Immanuel Velikovsky (17 November 1979) was a Russian-born American
independent scholarAn independent scholar is anyone who conducts scholarly research outside universities and traditional academia. Independent scholars play an especially important role in areas such as art history and other humanities fields...
of Jewish origins, best known as the author of a number of controversial books reinterpreting the events of ancient history, in particular the US bestseller
Worlds in CollisionWorlds in Collision is a book written by Immanuel Velikovsky and first published on April 3, 1950. The book proposed that around the 15th century BCE, Venus was ejected from Jupiter as a comet or comet-like object, and passed near Earth...
, published in 1950. Earlier, he played a role in the founding of the
Hebrew University of JerusalemThe Hebrew University of Jerusalem ; ; abbreviated HUJI) is Israel's second-oldest university, after the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. The Hebrew University has three campuses in Jerusalem and one in Rehovot. The world's largest Jewish studies library is located on its Edmond J...
in
IsraelThe State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
, and was a respected
psychiatristA psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. All psychiatrists are trained in diagnostic evaluation and in psychotherapy...
and psychoanalyst.
His books use
comparative mythologyComparative mythology is the comparison of myths from different cultures in an attempt to identify shared themes and characteristics. Comparative mythology has served a variety of academic purposes...
and ancient literary sources (including the
BibleThe Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
) to argue that Earth has suffered
catastrophicCatastrophism is the theory that the Earth has been affected in the past by sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope. The dominant paradigm of modern geology is uniformitarianism , in which slow incremental changes, such as erosion, create the Earth's appearance...
close-contacts with other planets (principally
VenusVenus is the second planet from the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. The planet is named after Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty. After the Moon, it is the brightest natural object in the night sky, reaching an apparent magnitude of −4.6, bright enough to cast shadows...
and
MarsMars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It is often described as the "Red Planet", as the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance...
) in ancient times. In positioning Velikovsky among catastrophists including
Hans BellamyHans Schindler Bellamy was a researcher and author. His books investigate the work of Austrian cosmologist, Hans Hoerbiger and German selenographer, Philipp Fauth, whose now-defunct Cosmic Ice Theory :Bellamy's first book, Moons, Myths and Man, describes Hoerbiger's theory in detail, and its...
, Ignatius Donnelly, and Johann Gottlieb Radlof, the British astronomers
Victor ClubeStace Victor Murray Clube is an English astrophysicist.He was educated at St John's and Christ Church, Oxford...
and
Bill NapierWilliam M. Napier or Bill Napier is the author of five high tech thriller novels and a number of serious scientific books....
noted ". . . Velikovsky is not so much the first of the new catastrophists . . . ; he is the last in a line of traditional catastrophists going back to mediaeval times and probably earlier." Velikovsky argued that electromagnetic effects play an important role in celestial mechanics. He also proposed a
revised chronologyThe term "New Chronology" can refer to any of a number of attempts to rewrite a conventional chronology :-Egyptian chronology:...
for
ancient EgyptAncient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
,
GreeceAncient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
,
IsraelThe Land of Israel is the Biblical name for the territory roughly corresponding to the area encompassed by the Southern Levant, also known as Canaan and Palestine, Promised Land and Holy Land. The belief that the area is a God-given homeland of the Jewish people is based on the narrative of the...
and other cultures of the ancient
Near EastThe Near East is a geographical term that covers different countries for geographers, archeologists, and historians, on the one hand, and for political scientists, economists, and journalists, on the other...
. The revised chronology aimed at explaining the so-called "
dark ageThe Greek Dark Age or Ages also known as Geometric or Homeric Age are terms which have regularly been used to refer to the period of Greek history from the presumed Dorian invasion and end of the Mycenaean Palatial civilization around 1200 BC, to the first signs of the Greek city-states in the 9th...
" of the eastern Mediterranean (ca. 1100 – 750 BCE) and reconciling biblical history with mainstream archaeology and
Egyptian chronologyThe creation of a reliable chronology of Ancient Egypt is a task fraught with problems. While the overwhelming majority of Egyptologists agree on the outline and many of the details of a common chronology, disagreements either individually or in groups have resulted in a variety of dates offered...
.
