A Study in Anger ......

Related updated article � Has the Ghost of Velikovsky returned ?

Immanuel Velikovsky
A Study in Anger in The Name of Science and Pride

In 2003 a book was released entitled "Immanuel Velikovsky The Truth Behind the Torment", by his daughter Ruth. The book documents the hate and prejudice against him and hints at the pain of rejection that he went through. Putting aside the brilliance of this one man momentarily, the event of the rise against him by accepted mainline scientists is worthy of serious attention and study. If for no other reason, but yet perhaps the most important reason, to see the mistakes of man when faced with a challenge to his/her pride. It strikes deeper than nearly any other instrument of emotion. This is clearly shown in the aforementioned book and in the few articles we will be posting on this page in the coming weeks and months. I recommend that you purchase the book, so that you can see the treachery for yourself as you read the articles that we post. The articles that we will post are some that have been previously published in magazines and periodicals mentioned in the book. These are not found on any other site on the web that we know of, but appear crucial to the understanding of the event. The impact on us in our day is evident. When we look to NASA for answers concerning the moon, Mars, or any other subject relative to our search for truth, you will see who you can trust and who you cannot trust. -[ http://www.crawford2000.co.uk/veli.htm] -

In the first installment we look at the initial Harper's Magazine article that really got the fire going. It was written by Eric Larrabee, a Harper's editor at the time (January 1950). It was a prelude to the release of Velikovsky's first published book, Worlds In Collision. It's a supportive article and puts a "best foot" forward for Velikovsky. But the article created a firestorm that hasn't stopped today.

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Harper's
MAGAZINE

The Day the Sun Stood Still

Eric Larrabee

The Old Testament describes an event over Palestine, when the Hebrew tribes were led into the battle of Beth-Horon by Joshua. "And he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day."

The sun over Gibeon was in the forenoon sky. It would have been night or very early morning in the Western hemisphere.

There is a Mexican tradition, recorded in the Nahua-Indian in the Annals of Cuauhtitlan, that once in the remote past the night did not end for a long time. Friar Bernardino de Sahagun, a Spanish scholar who came to the New World a generation after Columbus, wrote that the American aborigines told of a great catastrophe, in which the sun had risen only a little way above the horizon, and then stood still. These are but two of the many traditions from all parts of the world which refer to a disturbance in the earth's orderly rotation.

It is conceivable that a large celestial body approaching the earth could exert an attraction sufficiently powerful to slow down its turning and make the sun appear to stop in the sky. The heads of comets are assumed to be composed of clusters of meteorites. If a comet were to come close to the earth, it would accompanied by meteors falling in a torent. The Old Testament, two verses above the description in the Book of Joshua of the sun standing still, contains the following passage: "As they fled from before Israel, and were going down to Beth-Horan... the Lord cast down great stones upon them in Azekah, and they died..."

In a book to be published in a few weeks called Worlds in Collision, Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky will present a great body of evidence to show that about 1500 B.C. a comet, a new member of the solar system, did pass close to the earth. This he places at the time of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. Fifty-two years later, at the time of Joshua, the same comet returned. At both of these two meetings with the comet, in Dr. Velikovsky's words, "according to the memory of mankind, the earth refused to play the chronometer by undisturbed rotation on its axis." Worlds in Collision is the first of four or more volumes in which the same author will maintain that not only on these two occasions but many times has the earth undergone vast and disastrous catatclysms in which its rotation was interrupted.

This article is an attempt, necessarily condensed and incomplete, to offer a preview of Dr. Velikovsky's findings. It is impossible to give here any idea of the extent of the material he has assembled to substantiate his argument. In the descriptions which follow, for every piece of evidence mentioned, Worlds in Collision, the first volume alone, contains scores more; and every statement in the book is supplied with numerous references.

Dr. Velikovsky's work crosses so many of the jurisdictional boundaries of learning that few experts could check it against their own competence. The main body of evidence in Worlds in Collision is historical, and the details are drawn from - among other sources - the Old Testament, the Talmud, the Egyptian papyri, the historical texts, traditions, and the legends of Rome, Greece, Babylonia, Arabia, Persia, India, Tibet, Finland, Iceland, West Africa, Siberia, China, Japan, the Pacific Islands, Mexico, and Peru. Dr. Velikovsky describes the area of his investigations as "anthropology in the broadest sense," concerning itself with "the nature of the cosmos and its history."

