mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== ANNOTATED RESERVE LIST 1. General Accounts of Catastrophism <#1> 2. Scenarios of Past Catastrophes <#2> 3. Apocalyptic <#3> 4. Mythology <#4> 5. Translations and Commentaries <#5> 6. Fiction <#6> (top <#top>) 1. GENERAL ACCOUNTS OF CATASTROPHISM * Chapman, Clark R., and Morrison, David. 1989. Cosmic Catastrophes. * Two prominent astronomers give an overview for the layman of recent perspectives on cosmic catastrophes, both billions and thousands of years ago. They also forth a sober estimate of threats from comets and asteroids in the future. They give summary accounts of several 20th century catastrophists they deem ?pseudo-scientific? and try to sketch the boundaries of what mainstream scientists considered possible (as of 1989). * Halpern, Paul. 1998. Countdown to Apocalypse: Asteroids, Tidal Waves, and the End of the World. * A very recent survey (complete with apocalyptic websites) of a whole range of catastrophes, past and future, natural and manmade, with which science and religion have at one time or another been concerned. * Huggett, Richard J. 1997. Catastrophism: Asteroids, Comets, and Other Dynamic Events in Earth History. * A professor of ?geoecology and environmental change? chronicles the rise, fall and revival of catastrophism in the history of ideas, down to topics such as organized chaos in the non-linear dynamics both of biological change and of pulses in the galaxy and solar system. One of the very best recent synthetic introductions to the history and theory of catastrophism. * Lewis, John S. 1997. Rain of Iron and Ice: The Very Real Threat of Comet and Asteroid Bombardment. * Lewis, a planetologist and impact-crater expert, is Codirector of the NASA/Univ. of Arizona Space Engineering Research Center. He assembles the evidence for comet and asteroid impacts and extinctions on the earth, using similar evidence gathered from space flybys of the planets as well as geology and paleontology. He not only describes the preventive measures being taken by scientists today but also, on a more upbeat note, points to the immense economic yield to be had from mining asteroids. * Palmer, Trevor. 1999. Controversy: Catastrophism and Evolution, The Ongoing Debate. * Ranging over astronomy, biology, history and paleontology, this volume traces the interactive developments of these two scientific models from ancient times to the present. It argues in its conclusion that ?the characteristic pattern of evolution is of extinctions followed after a pause by the rapid radiation of new species into vacant ecological space.? Along with Huggett the best recent introduction to catastrophism. * Raup, David M. 1986. The Nemesis Affair. * Raup is an expert on extinction and evolution, and, with Jack Sepkoski, an early proponent of the theory of periodic mass extinction. The book includes an excellent summary of the debate between catastrophism and uniformitarianism beginning with Georges Cuvier and Charles Lyell in the early 19th century. It aims to be ?an account of the way science works, as seen by a participant.? * Rudwick, M. J. S. 1997. Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes: New Translations and Interpretations of the Primary Texts. * A specialist in the history of geology and paleontology explains the ideas and methods of the premier catastrophist in the field before the dominance of uniformitarianism. * Schechner-Genuth, Sandra. 1997. Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology. * Begun as a doctoral dissertation at Harvard in the history and philosophy of science, this book traces changing perceptionss about comets from ancient times to the 19th century and uses them ?to explore the interplay of high and low culture and the interface linking religious thought, political action, and natural world views.? * Steel, Duncan. 1995. Rogue Asteroids and Doomsday Comets: The Search for the Million Megaton Menace that Threatens Life on Earth. * Research astronomer at the Anglo-Australian Observatory and Vice President of the International Spaceguard Foundation, Steel is a world-renowned authority on the threat of cometary impacts. He is one of the principal advocates for ?coherent catastrophism?, which argues for a very specific periodicity and source for impact episodes. (top <#top>) 2. SCENARIOS FOR PAST CATASTROPHES * Allan, D. S., and Delair, J.B. 1997. Cataclysm: Compelling Evidence of a Catastrophic World Change 9,500 B.C. * Combining expertise in geology, paleogeography, and anthropology, these two British authors fashion the hypothesis that a fragment from a supernova hit the globe c. 11,500 years ago. * Bellamy, Hans Schind. 