In general, Velikovsky's theories have been vigorously rejected or ignored by the academic community. Nonetheless, his books often sold well and gained an enthusiastic support in lay circles, often fuelled by claims of unfair treatment for Velikovsky by orthodox academia. The controversy surrounding his work and its reception is often referred to as "the Velikovsky affair".
Emigration to the US and a career as an author
The remainder of the 1970s saw Velikovsky devoting a great deal of his time and energy to rebutting his critics in academia, and continuing to tour North America and also Europe, delivering lectures on his ideas. By now an elderly man, Velikovsky suffered from diabetes and intermittent
depressionMajor depressive disorder is a mental disorder characterized by an all-encompassing low mood accompanied by low self-esteem, and by loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities...
, which according to his daughter may have been exacerbated by the academic establishment's continuing rejection of his work.
Posthumous administration of Velikovsky's literary estate
For many years Velikovsky's estate was controlled by his two daughters, Shulamit Velikovsky Kogan (b. 1925), and Ruth Ruhama Velikovsky Sharon (b. 1926), who generally resisted the publication of any further material. (Exceptions include the biography
ABA — the Glory and the Torment: The Life of Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky, issued in 1995 and greeted with rather dubious reviews; and a Hebrew translation of another
Ages in Chaos volume,
The Dark Age of Greece, that was published in Israel.) A volume of Velikovsky's discussions and correspondence with Albert Einstein appeared in Hebrew in Israel, translated and edited by his daughter Shulamit Velikovsky Kogan. In the late 1990s, a large portion of Velikovsky's unpublished book manuscripts, essays and correspondence became available at the Velikovsky Archive website. In 2005, Velikovsky's daughter Ruth Sharon presented his entire archive to Princeton University Library.
Velikovsky's ideas
Notwithstanding Velikovsky's dozen or so publications in medical and psychoanalytic journals in the 1920s and 1930s, the work for which he became well known was developed by him during the early 1940s, whilst living in
New YorkNew York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
. He summarised his core ideas in an affidavit in November 1942, and in two privately published
Scripta Academica pamphlets entitled
Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History (1945) and
Cosmos without Gravitation (1946).
Rather than have his ideas dismissed wholesale because of potential flaws in any one area, Velikovsky then chose to publish them as a series of book volumes, aimed at a lay audience, dealing separately with his proposals on ancient history, and with areas more relevant to the physical sciences. Velikovsky was a passionate Zionist, and this did steer the focus of his work, although its scope was considerably more far-reaching than this. The entire body of work could be said to stem from an attempt to solve the following problem: that to Velikovsky there appeared to be insufficient correlation in the written or archaeological records between Biblical history and what was known of the history of the area, in particular, Egypt.
Velikovsky searched for common mention of events within literary records, and in the
Ipuwer papyrusThe Ipuwer Papyrus is a single papyrus holding an ancient Egyptian poem, called The Admonitions of Ipuwer or The Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All. Its official designation is Papyrus Leiden I 344 recto...
he believed he had found a contemporary Egyptian account of the Israelite Exodus. Moreover, he interpreted both accounts as descriptions of a great natural catastrophe. Velikovsky attempted to investigate the physical cause of the Exodus event, and extrapolated backwards and forwards in history from this point, cross-comparing written and mythical records from cultures on every inhabited continent, using them to attempt synchronisms of the historical records, yielding what he believed to be further periodic natural catastrophes that can be global in scale.
He arrived at a body of radical inter-disciplinary ideas, which might be summarised as:
- Planet Earth has suffered natural catastrophes on a global scale, both before and during humankind's recorded history.
- There is evidence for these catastrophes in the geological record (here Velikovsky was advocating Catastrophist
Catastrophism is the theory that the Earth has been affected in the past by sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope. The dominant paradigm of modern geology is uniformitarianism , in which slow incremental changes, such as erosion, create the Earth's appearance...
ideas as opposed to the prevailing Uniformitarian notions) and archeological record. The extinction of many species had occurred catastrophically, not by gradual Darwinian means.
- The catastrophes that occurred within the memory of humankind are recorded in the myths, legends and written history of all ancient cultures and civilisations. Velikovsky pointed to alleged concordances in the accounts of many cultures, and proposed that they referred to the same real events. For instance, the memory of a flood is recorded in the Hebrew Bible, in the Greek legend of Deucalion
In Greek mythology Deucalion was a son of Prometheus and Pronoia. The anger of Zeus was ignited by the hubris of the Pelasgians, and he decided to put an end to the Bronze Age. Lycaon, the king of Arcadia, had sacrificed a boy to Zeus, who was appalled by this savage offering...