This universal student was born in Vitebsk, Russia in 1895. He studied natural sciences at Edinburgh, and law, economics, and history in Russia. He studied medicine at the Moscow Imperial University and medical law at the University of Charcow. Later he received his M.D. in Moscow.

During the early twenties he studied biology in Berlin. He foundede and edited the Scripta Universitatis, a joint work of Jewish scholars out of which grew the University of Jerusalem. Dr. Chaim Weizmann asked Dr. Velikovsky to direct the inception of that University, but he declined and in 1923 went to Palestine, where he practiced as a physician. Beginning in 1928 he studied psychoanalysis and the function of the brain in Zurich and Vienna, with Eugen Bleuler, Wilhelm Stekel, Alfred Adler, and other pioneers in the field. In 1937 he delivered an address to the International Psychological Congress, "On Psychological Roots of Hatred Among the Nations," and in 1939, five weeks before war broke out, he came to this country.

Dr. Velikovsky brought with him to America an unfinished book on Freud and His Heroes. In the study of Moses and Ikhnaton in preparation for this work, he came upon the idea that great physical catastrophes might be used to synchronize the the records of the ancient peoples of the Near East, and before the end of 1940 the main outlines of his work were clear. It is so far composed of Worlds in Collision, a natural history of the world catastrophes, and of two further volumes called Ages in Chaos. The latter (completed first though they will be published second) contain the elaborately documented rewriting of ancient history assumed in Worlds in Collision. "I ask a credence of the reader," says Dr. Velikovsky, "that he allow me to use this chronology until Ages in Chaos is published." He has been working on both books concurrently for the past nine years.

Professor Horace M. Kallen, former dean of the New School For Social Research, was among the first to read the manuscript of Worlds in Collision. "Even if I thought that Velikovsky's theories were entirely ungrounded," writes Professor Kallen of Velikovsky's historical and archaeological work, "I would treat them as an extraordinary achievement of the scientific and historical imgination....But it is myt belief that Velikovsky has supported his thesis with substantial evidence and made an effective and persuasive argument." Gordon A. Atwater, curator of the Hayden Planetarium, wrote to the Macmillan Company that, "the theories presented by Dr. Velikovsky are unique and should be presented to the world of science in order that the underpinning of modern science can be re-examined....I believe the author has done an outstanding job. In fact, he has gone beyond what normally be expected of a single individual."

II.
The comet, at the first of the two meetings reconstructed in Worlds in Collision, touched the earth with its gaseous tail, and one of the first signs of the encounter was a rain of fine, rusty pigment. The world turned red. �All the waters that were in the river,� reads the Book of Exodus, �were turned to blood.� The Manuscript Quiche� of the Mayas tells of the rivers turning to blood, and so does the Papyrus Ipuwer of the Egyptians. Then, as the story continues in the Visuddhi-Magga of the Buddhists, the fine dust turned to coarse dust, �and then fine sand, and then coarse sand, and then grit, stones, up to boulders as large... as mighty trees on the hilltops.�

And with the shower of meteorites the earth stopped turning.

It came to rest so faced to the sun that a long night, darkened by the cosmic refuse sweeping in from interplanetary space, fell on Europe, Africa, the Americas, and the valleys of the Euphrates and the Indus. The Babylonians, the tribes of the Sudan, the Finns, the Greeks, the Peruvians, and the American Indians all have traditions of a long night accompanying a catastrophe which the earth did not survive. Further east, the Iranians saw the sun suspended several days in the sky. In china, it is said that in the reign of the Emperor Yahou the sun did not set for a number of days and all the forests burned.
We suppose that if the earth stopped turning it would destroy itself, as HG Wells imagined it would when his �man who could work miracles� commanded the same act. Our idea of momentum - and the Law of Gravitation, about which Dr. Velikovsky has much to say - leads us to assume that the earth�s surface would fly onward in the direction of its rotation and be torn apart. A great global catastrophe, with seas and continents changing their places,is in fact described in the traditions of mankind. The world gave every sign to its inhabitants of being on the brink of destruction.

