The Velikovsky Heresies: Worlds in Collision and Ancient Catastrophes Revisited

INTRODUCTION

THE IRREPRESSIBLE OUTSIDER

The long-persisting controversy over the unorthodox theories of Immanuel Velikovsky is one that I first became acquainted with during my years as a college student in the early 1970s. Although I earned my degree in English in Poughkeepsie, New York, as one of the early male co-eds at Vassar College, my off-school breaks were largely spent with my family in Portland, Oregon, a lovely city in the Willamette Valley, where I had attended high school. Portland is an intelligent, liberal-minded community with an active curiosity for new ideas and a well-earned reputation for thinking outside the box. During my college years, Portland was home to Pensée magazine, a student-run publication that had been produced to encourage continuing critical analysis of all questions raised by [Immanuel] Velikovsky’s work.¹ In those days, a person could not walk through the vibrant downtown of the city of Portland without passing by at least one street-side stand that displayed a copy of Pensée magazine. In retrospect, it seems hardly possible to have been a twenty-something student in that place and at that time without gaining at least a passing familiarity with the controversy that surrounded Immanuel Velikovsky.

Two decades later, during the mid-1990s, as the most time-intensive demands of my profession and of parenting began to ease, I found moments once again to read for personal pleasure, and my interest in unresolved mysteries brought me back again to Immanuel Velikovsky. I was now able to acquire and familiarize myself with many of his works, beginning with his books Worlds in Collision and Ages in Chaos. I also read with growing interest the arguments of various reputable critics of Velikovsky, along with a number of other books that were devoted to a more general discussion of the Velikovsky controversy itself.

Fairly quickly I came to see that the role Velikovsky had attained in relation to the scientific community—essentially that of a heretic’s heretic—seemed to have come about largely because of differences in the methodology he applied to his studies, as compared with those typically employed by a professional historian or scientific researcher. Velikovsky’s approach was often difficult for a traditional academic to accept—or sometimes even to fully understand—and so became one source of apparent frustration for some academics as the controversy played out. In some ways, Velikovsky became to traditional scientists in the 1950s what Groucho Marx had been to the social elite of the 1930s—the irrepressible outsider who, while steadfastly refusing to play by traditional rules, still threatened to beat an entrenched elite at their own game, with the potential to make them look ridiculous in the process.

It is fair to say that Immanuel Velikovsky approached his subject matter in a novel way and applied a unique brand of ample intelligence to many of the problems he researched. It was Velikovsky who, with straight-faced chutzpah, offered up ancient mythological storylines as evidence to support a controversial new astronomic theory. Velikovsky was the person who unblushingly put forth rational scientific explanations for biblical events that others had long since dismissed as unfathomable miracles—events that, for many, might properly fall somewhere closer to the realm of fairy tales than serious scientific discourse.

His theories touched on many different subject areas, and the implications of those theories often asserted themselves—without regard to traditional pedagogical boundaries—across a wide range of academic disciplines. One way to characterize the kind of brash unexpectedness with which Velikovsky’s unorthodox methods presented themselves to the scientific community of the 1950s would be to compare them to the acts of a later fictional movie hero named Indiana Jones—the swashbuckling, whip-carrying archeologist who, when faced with the losing prospect of a scimitar fight against an overmatched opponent, makes the inspired choice to go against type, pulls a gun from his belt, and simply shoots the inconvenient interloper.

It is perhaps this unusual methodology that resonates most with Velikovsky’s audience—his innate ability to infer from a small initial set of discrete facts a much broader set of patterns and implications that had remained largely undiscerned by his more traditional peers. It is this same unorthodox methodology that seems to have most inflamed his detractors, who never quite knew what to do with an opponent who refused to play by their rules. The dynamic between Velikovsky and the scientific community reminds me of a time early in my relationship with my wife, Risa, when we would often spend a pleasant evening playing the card game bridge with various friends.

Bridge is a game of skill that is often conducted by serious players according to a system of complicated rules. Each round of play is preceded by a prerequisite round of bidding, and when executed properly, each bid carries with it levels of meaning that may not be immediately obvious to the unsophisticated observer. Nonetheless, for a serious bridge player, these bids often imply to his or her partner information about the number of face cards and the relative strength of various suits that exist in the bidder’s hand. Risa and I, on the other hand, had always adopted a very straightforward, aboveboard approach to the game, in which a one-spade bid simply implied that one of us believed that we could negotiate a contract of one trick above book, with the suit of spades declared as trump. This approach, which worked quite well for our purposes, had a way of wreaking havoc with the sensibilities of the other players around us, whose impulse was to look for deeper symbolism in our bids.

Another reason for my interest in Velikovsky’s unorthodox methodology is that it resonates with my own professional mind-set. As an independent software designer and troubleshooter, my job typically requires me to analyze some aspect of a client company’s complex, mission-critical business software, then—typically on a short timeframe—make a significant change to it. Early in my career I began to notice a disturbing trend in the projects I was hired to do—that each one seemed to require me to know more and more about a client’s often unique software, but with less and less outside help or reliable guidance. I joked with myself that, if the trend continued, I would eventually be required to know everything about a client’s system with no outside assistance whatsoever. In order to accomplish this and without the luxury of sufficient time to learn all the critical aspects of the system I was about to modify, I needed to develop analytical techniques that would, on the basis of a small number of known facts and a broad overview of how business software typically works, point me in the right direction to make my changes. I think of these techniques as ways of knowing without knowing, and I can see similar techniques at work in Velikovsky’s methodology.