, and in the ManuIn various Hindu traditions, Manu is a title accorded to the progenitor of mankind, and also the very first brahman king to rule this earth, who saved mankind from the universal flood. He was absolutely honest which was why he was initially known as "Satyavrata"...
legend of India. Velikovsky put forward the psychoanalytic idea of "Cultural Amnesia" as a mechanism whereby these literal records came to be regarded as mere myths and legends.
- The causes of these natural catastrophes were close encounters between the Earth and other bodies within the solar system
The Solar System consists of the Sun and the astronomical objects gravitationally bound in orbit around it, all of which formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun...
— not least what were now the planets Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, and Mars, these bodies having moved upon different orbits within human memory.
- To explain the celestial mechanics necessary to permit these changes to the configuration of the solar system, Velikovsky thought that electromagnetic forces might somehow play a greater role to counteract gravity and orbital mechanics.
Some of Velikovsky's specific postulated catastrophes included:
- A tentative suggestion that Earth had once been a satellite of a "proto-Saturn
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest planet in the Solar System, after Jupiter. Saturn is named after the Roman god Saturn, equated to the Greek Cronus , the Babylonian Ninurta and the Hindu Shani. Saturn's astronomical symbol represents the Roman god's sickle.Saturn,...
" body, before its current solar orbit.
- That the Deluge (Noah's Flood) had been caused by proto-Saturn's entering a nova
A nova is a cataclysmic nuclear explosion in a star caused by the accretion of hydrogen on to the surface of a white dwarf star, which ignites and starts nuclear fusion in a runaway manner...
state, and ejecting much of its mass into space.
- A suggestion that the planet Mercury
Mercury is the innermost and smallest planet in the Solar System, orbiting the Sun once every 87.969 Earth days. The orbit of Mercury has the highest eccentricity of all the Solar System planets, and it has the smallest axial tilt. It completes three rotations about its axis for every two orbits...
was involved in the Tower of BabelThe Tower of Babel , according to the Book of Genesis, was an enormous tower built in the plain of Shinar .According to the biblical account, a united humanity of the generations following the Great Flood, speaking a single language and migrating from the east, came to the land of Shinar, where...
catastrophe.
- Jupiter
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planet within the Solar System. It is a gas giant with mass one-thousandth that of the Sun but is two and a half times the mass of all the other planets in our Solar System combined. Jupiter is classified as a gas giant along with Saturn,...
had been the culprit for the catastrophe that saw the destruction of the "Cities of the Plain" (Sodom and GomorrahSodom and Gomorrah were cities mentioned in the Book of Genesis and later expounded upon throughout the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and Deuterocanonical sources....
)
- Periodic close contacts with a comet
A comet is an icy small Solar System body that, when close enough to the Sun, displays a visible coma and sometimes also a tail. These phenomena are both due to the effects of solar radiation and the solar wind upon the nucleus of the comet...
ary VenusVenus is the second planet from the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. The planet is named after Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty. After the Moon, it is the brightest natural object in the night sky, reaching an apparent magnitude of −4.6, bright enough to cast shadows...
(which had been ejected from Jupiter) had caused the Exodus events (c.1500 BCE) and JoshuaJoshua , is a minor figure in the Torah, being one of the spies for Israel and in few passages as Moses's assistant. He turns to be the central character in the Hebrew Bible's Book of Joshua...
's subsequent "sun standing still" (Joshua 10:12 & 13) incident.
- Periodic close contacts with Mars
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It is often described as the "Red Planet", as the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance...
had caused havoc in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE.
As noted above, Velikovsky had conceived the broad sweep of this material by the early 1940s. However, within his lifetime, whilst he continued to research, expand and lecture upon the details of his ideas, he released only selected portions of his work to the public in book form:
- Worlds in Collision
Worlds in Collision is a book written by Immanuel Velikovsky and first published on April 3, 1950. The book proposed that around the 15th century BCE, Venus was ejected from Jupiter as a comet or comet-like object, and passed near Earth...