1938. Moons, Myths, and Man. * Hans Hörbinger, an Austrian engineer, propounded his Cosmic Ice Theory in 1913, according to which the moon is the last of a series of icy satellites captured by the earth within human memory. (For two astronomers? recent account off this theory, and dismissal of it, see Chapman and Morrison, Cosmic Catastrophes, below.) In this 1938 book his disciple, Bellamy, collected thousands of catastrophic myths and sorted them into useful categories-- e.g. Dragons and Serpents, the Great Fire, Deluge Warnings-- though unfortunately without footnoting his sources. This book is useful as a broad survey of the myths that can be recruited for a variety of catastrophist scenarios. * deGrazia, Alfred. 1981. Chaos and Creation: An Introduction to Quantavolution in Human and Natural History. * The first of the ten volumes in the author?s Quantavolution Series, this book introduces the new paradigm, then employs it in fashioning scenarios for the last 14,000 years on the assumption that the solar system was once an electrically charged binary system and that a series of historically attested planetary instabilities ensued upon the break-up of the binary partner. * -- 1984. The Burning of Troy and Other Works in Quantavolution and Scientific Catastrophism. * Eighteen essays in ?quantavolution?, a term of the author?s coinage which is meant to stress that catastrophes are not merely negative events; they have a tendency to trigger suddenly ?quantum leaps? forward, whether in speciation or the mental development of humans and civilizations. The five parts are entitled ?Historical Disturbances?, ?Geological Issues?, ?Workings of the Mind? (which we will read in detail in deGrazia?s Homo Schizo, ?Polemics and Personages?, and ?Communicating a Scientific Model?. * Donnelly, Ignatius. 1887. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel. * In seeking to explain the origin of the vast deposits of till and gravel on the American continent and elsewhere, this well-known orator and congressman came to believe that it has been deposited by the tail of a comet within human memory. * Gallant, Roy A. 1995. The Day the Sky Split Apart: Investigating a Cosmic Mystery. * An account of the Tunguska event (June 30, 1908), when a ?fireball brighter than the sun? exploded over Siberia and felled trees outward in a radial pattern over some 2000 square kilometers (half the size of Rhode Island). After chronicling the event itself Gallant moves through subsequent expeditions launched to determine its causes and the theories that proliferated. He concludes by joining the increasing number of scientists who insist on the ?need for an early warming system? for such events in the future. * Patten, Donald W. 1988. Catastrophism and the Old Testament: The Mars-Earth Conflicts. * A geographer by scientific training and a creationist by religious conviction, Patten ?concludes that ancient catastrophes were astronomical in nature, cyclical in timing, and global in impact.? He proposes a model which, he claims, ?accords with Newtonian mechanics, geomagnetic principles, gyroscopic theory, and historical accounts.? His time-frame is roughly the same as Velikovsky?s, from 2500 to 700 B.C * Ryan, William, and Pitman, Walter. 1998. Noah?s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History. * Two oceanographers posit an event c. 7000 B.C. which was remembered in the flood myths of Atrahasis, Gilgamesh, Deucalion, and Noah: the overflowing of the Mediterranean, as a result of melting since the last Ice Age, into the area which is now the Black Sea and which showns signs of having been earlier inhabited and farmed. * Velikovsky, Immanuel. 1965. Worlds in Collision. * A psychoanalyst by training, Velikovsky scandalized the scientific community in 1950 by publishing a catastrophist hypothesis which became an overnight best seller. His scenario, with a time frame from 1500 to 700 B.C., involves the fissioning off from Jupiter of a huge comet which later, after devastating encounters with Earth and Mars, stabilized into orbit as the planet Venus. Some see him as having retarded catastrophism by his shaky astrophysics, others as having dramatically revived it and shown its necessary connection to chronological revision. (top <#top>) 3. APOCALYPTIC * Barkun. 