In his monumental work The Decline of the West, the German philosopher Oswald Spengler held that the academic practice of dividing its subjects of study "vertically" is misleading in a number of ways. In creating categories of Art, Mathematics, Literature, and so on, and structuring them historically to reflect such "periods" as Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Modern, we construct an illusion of continuities that never existed. More seriously, in taking an epoch of human culture apart and distributing its constituent parts across artificial groupings that we impose upon the world, we lose sight of the essence defining the great human civilizations that time has seen. Hence, we fail to understand them as expressions of a unique cultural soul that is born, grows, flourishes for a while, and then, like any other living organism—which they are—dies. It would be as if, having consigned the business of circulatory systems, nervous systems, digestive systems, and so forth, each with its own history of discovery and development, to separate departments, we were unable to put together a horizontal slice through all of them as an entity having attributes of "personhood" at all.
Every culture embodies a central guiding idea, or worldview, that determines its account of the universe and dictates how it will interpret its perceptions to shape what it sees as reality. Everything that speaks in its arts and its sciences, its social and political institutions, and its conceptualizations from architecture to economics express its inner nature as inevitably as biological form and behavior express a genetic imperative. The classical world of Greece and Rome was finite and bounded, shrinking back from confronting infinities of space and time. Its pictures show only foregrounds, avoiding the challenges of distance and unlimited extent, while its sailors followed the coastlines, rarely venturing out of sight of land. Mathematics confined itself to the study of static geometric figures, and the number system contained nothing that went beyond what was needed to enumerate finite, tangible objects. Is it mere coincidence that the leading art form was sculpture—finite volumes bounded by surfaces?
That age ended when Rome fell, and in Europe there followed the era of Christendom in which spiritual concerns took precedence over the material values that we take as synonymous with progress, and which we consequently term the Dark Ages. And then came Western Man, who not only took on the notions of change and infinity, but delighted in them, and whose every innovation exulted in the newfound freedoms that they symbolized. The calculus of Newton and Leibnitz was the language that described a universe no longer static and bounded but dynamic and unlimited, to be explored through scientific discovery, the testing of limits, and the voyages of the global navigators. Mastery of perspective, soaring arches and buttresses, and the new astronomy rejoiced in the experience of boundless, endless space. And what else was the music of Mozart and Beethoven but flights of woodwind and strings exploring vast, orchestra-created voids?
From origins in the Renaissance, through the seventeenth-eighteenth century "Age of Enlightenment," the philosophical ideology underpinning the Euro-American Western culture in whose legacy we live today was a commitment to scientific rationalism: the belief that the universe would prove explainable in purely material, mechanistic terms. The hand of God, which an earlier age had discerned as guiding every facet of existence from the individual's station and fortune in life to the courses traced by the planets, was unnecessary. And if that were so, it followed that the God-given right of hereditary elites to rule, upheld and defended by the authority of traditional religion, could be challenged. In the idealistic vision of science, beliefs are arrived at impartially from objective evaluation of the evidence. But when a deeply rooted predisposition pervades an entire cultural movement, it is easy for objectivity to give way to ideology, even in those rarer instances where the conflict registers consciously. I have come to the conclusion that in some important areas, modern science, far from replacing old, outmoded ideas with new insights in the way that is presented, has let principle rule over evidence in ways that actually represent a retreat from truths that were closer to being understood more than a hundred years ago.
I've written at some length elsewhere1 about the Immanuel Velikovsky affair that was precipitated by the publication of his book Worlds in Collision in 1950, and continued through to the inquisitorial exorcizing of his theories under the guise of the AAAS meeting in San Francisco in 1974—which has been described as "one of the blackest episodes in the history of science."2 Essentially, Velikovsky proposed that the Solar System has not always displayed the repeating orderliness that we observe today. We live in one of a series of quiescent periods occurring between times of convulsive change, in which the motions of the planets and other bodies are disturbed before settling down into a new pattern of stable orbits. Such events have involved the Earth in encounters that have had profound effects on its geological, climatic, and biological history. The most recent of these events took place in historic times and are recorded in mythologies and legends handed down through cultures the world over.