(1950) discussed the literary and mythical records of the "Venus" and "Mars" catastrophes
- Portions of his Revised Chronology were published as Ages in Chaos (1952), Peoples of the Sea (1977) and Rameses II and His Time (1978) (The related monograph Oedipus and Akhenaten, 1960, posited the thesis that pharaoh Akhenaten
Akhenaten also spelled Echnaton,Ikhnaton,and Khuenaten;meaning "living spirit of Aten") known before the fifth year of his reign as Amenhotep IV , was a Pharaoh of the Eighteenth dynasty of Egypt who ruled for 17 years and died perhaps in 1336 BC or 1334 BC...
was the prototype for the Greek mythic figure OedipusOedipus was a mythical Greek king of Thebes. He fulfilled a prophecy that said he would kill his father and marry his mother, and thus brought disaster on his city and family...
.)
- Earth in Upheaval (1955) dealt with geological evidence for global natural catastrophes.
Velikovsky's ideas on his earlier Saturn/Mercury/Jupiter events were never published, and the available archived manuscripts are much less developed.
Of all the strands of his work, Velikovsky published least on his ideas regarding the role of electromagnetism in astronomy. Although he appears to have retreated from the propositions in his 1946 monograph
Cosmos without Gravitation, no such retreat is apparent in
Stargazers and Gravediggers.
Cosmos without Gravitation, which Velikovsky placed in university libraries and sent to scientists, is a probable catalyst for the aggressively antipathetic reaction of astronomers and physicists from its first presentation. However, other Velikovskian enthusiasts such as Ralph Juergens (dec.), Earl Milton (dec.), Wal Thornhill, and Donald E. Scott have embraced and developed these themes to propose a scenario where stars are powered not by internal nuclear fusion, but by galactic-scale electrical discharge currents. Such ideas do not find support in the conventional literature.
Revised chronology
Velikovsky argued that the conventional chronology of the Near East and classical world, based upon Egyptian Sothic dating and the king lists of
ManethoManetho was an Egyptian historian and priest from Sebennytos who lived during the Ptolemaic era, approximately during the 3rd century BC. Manetho wrote the Aegyptiaca...
, was wholly flawed. This was the reason for the apparent absence of correlation between the Biblical account and those of neighbouring cultures, and also the cause of the enigmatic "
Dark AgesThe Greek Dark Age or Ages also known as Geometric or Homeric Age are terms which have regularly been used to refer to the period of Greek history from the presumed Dorian invasion and end of the Mycenaean Palatial civilization around 1200 BC, to the first signs of the Greek city-states in the 9th...
" in
GreeceGreece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....
and elsewhere. Velikovsky shifted several chronologies and dynasties from the Egyptian Old Kingdom to Ptolemaic times by centuries (a scheme he called the
Revised Chronology), placing
The ExodusThe Exodus is the story of the departure of the Israelites from ancient Egypt described in the Hebrew Bible.Narrowly defined, the term refers only to the departure from Egypt described in the Book of Exodus; more widely, it takes in the subsequent law-givings and wanderings in the wilderness...
contemporary with the fall of the
Middle Kingdom of EgyptThe Middle Kingdom of Egypt is the period in the history of ancient Egypt stretching from the establishment of the Eleventh Dynasty to the end of the Fourteenth Dynasty, between 2055 BC and 1650 BC, although some writers include the Thirteenth and Fourteenth dynasties in the Second Intermediate...
. He proposed numerous other synchronisms stretching up to the time of
Alexander the Great. He argued that these eliminate phantom "Dark Ages", and vindicate the
biblicalThe Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
accounts of history and those recorded by
HerodotusHerodotus was an ancient Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria and lived in the 5th century BC . He has been called the "Father of History", and was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a...
.
These ideas were first put forward in
Ages in Chaos, and his later published works
Oedipus and Akhnaton,
Peoples of the Sea and
Rameses II and His Time, and two further works that were unpublished at the time of his death but that are now available online at the Velikovsky Archive:
The Assyrian Conquest and
The Dark Ages of Greece.
These ideas have been rejected by mainstream historians, and eventually even some of his followers.
Velikovskyism
Velikovsky inspired numerous followers during the 1960s and 1970s.
