverent toward his senior contemporary, Aristarchus, for
believing that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Archimedes won, and
after the time of Ptolemy (second century of the current era) the
victory was complete. Science accepted this untruth, not just for
centuries, but for more than a millennium.

Despite the fact that Aristotle did not profess beliefs which in any way
resembled the beliefs of Christianity, a strange symbiosis developed
between the writings of Aristotle and the Bible. Aristotle was the
authority that dominated Christian thinking for many centuries.
Copernicus? theory was rejected, not because of the Bible, but because
of Aristotle.

In this century there was great opposition when I proposed that the
Earth had nearly collided with other planets. Science, too, is torn
between the desire to know and the aversion to knowing. But my
revelation was really just a rediscovery, the evidence was always there.
I did not read any hidden texts, the words were clearly written, they
were shouting at me from all book shelves.

The Darwinian Revolution was also a regression. Disturbing evidence was
ignored; it was as if he worked with closed eyes. Darwin proposed that
only the fittest survive. He believed that, through competition alone,
the first unicellular bodies could evolve into more complex life forms,
as different as man, worm, and bird. Darwin did not know about mutations.

His notebooks from the only field trip he ever undertook contain
descriptions of cataclysmic disruptions. He wrote that nothing less than
the shaking of the entire frame of the Earth could result in the mass
annihilation of life forms that he observed. On the continental scale he
observed that life forms, large and small, were extinguished or
decimated from Tierra del Fuego to the Bering Strait. Darwin did not
accept the implications of the evidence that he saw with his own eyes.

The Darwinian Revolution was the rebirth of Aristotle, whose ideas had
lost ground, if not at the time of the Renaissance, then in the Age of
Enlightenment. Even in the Age of Enlightenment men espoused ideas of a
peaceful earth. Jean Jacques Rousseau believed that there was a happy
beginning to the human race and that because of man?s sinfulness, he has
become what he is today. That paradise existed in the past is another dream.

In the days of Rousseau and Voltaire there lived in France a man whose
name is probably not familiar to most of you. He was an engineer named
Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger. He wrote an article on the Deluge for the
great French /Encyclopédie,/ published by d?Alembert and Diderot.
Boulanger also wrote /l?Antiquité devoilé par ses usages,/ a work in
several volumes. Voltaire and Rousseau and other great names pale in my
eyes before Nicolas Boulanger. At my request. Dr. Mullen^7 <#7> was kind
enough to bring two of these volumes from the Princeton University
Library. I have displayed them on the floor as material evidence of
Boulanger?s work.

I discovered Boulanger rather late in my research. First I read about
him in Stecchini?s paper in the September 1963 issue of the /American
Behavioral Scientist?./^ <#7> ^8 <#8> Although I still have to study
Boulanger?s work carefully, his findings surprise me greatly. I realized
that he was the precursor of Freud, and in many respects of myself. I do
not know what led Boulanger to his discovery. He writes mostly of the
Deluge, but not only does he realize that there were catastrophes, he
draws some conclusions about the mental effects they caused.

The recognition of past cataclysms opens new vistas in all fields of
inquiry, even in morals and ethics. I wish to draw your attention to a
book by Pitirim Sorokin^ <#8> ^9 <#9> in which he discussed calamities
like world wars and famine. He discovered that two reactions occur. One
reaction is to help (a humanitarian reaction), and the other reaction is
to harm (a destructive reaction); he saw evidence for this in the
excesses of the Russian Revolution. Sorokin?s idea of dichotomy is
illustrated on the one hand by the way the escapees from Egypt
interpreted the noises caused by the folding and twisting of strata,
noises of the screeching Earth described also by Hesiod ? the Israelites
heard in them a voice giving ethical commands.

Elsewhere on the tortured Earth, other races responded differently:
compare Olympus to Sinai. The Homeric scandals on Olympus occurred at
the time of the cataclysms; this was the other reaction. Another example
comes from Heraclitus^10 <#10> , who compared the different descriptions
of the Pantheon by Plato and by Homer. We see then, past and present,
both reactions to calamity.