All of this was completely at odds with the reigning scientific views of the time, which admitted none of the catastrophic influences that are finally being recognized today (so long as they are kept comfortably remote in the distant past). But the dominant thinking of the mid twentieth century held doggedly to notions of a lawful, nonthreatening universe, cycling endlessly and predictably from the indefinite past to the indefinite future. Despite diverse evidence that Velikovsky marshaled to support his contentions, and some dazzlingly successful predictions that would have been applauded as triumphs had they been noncontroversial and made by an acceptable insider, he was greeted with a campaign of vilification and misrepresentation of an intensity seldom seen in professional circles, which remains largely successful to this day.
Yet his picture of a relatively tranquil Earth being periodically beset by immense cataclysms that bring on entirely new ages was not something innovative and revolutionary. Two centuries ago, evidence for the occurrence of major catastrophes in shaping the Earth as we know it had been considered self-evident and ubiquitous. The trouble, however, was that to the minds of many, such notions were inseparable from the doctrines held by the wrong side of the broad-based religious and political ideological clash that was coming to a head at the time.
Conflicting views on whether the universe has always existed pretty much as we find it, or arrived there either convulsively or through steady change go back to the time of ancient Greece and no doubt further. Such early accounts were inevitably inspired by religion and mythology, reflecting more than anything their proponents' predisposition to see the powers that ruled the cosmos as wrathful and capricious or protective and dependable. Homer's cosmos was a turbulent affair filled with selfish, insensitive gods. Plato saw it as an imperfect and sometimes troubled attempt at imitating unattainable ideals of form and harmony, while Aristotle, whose version eventually prevailed as the model for the medieval Scholastics, presented eternal stability in a system of celestial spheres centered upon the Earth, moving in perfect circles under the guidance of a Prime Mover who epitomizes everything good.
By Newton's time the subject was taking on more of the appearance of what we would consider a science, i.e. conclusions arrived at through study of the actual world rather than deduced from axiomatic preconceptions of how things must be. And what the early studies showed unequivocally was a record of the Earth's being subjected to episodic destruction on a vast scale. The evidence came in the form of large-scale faulting and dislocations of its surface geography, tremendous folding and uplifts of mountain chains—in many places of rock that had once laid beneath the ocean—and vast fossil graveyards testifying to sudden and violent mass extinctions, after which the essentially re-formed world was repopulated with new breeds of life. Initially, the Church opposed such notions as being sacrilegious to the doctrine of changeless order that Thomas Aquinas, primarily, had forged by reconciling Aristotle with the Bible. But as the evidence for change mounted, and such riddles as the existence of fossils showed an allegedly omniscient creator apparently capable of imperfection, or at least of having second thoughts, the new facts were coopted as demonstrable proof of divine retribution and the Great Flood, support for Mosaic chronology, and hence as a reaffirmation of Scriptural authority.
Christianity began as an ennobling of the worth and dignity of the ordinary individual, and an opposition movement challenging the right of Rome to rule through force and military conquest. By the time the emperor Constantine became a convert and proclaimed it the official Roman religion in AD 313, what he unveiled was a counterfeit. While preserving the symbols and slogans that had given the original movement its appeal, in essence it had become an arm of the state. Far from being a nonviolent opponent of imperialism, the refashioned institution championed it, fielding its own armies and conniving in the schemes of kings and princes to secure its share of power, wealth, and landholding across the map that emerged out of medieval Europe, the founding ideals effectively forgotten except, for a while, in a few places along the western fringes. What did the genocidal wars of the Middle Ages, the manic persecutions of witches and heretics, ferocious crusades against neighboring peoples, and the horrors of the Inquisition have to do with the original teachings of love, compassion, tolerance, and forgiveness?
The Renaissance is celebrated as a revival of Classical learning and the freeing of intellect from subjugation by repressive dogma to open inquiry and the objective pursuit of knowledge. But in a way that becomes apparent from the perspective of hundreds of years later, it also rekindled the earlier spiritual vision as the pioneers of the newly idealized Science came to see the mathematical laws they were uncovering as proof of perfection and harmony in a manner ideologically closer to medieval Scholasticism.