Alfred de GraziaAlfred de Grazia, is a political scientist and author. He has defended the catastrophism thesis of Immanuel Velikovsky.-Education:De Grazia attended the University of Chicago, receiving an A.B...
dedicated a 1963 issue of his journal,
American Behavioral Scientist to Velikovsky, published in an expanded version as a book,
The Velikovsky Affair, in 1966.
The Skeptical Inquirer in a review of a later book by de Grazia,
Cosmic Heretics (1984), suggests that de Grazia's efforts may be responsible for Velikovsky's continuing notability during the 1970s.
The
Society for Interdisciplinary StudiesThe Society for Interdisciplinary Studies is a membership-based organization "formed in 1974 in response to the growing interest in the works of modern catastrophists, notably the highly controversial Dr Immanuel Velikovsky"...
(SIS) was "formed in 1974 in response to the growing interest in the works of modern catastrophists, notably the highly controversial Dr Immanuel Velikovsky". The
Institute for the Study of Interdisciplinary SciencesThe Institute for the Study of Interdisciplinary Sciences, ISIS was a British educational charity established in 1985 and founded by researchers formerly connected with the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies whose original purpose was to examine and debate the revisionist theories of Immanuel...
(ISIS) is a 1985 spin off the SIS, founded under the directorship of
David RohlNew Chronology is the term used to describe an alternative Chronology of the ancient Near East developed by English Egyptologist David Rohl and other researchers beginning with A Test of Time: The Bible - from Myth to History in 1995...
, who had come to reject Velikovsky's Revised Chronology in favour of his own "New Chronology".
Kronos: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Synthesis was founded in 1975 explicitly "to deal with Velikovsky's work". Ten issues of
Pensée: Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered appeared in 1972 to 1975.
The controversy surrounding Velikovsky peaked in the mid 1970s and public interest declined in the 1980s, and
by 1984, erstwhile Velikovskyist
C. Leroy EllenbergerCharles Leroy Ellenberger is perhaps best known as a one-time advocate, but now a prolific critic of controversial writer Immanuel Velikovsky and his works on catastrophism. He first read Worlds in Collision in August 1969 after discovering it while browsing in the B. Dalton's Bookstore in...
had become a vocal critic of Velikovskian catastrophism. Some Velikovskyist publications and authors such as
David TalbottDavid N. Talbott is an American author and inveterate promoter of neo-Velikovskian ideas. Inspired by Immanuel Velikovsky, he proposes a “Polar Configuration” involving the five planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Mars, Earth, in order, and its influence on the human mythology.-Biography:Talbott...
remain active into the 2000s.
Criticism
Velikovsky's ideas have been almost entirely rejected by mainstream academia (often vociferously so) and his work is generally regarded as erroneous in all its detailed conclusions. Moreover, scholars view his unorthodox methodology (for example, using comparative mythology to derive scenarios in celestial mechanics) as an unacceptable way to arrive at conclusions. The late
Stephen Jay GouldStephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation....
offered a synopsis of the mainstream response to Velikovsky, writing, "Velikovsky is neither
crank"Crank" is a pejorative term used for a person who unshakably holds a belief that most of his or her contemporaries consider to be false. A "cranky" belief is so wildly at variance with commonly accepted belief as to be ludicrous...
nor
charlatanA charlatan is a person practicing quackery or some similar confidence trick in order to obtain money, fame or other advantages via some form of pretense or deception....
— although, to state my opinion and to quote one of my colleagues, he is at least gloriously wrong ... Velikovsky would rebuild the science of celestial mechanics to save the literal accuracy of ancient legends."
Velikovsky's bestselling and, as a consequence, most-criticized book is
Worlds in CollisionWorlds in Collision is a book written by Immanuel Velikovsky and first published on April 3, 1950. The book proposed that around the 15th century BCE, Venus was ejected from Jupiter as a comet or comet-like object, and passed near Earth...
. Astronomer
Harlow ShapleyHarlow Shapley was an American astronomer.-Career:He was born on a farm in Nashville, Missouri, and dropped out of school with only the equivalent of a fifth-grade education...
, along with others such as
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin-Further reading:*Rubin, Vera , "Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin" in OUT OF THE SHADOWS: Contributions of 20th Century Women to Physics, Nina Byers and Gary Williams, ed., Cambridge University Press ....