Approached by the body of the comet, the earth was forced out of its regular motion; a major shock convulsed its entire surface. The major shift in the atmosphere caused by the approach of the comet and the stasis of the planet, itself produced hurricanes of enormous velocity and force. �The face of the earth changed,� writes Dr. Velikovsky, summarizing the Mayan account from the Manuscript Troano, �mountains collapsed, other mountains grew and rose over the onrushing cataract of water driven from the oceanic spaces, numberless rivers lost their beds, and a wild tornado moved through the debris descending from the sky.�

The human population was decimated and many species of animals perished entirely. The surface of the earth burst. Three Mexican manuscripts tell how everywhere in the Western hemisphere new mountains came into being. New volcanos opened and fissures in the flat land threw forth fire and smoke and liquid basalt. The rivers steamed and the sea boiled. The Zendi-Avesta of the Persians says that a star made the sea boil. The Polynesians say that a star caused new islands to appear.

It was the tenth plague of Egypt, the night of Passover, when the Lord passed over the huts of the Israelites and struck the mansions of the Egyptians (the light rush houses would survive and earthquake more easily than heavy stone ones). �There was not a house where there was not one dead,� says the Book of Exodus, and St. Jerome wrote that �in the night in which Exodus took place, all the temples of Egypt were destroyed either by an earth shock or by the thunderbolt.� The head of the comet cam close to the earth, breaking through the darkness of the dust cloud, and the Hebrew tradition tells that the last night of the Jews in Egypt was as bright as the noon of the summer solstice.

The blow fell at midnight. Dr. Velikovsky observes in passing that as the israelites counted the days from sunset it was for them the 14th Aviv; and, ever since, the Passover has been celebrated on the fourteenth day of the first month of spring. The Egyptians counted from sunrise, as we do, and for them it was the 13th Thout, a day forever after unlucky. As for the thirteenth of any month, said the Egyptians, �thou shalt not do anything on this day.� The Aztecs also counted the day from sunrise, and in their calendar it was noted that on the 13th Olin, a month called �earthquake,� a new world age had come into being.

When a comet encounters a planet, it may become entangled and drawn from its path, then forced into a new orbit, and finally liberated. This is what happened to Lexell�s comet, which was captured by Jupiter and its moons in 1767 and did not free itself until 1779. Some form of balance between attraction and inertia was maintained for twelve years; Jupiter and the comet did not crash together. Neither, according to Dr. Velikovsky�s thesis, did the earth and the comet that came near it in 1500 b.c. They exchanged discharges of electrical potential.

The action of the sun and the moon on the earth produces the ocean tides. If the earth were to slow down, the seas would first recede toward the poles; but the attraction of a large comet close to the earth would draw them back toward itself and heap them high in the air. The story of the seas divided and then rising to break over the land is widespread. The Choctaw Indians say that when the land was in darkness a bright light appeared in the north, �but it was mountain-high waves, coming nearer�; the Peruvians say that the ocean left the shore and inundated the continent; the Chinese annals say that in the reign of the Emperor Yahou a great tidal wave broke over the mountains into the Chinese Empire and flooded the land for decades.

The tides carried huge rocks along them. For instance, the Madison Boulder, near Conway, New Hampshire, is a ten-thousand-ton piece of granite quite different from the bedrock beneath it. An early nineteenth century explanation of this and other �erratic� boulders was that great tidal waves, originating in the north, must have swept the rocks and geologic till (clay, mud and gravel) across the land. According to the calculations based on the amount erosion under them, the boulders were deposited in their places less than six thousand years ago. It has been assumed that the stones were drawn along by the glacial ice sheet, but the disquieting fact is that accumulations of rock were moved from lower latitudes to higher latitudes - and even uphill toward the Himalaya, through the existing glaciers push stones down, not up, the slopes.

At the Sea of the Passage the Israelite tribes saw the water drawn aside and heaped up in a double tide; and, after they crossed, the waters of the Mediterranean fell and broke into the Red Sea ina great wave. �It was an unusual event,� writes Dr. Velikovsky, �and because it was unusual it became the most impressive recollection in the long history of this people. All peoples and nations were blasted by the same fire and shattered in the same fury. The tribes of Israel on the shore of a sea found in this annihilation their salvation from bondage. They escaped destruction but their oppressors perished before their eyes. They extolled their Creator, took upon themselves the burden of moral rules, and considered themselves chosen for a great destiny.�

Here is what Dr. Velikovsky�s description of the pageant that took place in the sky:
When the tidal waves reached their highest point, and the seas were torn apart,
a tremendous spark flew between the earth and the globe of the comet, which
instantly pushed down the miles-high billows. Meanwhile, the tail of the comet and
its head, having become en