In the minds of most people, Isaac Newton towers as a virtual embodiment of the philosophic revolution that ushered in the age of science and reason. And, of course, his scientific achievements were indeed stupendous, creating precedents in thought and method that would serve as models for the next three centuries. It should be stressed, however, that the prime aim of Newton's science was not to show a universe functioning without God, but to reveal the creator's perfection through the workings of the cosmos and their conformity to mathematical precision. His scientific work was ancillary to theological preoccupations, which formed the major part of his unpublished writings and absorbed more of his time.3
In 1696, nine years after publication of the first edition of Newton's Principia, William Whiston, a fellow of Cambridge University and devoted pupil of Newton, presented the manuscript of a book entitled New Theory of the Earth. With uncanny similarities to what Velikovsky would claim over two centuries later—and which Velikovsky acknowledged fully—Whiston argued from historical evidence and astronomical considerations that the cataclysm implied by the Old Testament account of a universal deluge was caused by the impact a comet at the end of the third millennium BC, prior to which the solar year had been 360 days long. At first, Newton was impressed and sympathetic to Whiston's views, but later he became hostile to their radicalism. If traditional views of the cosmic order were abandoned, the foundations of morality would be undermined and the chief arguments for the existence of God—the wise adaptation of the natural world to the preservation of living creatures—eliminated. In 1710, Whiston was dismissed from his teaching position because of heresy and then formally tried before a body of bishops of the Church of England. Nevertheless, the astronomer Edmond Halley, who had himself, a year and a half before Whiston's book, read a paper before the Royal Society explaining the deluge as a comet impact but not printed it lest he might "incur the censure of the sacred order," proposed Whiston for membership of the society, upon which Newton threatened to resign. By the time the second edition of the Principia appeared in 1713, refutation of Whiston and proving the universe to be stable and unchanged since the creation had become Newton's major preoccupation.
But in a way that can only be described as ironic, the lawfulness and precision first demonstrated in Newton's mechanics provided the inspiration for those who were seeking to break from traditional religion. Following his mathematics but not his theology, the thinkers of the Enlightenment period moved from theism to deism—in which God was removed from intervention in day-to-day human affairs and relegated to setting up and starting the clockwork universe to operate under its own laws thereafter—and thence to the mechanistic atheism of the later eighteenth century. Hence, while they believed they were freeing themselves from religiously determined predispositions, the Newtonian ideals that they projected upon the world represented a philosophic return to medieval tenets of changeless, eternal heavens. Thus, in what was really a reversal of the roles that are popularly perceived today, a worldview that owed more to the theology of the Middle Ages than to impartial evaluation of the evidence mounting from Renaissance researches became the underlying ideology guiding what was seen as science, while genuinely new factual accounts and unbiased reviews of ancient records were dismissed as too uncomfortably evocative of biblical wrath and retribution to be acceptable.
Studies comparable to "geology" as we understand it had not really figured in the medieval world. The Earth was deemed corrupt and fallen, and hence not a subject worthy of academic study. The wisdom of God was reflected in subjects like geometry, numerology, harmony, and astronomy. But what the findings being made in the new spirit of discovery were showing was not a picture of serene changelessness, but of abrupt discontinuities in the formations of rocks and the stories told by fossils, of immense deposits of sediments, mountains rising were there had been oceans, and graveyards filled with the bones of countless animal forms that no longer existed.
After the notoriety it had earned previously in opposing new ideas, the traditional Church largely accommodated to the new findings. But the Protestant Reformation, with its fervor to demonstrate the literal truth of a Bible that taught not only its creation story but also of the deluge as divinely decreed punishment for sin, sought an interpretation that would reconcile these findings with the book of Genesis. A stream of books and publications appeared in England from the close of the seventeenth century onward, explaining such features as the stratification of rocks in terms of Noah's flood, and provided the Tories with one of their major weapons in defense of the monarchy against the liberal Whigs. In both England and France, upholders of the traditional order argued that monarchy was not only the most ancient and the most common form of government, but also the most natural. Hence, the king was emulating the divine monarch in ruling with absolute authority. In the course of the eighteenth century, ideas of liberalism and democracy challenging this doctrine took hold throughout Europe and in America. But to show that monarchy was not "natural" in a way that would be acceptable at the time required alternative explanations for the origin of the world and its living things, and a refutation of catastrophes as the punishment for sin.