, were highly critical of Macmillan's decision to publish the work. The fundamental criticism against this book from the astronomy community was that its celestial mechanics were
physically impossiblePhysics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
, requiring planetary orbits that do not conform with the laws of
conservation of energyThe nineteenth century law of conservation of energy is a law of physics. It states that the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant over time. The total energy is said to be conserved over time...
and conservation of angular momentum.
Velikovsky relates in his book
Stargazers & Gravediggers how he tried to protect himself from criticism of his celestial mechanics by removing the original Appendix on the subject from
Worlds in Collision, hoping that the merit of his ideas would be evaluated on the basis of his comparative mythology and use of literary sources alone. However, this strategy did not protect him: the appendix was an expanded version of the
Cosmos Without Gravitation monograph, which he had already distributed to Shapley and others in the late 1940s — and they had regarded the physics within it as absurd.
By 1974, the controversy surrounding Velikovsky's work had permeated US society to the point where the
American Association for the Advancement of ScienceThe American Association for the Advancement of Science is an international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for the...
felt obliged to address the situation, as they had previously done in relation to UFOs, and devoted a scientific session to Velikovsky, featuring (among others) Velikovsky himself and Professor
Carl SaganCarl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, science popularizer and science communicator in astronomy and natural sciences. He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books...
. Sagan gave a critique of Velikovsky's ideas (the book version of Sagan's critique is much longer than that presented in the talk; see below). His criticisms are available in
Scientists Confront Velikovsky and as a corrected and revised version in the book
Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of ScienceBroca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science is a 1979 book by astrophysicist Carl Sagan. Its chapters were originally articles published between 1974 and 1979 in various magazines, including Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, Physics Today, Playboy and Scientific American...
. Sagan's arguments were aimed at a popular audience and he did not remain to debate Velikovsky in person, facts that were used by Velikovsky's followers to attempt to discredit his analysis. Sagan rebutted these charges, and further attacked Velikovsky's ideas in his PBS television series
CosmosCosmos: A Personal Voyage is a thirteen-part television series written by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter, with Sagan as presenter. It was executive-produced by Adrian Malone, produced by David Kennard, Geoffrey Haines-Stiles and Gregory Andorfer, and directed by the producers, David...
, though not without reprimanding scientists who had attempted to suppress Velikovsky's ideas.
It was not until the 1980s that a very detailed critique of
Worlds in Collision was made in terms of its use of mythical and literary sources, when Bob Forrest published a highly critical examination of them (see below). Earlier in 1974, James Fitton published a brief critique of Velikovsky's interpretation of myth that was ignored by Velikovsky and his defenders whose indictment began: "In at least three important ways Velikovsky's use of mythology is unsound. The first of these is his proclivity to treat all myths as having independent value; the second is the tendency to treat only such material as is consistent with his thesis; and the third is his very unsystematic method." A short analysis of the position of arguments in the late 20th century is given by Dr Velikovsky's ex-associate, and
KronosKronos: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Synthesis published articles on a wide range of subjects as diverse as ancient history, catastrophism and mythology. It ran 44 issues from the Spring of 1975 to the Spring of 1988. The title is an homage to the Greek name for the Roman god Saturn whose...
editor,
C. Leroy EllenbergerCharles Leroy Ellenberger is perhaps best known as a one-time advocate, but now a prolific critic of controversial writer Immanuel Velikovsky and his works on catastrophism. He first read Worlds in Collision in August 1969 after discovering it while browsing in the B. Dalton's Bookstore in...
, in his
A Lesson from Velikovsky.
More recently, the absence of supporting material in
ice-core studiesAn ice core is a core sample that is typically removed from an ice sheet, most commonly from the polar ice caps of Antarctica, Greenland or from high mountain glaciers elsewhere. As the ice forms from the incremental build up of annual layers of snow, lower layers are older than upper, and an ice...
(such as the Greenland Dye-3 and
Vostok coresVostok Station was a Russian Antarctic research station. It was at the southern Pole of Cold, with the lowest reliably measured natural temperature on Earth of −89.2 °C . Research includes ice core drilling and magnetometry...