*Planet Gods*

The inability to accept the catastrophic past is the source of man?s
aggression. Astronomy preoccupied all ancient peoples ? in Mexico, in
Babylonia, and elsewhere. It was the dominant occupation of the sages.
The ancients watched the planetary bodies because they were afraid that
another disaster would occur. Astrology has its beginning in the deeds
of the planets. Many of the liturgies since antiquity are echoing in
catastrophic events. Around the world peoples of all faiths worshipped
astral bodies. Great temples were erected to the planetary deities. The
Parthenon was built to honour Athene. In Athens, a few columns of the
temple to Zeus are still standing. Temples were erected to Jupiter in
Baalbek, and to Amon (Jupiter) in Kamak. The worship and sacrifices to
the various deities of the past have the same genesis, as do the
establishment of priesthoods and priestly rituals, many of which are
still used. Even in the Christian era, temple architecture has
memorialized these events. The Gothic buildings of the Middle Ages refer
to unconscious catastrophic memories and to lingering mnemes of
terrifying apparitions exemplified by the dreadful figures of Notre
Dame. The greatest feat of engineering of the past, the great pyramids
of Egypt, were royal shelters against possible repetition of
catastrophic events.

In his /Despotisme orientate,/ Boulanger discusses those ancient kings
and tyrants who behaved as if they wished to be regarded as earthly
equivalents of the planetary gods. Only rarely did they desire to be
called sun gods because the Sun was never the supreme deity. Today, we
find this strange because we do not recognize the catastrophic history
of our Solar System. Macrobius, a Latin author of the fourth century
identified Jupiter of mythology and of religion as the Sun. Modern
authors do the same thing when they say that Amon was the Sun, or Nergal
was the Sun; they were not. Around the world mythology and folklore
testify that some ancient terror underlies the origin of many social
institutions. The sacred prostitution of the past became the secular
prostitution of today. Warfare has its origin in the same terror. As the
ancient Assyrian kings went to war they compared the destructiveness of
their acts to the devastations caused by the astral deities at the time
of upheavals. In creating symbols, men were depicting battles in the
sky; the Mogen David of ancient Israel or even of Israel of today, the
five-pointed star of Communist Russia and China, and of the US Armed
Forces are emblems of Athene-Pallas. The dragon, be it Chinese, Assyrian
or Mexican, or the dragon fighting with St. George or with Michael the
archangel originates from the apparition first seen on the celestial
screen in the days of the Passage of the Sea. All Mayan, Olmec and
Toltec monuments and temples are constructed to Quetzalcohuatl, the
planet Venus and other planetary bodies which superseded in their
dominance one another in planetary ages. Quetzalcohuatl is omnipresent
in Yucatan, a winged serpent or dragon, exhaling burning water or naphtha.

*War*

The after-effects of what took place millennia ago do not lose their
grip on the human race. If anything, the trend continues and
accelerates. Wars made by irrational nations led by irrational
governments have been recurring since the time of the Assyrian kings,
and have been growing in scale as preparations for war continue. In the
last century the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov recognized that
almost all technology for peaceful uses had firstly originated and
developed to serve destruction. The awarding of the Nobel Peace prizes
has been of no help in preventing military conflicts.

Freud exchanged with Einstein famous letters on the subject of ?Why
War?? ? but he resigned to the unavoidability of human carnages. Due to
the persistent urge for destruction in man, already early in the
development of his theory he realized that traumatic experiences,
whether of physical or psychological nature, cause amnesia in the
individual; and further, as years passed, he realized that the victim of
traumatic experience, whether still on his conscious mind, or submerged
in oblivion, urges the victim to live once more through the traumatic
experience, and sometimes, more often than not, making somebody else the
victim. But Freud thought that man was reliving the regularly-repeated
drama of the murder of the father by his grown-up sons which occurred in
the caves of the Stone Age. Freud believed that an indelible vestige of
this prehistoric trauma lurks deep within the human mind, and as years
passed he came to the thought that possessed all his thinking. Racial
memory of some traumatic experiences dominates man and society to the
extent that the human race in his diagnosis, lives in delusion. But he
did not know the true traumatic nature of the historical past, namely,
the outburst of wantonness in nature itself, and so he insisted that
each individual relives the catastrophes of the past, which he believed
to be the murder of the father, the Oedipus complex. He opposed the
biological view of his day, and of today, too, and insisted that this
imprint was transported through the genes from one generation to the
next. He did not come to know the true nature of the Great Trauma ? born
in the Theogony or battle of the planetary gods with our Earth, brought
more than once to the brink of destruction ?which was the fate of
Mercury, Mars, and Moon. Freud died in exile from his home, when a
crazed worshipper of Wotan was preparing another Götterdäm-merung.