It is difficult for most people today, when geology is thought of in connection with university laboratories and rock-filled museum cases far removed from politics and religion, to imagine it as a subject that was regarded as inseparable from passionately held beliefs. Two principal, strongly antagonistic schools emerged, impelled to conflicting interpretations of the same facts for reasons that were to a large degree ideological. The "neptunists" attributed the Earth's strata and sediments to precipitations from immense flooding and saw the faulting of its surface as the result of catastrophic episodes, while the "vulcanists" or "plutonists" accounted for it all in terms of volcanic activity and the slow erosion of massive uplifts. The language had become scientific, but beneath it lay the old association of catastrophe and violence with biblical authenticity and revelation. The Scottish geologist James Hutton, author of the influential Theory of the Earth, which made the case for strictly natural processes—also a friend of Adam Smith, the promoter of laissez-faire economics ruled by natural market processes—believed that when we became "free of the mental shackles of rigid adherence to biblical doctrines" we would see that "the operations of nature are equable and steady."
Repudiating violent upheaval as the natural mechanism of change also had more immediate implications. Hutton's book was published in 1789, six years after recognition of America's independence and on the eve of the French Revolution. Following the French bloodletting and the subsequent Napoleonic wars, England fell into a severe depression with the cessation of demand for military supplies, demobilization of nearly 400,000 soldiers, and laws passed to protect farmers from imports of cheap grain, which had devastating effects on industrial towns and the laboring class. In 1819 a political meeting of the unemployed in Manchester turned into a riot and was fired on by the militia, which resulted in the passing of a series of repressive acts by the monarchist Tory government, bringing the country to the verge of revolution itself. But after witnessing the French experience, the people wanted reform in Parliament, not violence. Reforming Parliament, however, would first entail defeating a highly effective system of natural theology—required reading before a student could graduate from Oxford or Cambridge—which taught that sovereignty descends from God to the king, and "it is the will of God that the established government be obeyed." And the only way to achieve that would be by destroying the scientific foundations upon which that system rested.
The London Geological Society had been formed in 1807. Remarkable about it was that none of its thirteen original members was a geologist. Four were doctors, one of them a former Unitarian minister and another a refugee from the French Revolution, along with four Quakers, two booksellers, two independently wealthy amateur chemists, and a member of Parliament. Its growth thereafter was brisk, attracting 26 Fellows of the Royal Society in the following year, 400 members by 1817, and reaching 637 at the time of its incorporation in 1825, almost all of them still drawn from such ranks as doctors, clergymen, lawyers, and politicians. England was heavily engaged in canal digging and mining at this time, so there was no shortage of people actively engaged in geologically related work. William Smith, for example, a drainage engineer who pioneered the technique of dating strata by fossils, is cited in modern texts as a noted geologist of the era. But he was not invited to join the society. The business that drew such exalted attendance had to do with theological and political implications and their impact on the system that would shape the country, not with canals, mines, and hammering rocks.
In the same year that the London Geological Society was incorporated, 1825, George Scrope, who later bought himself a seat as a liberal in Parliament, published Considerations on Volcanos, which flagrantly applied Hutton's ideas to transforming all of the Torys' arguments, ascribing to volcanic activity every event that they ascribed to God. So effective was this mechanism at achieving the results observed, Scrope maintained, that there was no more need of God to interfere in the business of the universe than there was for a king to interfere with the natural laws of economics and society. Scrope's head-on approach proved somewhat too radical and impetuous for the times, and achieved little immediate effect. It did, however, set the tone of co-opting facts that the opponents presented as arguments and accounting for them by natural means. This tactic was taken up in a more subtle fashion by Scrope's Whig lawyer associate Charles Lyell with devastating success. In his three-volume Principles of Geology, published between 1830 and 1833, Lyell established "uniformitarianism," or gradualism, as the exclusive guiding force in shaping the world we see.
The essence of the uniformitarian claim is that all features the Earth's surface as it exists today can be accounted for by the same processes that are observed working today, operating at the same rates, over immense spans of time. Lyell's book was not, primarily, a scientific report as is generally depicted, but "a treatise devoted to the presentation and defense of a new system."6 Steady, cumulative transformation, working insensibly and patiently, could bring about extreme change. World cataclysms and violent upheavals were not necessary.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the catastrophist school had been vanquished in the eyes of intellectual trendsetters. Its leading proponent was the French comparative anatomist Baron Georges Cuvier, also known as the "father of paleontology." Solid English rationalism and gentlemanly restraint, tempered by a proper sense of allowing things time to mature, had saved the day against those excitable continentals with their rioting mobs and guillotines. It was more a religious and political battle than a scientific one, characterized by demonization of the opponents and fanatical attacks. In a well-funded and coordinated campaign, catastrophists were popularly depicted as crazed supernaturalists forcing facts to fit their delusions and bent on imposing a Mosaic account of history on the world, while uniformitarians were presented as sober, sensible, and intellectually sound. All and any data pointing to the possibility of catastrophes were rejected, suppressed, or ignored. There were no grounds for compromise, and by the end of the century an enormous body of inconvenient findings had disappeared from textbooks and university teaching. To a disturbing extent that remains true to the present time.