) have removed any basis for the proposition of a global catastrophe of the proposed dimension within the later
HoloceneThe Holocene is a geological epoch which began at the end of the Pleistocene and continues to the present. The Holocene is part of the Quaternary period. Its name comes from the Greek words and , meaning "entirely recent"...
period. However, tree-ring expert
Mike BaillieMike Baillie is a Professor Emeritus of Palaeoecology at Queen's University of Belfast, in Northern Ireland. Baillie is a leading expert in dendrochronology, or dating by means of tree-rings...
would give credit to Velikovsky after disallowing the impossible aspects of
Worlds in Collision: "However, I would not disagree with
all aspects of Velikovsky's work. Velikovsky was almost certainly correct in his assertion that ancient texts hold clues to catastrophic events in the relatively recent past, within the span of human civilization, which involve the effects of comets, meteorites and cometary dust. . . . But fundamentally, Velikovsky did not understand anything about comets; . . . . He did not know about the hazard posed by relatively small objects . . . . This failure to recognize the power of comets and asteroids means that it is reasonable to go back to Velikovsky and delete all the physically impossible text about Venus and Mars passing close to the earth. . . . In other words, we can get down to his main thesis, which is that the Earth experienced dramatic events from heavenly bodies particularly in the second millennium BC."
Velikovsky's revised chronology has been rejected by nearly all mainstream historians and
EgyptologistsEgyptology is the study of ancient Egyptian history, language, literature, religion, and art from the 5th millennium BC until the end of its native religious practices in the AD 4th century. A practitioner of the discipline is an “Egyptologist”...
. It was claimed, starting with early reviewers, that Velikovsky's usage of material for proof is often very selective. In 1965 the leading cuneiformist Abraham Sachs, in a forum at
Brown UniversityBrown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
, discredited Velikovsky's use of
MesopotamiaMesopotamia is a toponym for the area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran.Widely considered to be the cradle of civilization, Bronze Age Mesopotamia included Sumer and the...
n
cuneiformCuneiform script )) is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. Emerging in Sumer around the 30th century BC, with predecessors reaching into the late 4th millennium , cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs...
sources. Velikovsky was never able to refute Sachs' attack. In 1978, following the much-postponed publication of further volumes in Velikovsky's
Ages in Chaos series, the
United KingdomThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
-based Society for Interdisciplinary Studies organised a conference in
GlasgowGlasgow is the largest city in Scotland and third most populous in the United Kingdom. The city is situated on the River Clyde in the country's west central lowlands...
specifically to debate the revised chronology. The ultimate conclusion of this work, by scholars including Peter James, John Bimson, Geoffrey Gammonn, and
David RohlNew Chronology is the term used to describe an alternative Chronology of the ancient Near East developed by English Egyptologist David Rohl and other researchers beginning with A Test of Time: The Bible - from Myth to History in 1995...
, was that the Revised Chronology was untenable.
While James credits Velikovsky with "point[ing] the way to a solution by challenging Egyptian chronology", he severely criticised the contents of Velikovsky's chronology as "disastrously extreme", producing "a rash of new problems far more severe than those it hoped to solve" and demonstrating that "Velikovsky understood little of archaeology and nothing of stratigraphy."
Bauer accuses Velikovsky of dogmatically asserting interpretations which are at best possible, and gives several examples from
Ages in Chaos.
"The Velikovsky Affair"
Such was the hostility directed against Velikovsky from some quarters (particularly the original campaign led by
Harlow ShapleyHarlow Shapley was an American astronomer.-Career:He was born on a farm in Nashville, Missouri, and dropped out of school with only the equivalent of a fifth-grade education...
), that some commentators have made an analysis of the conflict itself. The most prominent of these was a study by
American Behavioral ScientistAmerican Behavioral Scientist is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes papers in the field of Psychology. The journal's editor is Laura Lawrie. It has been in publication since 1957 and is currently published by SAGE Publications.- Scope :...
magazine, eventually published in book form as
The Velikovsky Affair. This framed the discussion in terms of how academic disciplines reacted to ideas from workers from outside their field, claiming that there was an academic aversion to permitting people to cross inter-disciplinary boundaries. More recently, James Gilbert, professor of history at University of Maryland, challenged this traditional version with a more nuanced account that focused on the intellectual rivalry between Velikovsky's ally
Horace Kallen-Biography:Born in the then German Bernstadt, Silesia to Jacob David Kallen and Esther Rebecca , an Orthodox rabbi and his wife, Kallen came to the United States as a child in 1887. He studied philosophy at Harvard University where he was a student of George Santayana, earning his B.A. in 1903...
and
Harlow ShapleyHarlow Shapley was an American astronomer.-Career:He was born on a farm in Nashville, Missouri, and dropped out of school with only the equivalent of a fifth-grade education...