1996. Millenialism and Violence. * These seven essays, drawing together research from political science, psychology, sociology and history, establish connections between millenarian movements and episodes of violence. Case studies range from medieval Christians to 19th century Maoris to contemporary opponents of abortion and defenders of the environment. * Cohn, Norman Rufus. 1970. The Pursuit of the Millenium. * The classic account of the apocalyptic tradition in medieval Europe, ranging over such topics as the disoriented poor, the hosts of Antichrist, the Crusades, self-immolating redeemers, amoral supermen, and the egalitarian state of nations. * -- 1995. Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come. * Cohn here surveys catastrophic myths from ancietn Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, Iran, Syria and Israel, then argues that it is with Zoroaster (whom he dates to between 1500 and 1200 B.C.) that there first emerges a vision of a final struggle to come which will defeat the forces of chaos once and for all. Cohn carries the story down through Christian sects of the first century A.D. * Reddish, Mitchell G. 1995. Apocalyptic Literature: A Reader. * A professor of religion has put together this anthology of Jewish and early Christian apocalyptic texts, dividing them into those that do and do not contain journeys into the divine realm. (top <#top>) 4. MYTHOLOGY * Cohn, Norman Rufus. 1996. Noah?s Flood. * A beautifully illustrated history of the Mesopotamian and Hebrew flood myths and their sundry interpretations through the ages, with chapters on 17th century catastrophists such as Whiston and modern myth-interpreters such as Dundes. * Crossley-Holland, Kevin. 1980. The Norse Myths. * A modern retelling of the Norse myths from the Creation to Ragnarok, with a useful 30-page introduction to the cosmology and pantheon of the Norse world. * Dronke, Ursula. 1996. Myth and Fiction in Early Norse Lands. * Essays by a preeminent scholar of Eddic poetry, including ones on the relations of the apocalyptic Voluspa to Greek and Latin Sibylline oracles and of Ragnarok to the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf. * Dundes, Alan, ed. 1988. The Flood Myth. * Dundes? own explanation of the deluge myth is that it stems from male envy of the female power to give birth; we all come into the world ?delivered from an initial flood of amniotic fluid when the sac breaks?, and men tell flood stories that replicate the creation of the world in that fashion. He allows many other theories their own voices, too, and in the essays he has collected there are separate accounts of flood myths, and theories about them, in Mesopotamia, Israel, Greece, Mesoamerica, South America, Australian Aborigines, Cameroon, the Phillipines, Thailand, India, as well as reflections on uniformitarianism, creationism, and ?the principle of retribution? in catastrophe myths. * Forsyth, Neil. 1987. The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth. * Surveying the many variants of the combat myth from Gilgamesh to Augustine, Forsyth, a professor of comparative literature, concerns himself primarily with the devil?s function in the narratives in which he appears and portrays the developing systems of Jewish and Christian belief from that point of view. This has come to be a definitive work in its field. * Graves, Robert. 1960. The Greek Myths, Vol. I and II. * Graves? prose retellings of virtually all the Greek myths are easy to read, and accompanied by notes referring to the primary ancient sources for each and every detail. He adds his own interpretations but keeps them carefully separated both from the retellings and the source references. There is no better easily available compendium of Greek myths in English. Note that the index is only at the end of the second of these two volumes. * Leon-Portilla, Miguel. 