Not only did uniformitarianism gain acceptance as the explanation of geological phenomena to the exclusion of all rival theories. It was adopted into biology by Darwin, and became the unifying paradigm that enabled astronomy too to be fitted comfortably into the emerging Victorian worldview of progress, predictability, and security. As Stephen Jay Gould described it: " . . . scientists began to see change as a normal part of universal order, not as aberrant or exceptional. Scholars then transferred to nature the liberal program of slow and orderly change that they had advocated for social transformation."7 Science took on the role of presenting a universe that was in accordance with its cultural worldview: safe, stable, nonthreatening, not quite timeless but changing imperceptibly, and then in the direction of constant improvement, carrying mankind onward toward ultimate perfection at the top of the Great Scale of Being.
The vision might have been one of progress and enlightenment. But what the embodiment of this Victorian fantasy really represented was an ideological retreat to a medieval faith in cosmic benevolence and the inherent constancy and protectiveness of Nature. In the spirit of empirical discovery that came with the Renaissance, Cuvier and others had begun putting together the picture of how the evidence said things were in the real world, but the prospect was too alarming to face and the new ecclesia buried it.
The world of the Victorians and Edwardians exploded in 1914, and the time might have been ripe then for a deep-searching reappraisal of the precepts that it had been founded on. On the other hand, perhaps, in the chaos of world wars, revolutions, and economic catastrophes that followed, science needed more than ever the reassurance of a more fundamental stability and orderliness beyond the world of human affairs with all its follies and transience. And so things pretty much remained until 1950, when Velikovsky resurrected all the specters of catastrophism that had been safely laid to rest, amid a blaze of publicity that couldn't be ignored.
In some respects, the timing couldn't have been worse. The world was still recovering from World War II, ended by twin man-made catastrophes of nuclear explosions, with communist paranoia in the U.S. at its height and drawing the lines for the Cold War. His proposals were greeted with a level of hysteria and vehemence perhaps unique in the professional circles of modern times. Every device of ridicule, vilification, ad hominem attack, misrepresentation, and denial of means to respond was employed, and continued even as evidence mounted from space probes, archeological findings, revised historical accounts, and elsewhere that was in accordance with his claims and refuted the authorities that he had challenged. One can only note the striking parallel to the tone of the early-nineteenth-century ideological battle in England and wonder what deeper, possibly unconscious psychological terrors might have been triggered.
In more recent years, catastrophist notions have begun to regain some respectability with the much-publicized theory of the dinosaurs' extinction being due to an impact event—although that is now (late 2004) being challenged. Also, we're suddenly hearing a lot about the hazards in the form of wandering asteroids, near-approach comets, and the like threatening the end of the world as we know it—which may have a lot to do with an ailing space program and the kind of funding opportunities that tend to follow any campaign of scaring the public. Impacts by relatively minor objects have become permissible, but any thought of major Solar System instabilities or encounters between the planets themselves remains off-limits. Newly discovered swathes of ancient cratering are reported seemingly every week, along with another major historical event or turning point being linked to some postulated climatic change or geological upheaval. The science press and popular media treat these revelations as breaking through into new realms of inquiry and conceptual insight. Yet what they really represent are the first steps toward recovery from a backward-looking mind-set that has held sway in some of the major departments of science for the best part of two hundred years.
The shabby side of all this is that it's hard to find one of the ideas that Velikovsky proposed, which was once derided and rejected with ill grace, now being quietly coopted and sneaked in through the back door of Establishment science with no due acknowledgment. Electromagnetic influences beyond Earth and across the Solar System have been confirmed by space probes, and cosmological models have been developed giving them a major role in shaping the universe. Such topics as ancient cometary encounters, revisions to ancient history, mass extinctions, sudden climate changes and pole shifts, and the fission of the minor planets from gas giants are standard fare today for scientific conferences and journals. But such is the political tone within mainstream science that to associate one's name with the originator of concepts that are still beyond the pale of conventional acceptability would be tantamount to committing career suicide.