The great riddle unsolved, Freud closed his eyes when the hakenkreutz
(another ancient emblem) carrying troops marched into flaming Poland.

Another generation rose since the end of World War II. The technology of
destruction since the days when a mushroom rose over Hiroshima has
advanced tremendously. The human urge to repeat the traumatic
experiences of the past did not subside, but grew, and he who tried to
reveal them was reviled. How many atomic submarines have been built? How
many mushroom clouds can be produced? In how many ways can we destroy
all life on this Earth? A Damocles sword hangs over the human race. The
planets have finally retired into peaceful coexistence. But mankind,
though not in the center of creation, still, in its optimal place, is a
pandemonium of races and nations, while the blueprint of Armageddon is
on the drawing boards, and the arsenal to incinerate this globe and
degenerate whatever population will survive is growing from day to day.
The adversaries on both sides of the Atlantic, with many small nations
emulating them are as if living with the urge to see again the unchained
elements in a nuclear multi-head explosion over every locality of the
Old and New Worlds.

I feel that I must speak out on this subject whenever and wherever I
can. We are in a race, and I do not know if I can help, but I must try.

Unfortunately my attempt to cure the mental illness which afflicts
mankind cannot use the methods of good psychiatry. You cannot put the
human race on the couch. You cannot expect to cure using blunt
statements about the past. Without preparation, without giving the
patient a chance to prepare himself, you cannot slowly release from his
subconscious mind the necessary recognition of the traumatic past. Above
all others, the scientific community has experienced great paroxysms,
and reacted in fury against the disclosures of a modern book.

The price for my revelation has been high, but what choice did I have?
The enemy is time. I conclude with a verse which is not my own, and I
don?t remember it exactly, but the hour is late, and I will repeat it:

    We are in a race with the Reaper
    We hastened, he tarried, we won.

I wish I could hope that it will be that way, and not the other way around.


*References*

   1.

      /Worlds in Collision/ (1950), /Ages in Chaos, /Vol. I (1952),
      /Earth in Upheaval /(1955), /Oedipus and Akhnaton/ (1960).

   2.

      The astronomical way of indicating 687 B.C.

   3.

      See /Worlds in Collision/ (Macmillan/Doubleday, 1950) page 122,
      footnote 10; (Pocket Books, 1977), page 134; (Abacus, 1972), page
      127, footnote 3.

   4.

      See In the Beginning <../../itb/index.htm>, section Uranus
      <../../itb/uranus.htm>.

   5.

      /Earth in Upheaval/ (Doubleday, 1955), pages 71-72, footnote 5,
      (Abacus. 1973), pages 64-65; (Dell, 1968), page 75; (Pocket Books,
      1977), pages 66-67.

   6.

      /De/ /revolutionibus orbium coelestium/ was published in 1543.

   7.

      Dr. William Mullen, Hodder Fellow in the Humanities, Princeton
      University.

   8.

      ?The Inconstant Heavens,? pages 19-35,43-44: this article has been
      reprinted in de Grazia, Juergens, and Stecchini eds. /The/
      /Velikovsky Affair/ (University Books, 1966) pages 80-126.

   9.

      /Man and Society in Calamity/ (Greenwood Press, 1968).

  10.

      Heraclitus, author of /The Homeric Allegories/ (1st century
      present era) not to be confused with Heraclitus of Ephesus.


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