1986. Pre-Columbian Literatures of Mexico. * The Director of the Institute of Historical Research in the National Museum of Mexico describes the principal literary genres of the ancient Mexican peoples and provides extended quotations from each. * Long, Charles H. Alpha: The Myths of Creation. * The third book in the Patterns of Myth series edited by Alan Watts, this is a compilation of lesser known myths primarily from Africa and Polynesia. It is a resource for ?universal? motifs and variations on interrelated myths of world-creation and world-destruction. (top <#top>) 5. TRANSLATIONS AND COMMENTARIES * Alter, Robert, tr. 1996. Genesis: Translation and Commentary. * In this new translation Alter, Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Berkeley, combines the fluency of modern prose with a keen sense of tradition. The commentary underneath the translation on each page intervenes whenever the single choice of the translation is insufficient. * Dalley, Stephanie. 1991. Myths from Mesopotamia. * Dalley is a Fellow in Assyriology at the Oriental Institute, Oxford, and these fluent translations, unlike many writers? ?versions? of the Gilgamesh and other stories, are based on first-hand philological knowledge of the original texts, reflected also in notes and bibliography. It is useful as providing alternative translations of all the Mesopotamian texts read in the course: ?The Epic of Creation?, ?Gilgamesh?, ?Anzu? and ?Erra and Ishun?. *Ford, J. Massyngberde. 1975. Revelation: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. * This is the most cogent exposition of the theory that the bulk of Revelation was composed by John the Baptist and his disciples and is therefore essentially pre-Christian. The editor rearranges the text according to the chronology presupposed for its strata and gives both close textual notes and a general commentary to each. * Foster, Benjamin R. 1995. From Distant Days: Myths, Tales, and Poetry of Ancient Mesopotamia. * Massive anthology of texts translated with individual introductions by a Yale Assyriologist. * Goetz, Delia, and Morley, Sylvanus G. 1950. Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiché Maya. * This English version is made from the translation of the original Quiché into Spanish by Adrian Recinos. In general it has been outdated by Tedlock?s version, but a second version is always useful. * Heidel, Alexander. 1951. The Babylonian Genesis: The Story of Creation. * A translation, by a scholar at the Oriental Instiute in Chicago, of the Enuma Elish (Foster?s Epic of Creation) and other cuneiform tablets of the Babylonian creaton story, accompanied by an essay on Old Testament parallels. * Hollander, Lee M., tr. 1962. The Poetic Edda. * Collected by an unidentified Icelander, probably during the 12th or 13th century, this is one of the greatest treasure troves of Nordic culture. The translator is an authority in Nordic language and literature, and attempts to reproduce the verse patterns and rhythms as well as the mood of the original. * Sandars, N. K. 1971. Poems of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopotamia. * An attempt by a scholar who does not command the original cuneiform to fashion a ?straightforward narrative? out of versions by specialists. * Sawyer-Lauçanno, Christopher. 1987. The Destruction of the Jaguar: Poems from the Books of Chilam Balam. * Written in the Mayan language but in Latin script, the Books of ?Chilam Balam? (the archetypal ?Jaguar Priest?) are generally considered to be recompositions from memory of the original texts of hieroglyphic books destroyed by the Spanish. They combine ?prophecy, history, chronology, ritual and mythology? and have passages of undeniably great poetry, most of it having to do with bleak times to come. The author of this poetic simplification of the bewildering texts readily admits that ?I am not a Mayan scholar and my knowledge of the language is severely limited.? * Tedlock, Dennis. 1996. Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life (Revised Edition). * Dennis and Barbara Tedlock, both trained anthropologists, gained the trust of the highland Mayans with whom they worked to such an extent that they were made diviners and ?daykeepers?. As a result the translator is able to bring to the text of this ?Bible? of the Quiché an unprecedented understanding of the cultural context of its phrases. (top <#top>) 6. FICTION * Napier, Bill. 1998. Nemesis. * Fiction, for a change. And the author, an astronomer, knows the difference, since, with Victor Clube, he has co-authored two of the most credible catastrophist hypotheses in the last decades, The Cosmic Serpent and The Cosmic Winter. In this ?spaceguard? drama set in the immediate future, deflection of a Near Earth Object depends on finding and interpreting accurately a medieval manuscript. Email Prof. Mullen with questions and comments. C/A Home Copyright info Bard