Fortunately, not all minds are so easily intimidated or deterred. A lively school of catastrophe theorists outside the citadel walls, publishing its own journals and convening its own meetings, continues developing and debating the lines of inquiry that Velikovsky's questions first opened up. In some ways their work may be closer to the spirit of original science, being motivated first and foremost by curiosity and the urge to know, not by any need to attract political approval and funding, and pressures to conform. It took about a hundred years for Copernicus's fairly straightforward suggestion—if you put the Sun in the center, everything becomes simpler and makes more sense—to get past the professors of his day.
Velikovsky believed that the disturbances to the Solar System brought about by Venus's encounters with Earth, and later Mars, represented the final phase of even greater cataclysmic events that went back much earlier. In his studies of the world's ancient mythologies, he was struck by the repeated descriptions of a past age in which the skies has been ruled not by the Sun but by other deities that turn out over and over again to be references to the planet we know today as Saturn. Pursuing this line of investigation led him to speculate that Earth might once have been a satellite of Saturn, which was then a protostar somewhat larger than the object we know today. He suggested this might explain, for example, the apparent adaptation of most plant life to red light (they absorb and utilize mainly redder wavelengths, which is why what's reflected is predominantly green), and the mystery of how early life could have survived unshielded ultraviolet radiation from the Sun, which disrupts the formation of biological macromolecules. The configuration broke up when Saturn flared in a novalike instability that involved the loss of much of its mass. Velikovsky connects these events with the seven days of light that cultural traditions worldwide attest to as ending a time of darkness before the skies changed, an immense deluge that predated the Venus events, the receding of Saturn to a position of minor importance, periods of cold and ice, and massive extinctions of life, followed by the appearance of new forms.
Although reliance must be primarily on mythological interpretations because the physical evidence no longer exists, the Saturn theory has taken on a life of its own, giving rise to a variety of alternative forms that continue to be the subject of energetic debates, carried notably by the journal Aeon, Chronology & Catastrophism Review, and the Kronia Group.8 One of the most controversial features that these models share is a linear configuration of Earth, Mars, Venus, and Saturn as a kind of celestial shish kebab, in which Saturn remains stationary over the northern hemisphere. The daily rotation of its sunlit crescent as seen from Earth is said to explain the countless stories in mythology and legend of wheels, mills, horned heads, and the like turning in the sky, while the strange electrical and gravitational conditions produced at the common axis along which all the planets were aligned provides the basis for once-again widespread accounts of awe-inspiring ladders, stairways, pillars, columns of light, mountains, and other edifices extending away into the northern heavens. Some researchers have identified Adam and Eve with the celestial spectacles presented by Mars and Venus, the four rivers that flowed out of their abode being radiant filaments of light emanating from Venus to cross the surrounding halo of Saturn's disk.
In a further dissension, some proponents of the Saturn theory, while agreeing with Velikovsky on Venus's being a young, recently hot object and not something that has existed for billions of years as the conventional picture maintains, contend that it originated by fission from Saturn in the course of these events, not from Jupiter. A bolder version still of the theory holds that Saturn and its companions, including Earth, constituted a separate interloping system that met up with an originally smaller Sun-Jupiter configuration of some form, and the Solar System that we know is what came out of it. In this interpretation, the lineup results from the smaller planets being strung out behind the primary in the final stages of acceleration toward the larger Sun, somewhat in the manner of the pieces of Shoemaker-Levy comet before its spectacular plunge into Jupiter in 1994.
And then we come to further developments of the theme that propose events even more fantastic than anything imagined by Velikovsky himself. The Velikovsky-Angiras scenario9 results from years of research on the part of the latter, a physicist, into deriving new translations of the Hindu Vedas, the oldest written records available to humanity, interpreted from the point of view of their being accounts of cosmic and cataclysmic events. Angiras's conclusion is that Velikovsky was right in identifying Venus as a young body, but wrong in his dating of its encounters with Earth. By Angiras's account, Venus as a white-hot protoplanet is identified with the Hindu fire deities Aditi and Agni, which seared the Earth on two occasions fairly close together but two thousand years before the time of the Exodus, causing immense devastation that is still recorded in the band of desert stretching from West Africa to Mongolia, and almost ending the human race in the process. Venus then dislodged Mars from what was originally an internal orbit (closer to the Sun), and the three bodies entered into a resonant cycle in which Mars periodically approached close to Earth, locking synchronously with it like a binary star for stretches of fifteen years or so at a time, ending only when Venus returned to break up the configuration.