For me, there is a fundamental difference between the way a programmer and a scientist looks at the world. For most scientists, a 5-percent chance that a theory could be wrong is sufficient reason to cast doubt on the approach, while for me as a programmer, a 60-percent likelihood that a theory is right can often be ample reason to actively pursue it. While a good scientist typically works forward through a complicated theory in incremental steps, each based on carefully quantified facts, I tend to begin with a set of core facts or observations and move forward from these in much larger steps, making some choices based on approximation, probability, and inference.

This difference in approach is well illustrated by a technique that was suggested to me as a grade-school student when I was first introduced to a dictionary as a research tool. If you want to look up the dictionary entry for the word flicker, you could start by leafing through the book from front to back until you come to words beginning with F, then continue forward a page at a time until you eventually find the word flicker. On the other hand, you could choose to begin at the F tab of the dictionary, then, estimating that words beginning with Fl will likely fall somewhere beyond a third of the way into the F section, continue your search partway through that section, moving forward or backward in increments until you find the entry. Either approach will ultimately bring you to the correct page, but for me, the second approach represents a much more effective way of getting there.

This method is similar to a programming technique called a binary search, in which a programmer divides a set of sorted searchable material in two, disregards the half that he knows does not contain his entry, then continues the search using only the remaining half, which he again divides in two. The technique allows a computer program to locate one specific record (out of perhaps millions of records) with only a very small number of actual inquiries.

Another difference in methodology between a typical scientist’s and Velikovsky’s approaches to science is found in the way that known facts are seen to relate to one another. For example, a scientist given the value pi and the radius of a circle will quickly realize that he can derive other useful information from those initial facts, such as the circumference of the circle. However, when faced with two different contemporaneous ancient cultures from different regions of the globe who are known to have made the very same extraordinary claim about the unusual appearance of the planet Venus, these same scientists somehow fail to notice that important additional information can also be derived from the mere concurrence of those statements, namely, that something unusual must certainly have been happening to Venus in ancient times in order to have precipitated the matching reports.

One longstanding complaint I have with modern scientific discourse in general as it pertains to unorthodox theories such as Velikovsky’s involves the concept of coincidence. Meaningless coincidences can be a professional hazard for any theorist—orthodox or heretical—and the ability to distinguish between the meaningful interrelationship of two events and the less meaningful coincidence of two disconnected events becomes an important skill.

My complaint comes in response to an apparent double standard that often seems to be applied when evaluating unorthodox theories. For example, there would likely be little tolerance from traditional astronomers if I were to argue that single-star systems must actually be the rule in the universe and that the preponderance of binary star systems must be a mere coincidence; clearly there are far too many counterexamples to justify my view. I would expect even less tolerance if the validity of my theory depended on two or more coincidences.

For me, a good rule of thumb has always been that the need to invoke two levels of compounding coincidence is usually enough to disqualify a theory from consideration. However, in cases like the Velikovsky controversy, in which a growing number of predictive aspects of his theory have seemingly proved to be correct over the course of several decades, traditional astronomers seem to have developed an unreasonably high tolerance for coincidence as a theory of last recourse by which to explain them away.

Another aspect of Velikovsky’s theory that, for me, ultimately works in his favor is the sheer tenacity with which certain key aspects of the theory have resisted outright disproof. The state of science being what it is today, one would think that it should be a do-able task to categorically refute a theory that has been as widely critiqued and derided as Velikovsky’s. From the standpoint of traditional astronomers, there are at least a dozen points at which Velikovsky’s theory might potentially be shown to be flatly wrong (many would say that his theory has long since been flatly disproved), yet over time, as new facts emerge, these points take on new life as subtle aspects of the theory continue to be shown to be ultimately valid. To my way of thinking, surely this kind of persistency is one hallmark of a theory that is worthy of careful reconsideration.

Sadly, but in seeming fulfillment of prophesies made by George Orwell in his classic book 1984, I have seen several instances, even over the relatively brief course of my research, in which online articles I cite have since been altered, sometimes with references to Velikovsky removed or information pertinent to his theories altered. However—the Brave New electronic era notwithstanding—the principle has always been that, once published, an author’s text is fair game for quoting by others. This holds true historically even for texts that have since passed out of existence, such as certain ancient Greek texts, which we can now only quote secondhand based on references from some other Greek author. What this means (as with all online postings) is that the reader should be aware that some Internet references may have changed (or perhaps even been outright removed) since they were originally quoted. In the name of a rapidly failing ethic of intellectual integrity and cultural sanity, I steadfastly affirm that any statement included here has been fairly and accurately quoted from the Internet articles cited, as they appeared at the time of quoting.

1

WORLDS IN COLLISION AND THE FIRESTORM IT CREATED

In 1950, a Russian-born psychoanalyst named Immanuel Velikovsky published a wildly popular, hugely controversial book called Worlds in Collision. Even before its release, public reaction to various promotional summaries and early critical reviews assured that the book, in which Velikovsky proposed that there had been great planetary upheaval within our solar system during historical times, was likely to foment a firestorm of controversy among the scientific community.

Although Immanuel Velikovsky had no credentials as a trained astronomer, his academic background, reputation, political associations, and professional standing were such that the scientific community could not realistically afford to simply ignore his book. He had become Israel’s first practicing psychiatrist and psychotherapist and was trained by Sigmund Freud’s famous pupil Wilhelm Stekel. Some of Velikovsky’s writings appeared in Freud‘s psychoanalytic journal