. Earlier,
Henry BauerHenry H. Bauer is an emeritus professor of chemistry and science studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University . He is the author of several books and articles on such topics as the Loch Ness Monster and Immanuel Velikovsky, and is an AIDS denialist...
challenged the traditional view that the Velikovsky Affair illustrated the resistance of scientists to new ideas by pointing out "the nature and validity of Velikovsky's claims must be considered before one decides that the Affair can illuminate the reception of new ideas in science ..."
The scientific press, in general, denied Velikovsky a forum to rebut his critics. Velikovsky claimed that this made him a "suppressed genius", and he likened himself to
Giordano BrunoGiordano Bruno , born Filippo Bruno, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. His cosmological theories went beyond the Copernican model in proposing that the Sun was essentially a star, and moreover, that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited...
, who was burnt at the stake.
The storm of controversy created by Velikovsky's publications may have helped revive the
catastrophistCatastrophism is the theory that the Earth has been affected in the past by sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope. The dominant paradigm of modern geology is uniformitarianism , in which slow incremental changes, such as erosion, create the Earth's appearance...
movement in the second half of the 20th century; however it is also held by some working in the field that progress has actually been retarded by the negative aspects of the so-called Velikovsky Affair.
Books by Velikovsky
Published by
The Macmillan CompanyMacmillan Publishers Ltd, also known as The Macmillan Group, is a privately held international publishing company owned by Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. It has offices in 41 countries worldwide and operates in more than thirty others.-History:...
:
- Worlds in Collision
Worlds in Collision is a book written by Immanuel Velikovsky and first published on April 3, 1950. The book proposed that around the 15th century BCE, Venus was ejected from Jupiter as a comet or comet-like object, and passed near Earth...
(1950) (new edition: ISBN 978-1-906833-11-4)
Published by Doubleday:
- Worlds in Collision
Worlds in Collision is a book written by Immanuel Velikovsky and first published on April 3, 1950. The book proposed that around the 15th century BCE, Venus was ejected from Jupiter as a comet or comet-like object, and passed near Earth...
(1950) (new edition: ISBN 978-1-906833-11-4)
- Ages in Chaos
Ages in Chaos is a book by the controversial writer Immanuel Velikovsky, first published by Doubleday in 1952, which put forward a major revision of the history of the Ancient Near East, claiming that the histories of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Israel are five centuries out of step...
(1952) (new edition: ISBN 978-1-906833-13-8)
- Earth In Upheaval (1955) (new edition: ISBN 978-1-906833-12-1)
- Oedipus and Akhnaton (1960)
- Peoples of the Sea (1977)
- Ramses II and His Time (1978) (new edition: ISBN 978-1-906833-14-5)
- Mankind in Amnesia (1982) (new edition: ISBN 978-1-906833-16-9)
Published by
William MorrowWilliam Morrow and Company is an American publishing company founded by William Morrow in 1926. The company was acquired by Scott Foresman in 1967, and sold to Hearst Corporation in 1981. It was sold along to the News Corporation in 1999...
:
- Stargazers and Gravediggers (1983)
Published in Israel:
.
Velikovsky works available online
- The Velikovsky Archive — an online collection of works, including unpublished manuscripts, audio recordings of lectures, and a video of the 1972 CBC
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, commonly known as CBC and officially as CBC/Radio-Canada, is a Canadian crown corporation that serves as the national public radio and television broadcaster...
documentary
Sites about Velikovsky
Organizations sympathetic to Velikovsky's work
- Aeon: The Journal of Myth and Science
- Kronia
- Kronos Press
Kronos: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Synthesis published articles on a wide range of subjects as diverse as ancient history, catastrophism and mythology. It ran 44 issues from the Spring of 1975 to the Spring of 1988. The title is an homage to the Greek name for the Roman god Saturn whose...
- Society for Interdisciplinary Studies
The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies is a membership-based organization "formed in 1974 in response to the growing interest in the works of modern catastrophists, notably the highly controversial Dr Immanuel Velikovsky"...
- The Velikovskian, A Journal of Myth, History and Science
Critiques of Velikovsky