If Angiras is right, this pattern continued for something like 2,000 years! During each encounter, Mars hung stationary in the sky above northern India, appearing ten to twenty times the size of the Moon. Its surface was clearly visible, possessing oceans and, quite possibly, a biosphere. The mutual tidal effect caused the oceans of both planets to pile up around the crustal bulges forming the points of closest proximity—the Tibetan plateau in the case of Earth, and the Tharsis region of Mars, the latter being submerged. This, according to Angiras, is where the Atlantis was that Plato was trying to describe—which could be, perhaps, why nobody is having much luck finding it here.
The only real reason for the incredulity with which most people greet this proposition on hearing it for the first time is its contradiction of so much that we think we know. But it's consistent with the well-publicized mystery of where all the water went that Mars evidently did possess at one time. According to Angiras's reconstruction, as a result of a matter-transfer process similar to that which can be observed taking place between some binary objects, it's right here! And it's true that Earth's sea levels apparently rose several hundred feet at around this time for reasons that conventional theories have never really explained. All this, of course, would make nonsense of the official position that the surface of Mars we see today dates back millions or billions of years. I've never understood how this could seriously be believed. The comment heard over and over again from researchers studying pictures of the floodplains, water channels, canyons, and other surface features is how sharp and uncannily fresh they appear. Even by their own figures for wind speeds, dust transportation, and meteorite infall, all such traces should long ago have been obliterated.
The scenario is consistent also with such factors as the repeated inundating of regions from China to the Middle East that surround northern India, the layers of archeological finds that testify to cycles of flood devastation and rebuilding, and the reinterpretation as flood defenses of many puzzling massive structures assumed to be fortifications when no other explanation seemed to fit. And, finally but not least, of course, it would mean that the object responsible for the upheavals recorded at the time of the Exodus would have been Mars, in one of its recurring visits, and not Venus as Velikovsky believed.
Many of the foregoing contentions are contradictory or mutually incompatible. I take this as a sign of vigorous and healthy inquiry in action—science the way it should be, in which standing by what seems to be true, even at the risk of isolation and ridicule, takes precedence over being acceptable to the ranks of the exalted. Whether one takes the view that Velikovsky had the right picture even if he was wrong on some details, or the converse, as is the case with some schools among his followers, his genius lay in being one of the first to recognize the myths handed down by ancient cultures as accounts by people who lived under different skies of terrifying events that they actually witnessed but were unable to comprehend. He was the first to ask why objects that we see as insignificant pinpoints, which few people today could even find, should be depicted as harbingers of the end of the world and titanic celestial battles between gods, inspiring awe and terror across the Earth. Here, surely, are the cosmic origins of the rituals and attempts at placation that were to become the foundation of all religions, and beyond that, conceivably, the roots of many of the phobias, insecurities, and obsessions that continue to haunt humankind today.
Officially promulgated science clings to its doctrine that—apart from the relatively minor impacts that it has conceded to admit in the last couple of decades or so—the major bodies of the Solar System have remained essentially unaltered for billions of years, and the heavens look much the same as they always did. Yet the observational basis for these confident assertions extends back only for a matter of a few centuries. Is there some unconscious fear at work that accepting the interpretations of ancient myths as cosmic events that took place in recorded human history would be to acknowledge they could happen again? On the one hand we have faith in a principle that enables us to infer how things must have been; on the other, if the catastrophists are correct, we have the records of what the people who lived then say they saw.
The spirit of unprejudiced inquiry that began to emerge with the Renaissance, of following where the evidence seems to lead, was quashed by forces that viewed themselves as progressive, but which in fact had more in common with the Aristotlean-medieval yearning for a safe and predictable universe shaped by benign forces for the continuing betterment of man. As a consequence, we still labor under the legacy of a largely forgotten nineteenth-century religious and political struggle that has no bearing upon the modern world.