An ancient visit by an alien star, runs the headline in the Health & Science section of The Week magazine (April 13, 2018); and the story begins: “A wandering binary star sideswiped the solar system some 70,000 years ago, knocking dozens of far-flung comets and asteroids into unusual orbits. The glow of the red star’s fleeting flyby may have been witnessed by early human ancestors and Neanderthals …”
Being of the generation that I am, my mind goes to Immanuel Velikovsky and his 1950 bestseller Worlds in Collision.
Velikovsky is not much remembered today. Since the late 1970s, at least, he’s been eclipsed by Erich von Däniken as the outer-space theorist of antiquity whom the accredited experts love to hate, whose books nonetheless crown the bestseller charts. Like von Däniken, Velikovsky argued for massive extraterrestrial interference in the affairs of this planet, witnessed by ancient tales conventionally dismissed as myths and legends. But for Velikovsky it wasn’t visitors from other planets who’d meddled in the ways of humankind. It was the planets themselves.
Specifically, Venus and Mars.
I read Worlds in Collision in the early 1960s, as a teen UFOlogist. I first heard about it from Frank Scully’s Behind the Flying Saucers, which came out later in 1950 and whose fourth chapter was titled “Theories in Collision” in homage to Velikovsky. (Scully’s book also sold well, though I don’t think quite as well as Velikovsky’s. So did Donald Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucers are Real, also in 1950. That was a good year for people like us.)
I didn’t quite buy into Velikovsky, the way I bought into UFOs. The Old Testament was his primary source, and I knew the Bible and its historical background well enough to wonder if it was really possible to read Amos and Isaiah as talking about a disastrous near-collision between Earth and Mars. Yet I was impressed. Pulling my copy off the shelf where it’s been gathering dust, dipping into it for the first time in decades, I’m impressed once more. This is a brilliant book, a captivating book. A book that’s erudite and poetic in about equal measure.
Call it a book, not about mythology–although it copiously invokes the mythologies of the Old and New Worlds, to confirm and supplement the traditions of ancient Israel–but of mythology. Its preface describes it as “a book of wars in the celestial spheres that took place in historical times. In these wars the planet earth participated too. This book describes two acts of a great drama: one … in the middle of the second millenium before the present era; the other in the eighth and the beginning of the seventh century. … Accordingly, this volume consists of two parts [I. Venus; II. Mars], preceded by a prologue.”
Out of the myth came faith–Velikovsky’s.
“The Jewish people did not obtain all its ‘supremacy’ in that one day at the Mountain of Lawgiving; this people did not receive the message of monotheism as a gift. It struggled for it; and step by step, from the smoke rising from the overturned valley of Sodom and Gomorrah, from the furnace of affliction of Egypt, from the deliverance at the Red Sea amid the sky-high tides, from the wandering in the cloud-enshrouded desert burning with naphtha, from the internal struggle, from the search for God and for justice between man and man … it became a nation chosen to bring a message of the brotherhood of man to all the peoples of the world” (page 297).
Born in Czarist Russia in 1895, he was never an orthodox Jew. But he was a passionate Zionist who spent the 1930s in Palestine, practicing the medicine in which he’d been trained. In the 1920s, living in Weimar Berlin, he was one of the organizers of a project called Scripta universitatis atque bibliothecae hierosolymitanarum, “Writings of the Jerusalem university and library,” the title referring to the fledgling Hebrew University in Jerusalem. This was to be a compendium of scholarly writings by outstanding Jewish thinkers, published both in their original languages and in Hebrew translation, one step in the emergence of a Hebrew state that was to be a light unto the nations.
For the “Mathematica et Physica” division of their series, Velikovsky and his colleagues found an editor of particular distinction: Albert Einstein. The connection was renewed after the Second World War, when Einstein and Velikovsky became neighbors and on-again-off-again friends in the tranquil, leafy streets of Princeton, New Jersey. Einstein didn’t really believe Velikovsky’s notions, yet they intrigued him. When he died in 1955, the German translation of Worlds in Collision sat on his desk.
(I have this information courtesy of a wonderful book by Michael D. Gordin, The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe, to which my next blog post will be devoted.)
Grant that Velikovsky was wrong, indeed wildly wrong, in both his history and his science. To write him off as a “crank” or a “crackpot”–do we really know what either of these words means?–does huge injustice to an extraordinary man, a cosmopolitan intellectual who was master of multiple languages and a tireless searcher after what he regarded as the hidden and forgotten truth of our collective past.
Which leads into one more dimension of Velikovsky’s versatile mind. He was a psychoanalyst, trained in Vienna at the beginning of the 1930s under Freud’s disciple Wilhelm Stekel. His Freudian background left its fingerprints on Worlds in Collision.
“It is an established fact in the learning about the human mind that the most terrifying events of childhood (in some cases even of manhood) are often forgotten, their memory blotted out from consciousness and displaced into the unconscious strata of the mind, where they continue to live and to express themselves in bizarre forms of fear” (page 298).
Never mind that most psychologists today would fiercely dispute this “established fact.” (I myself think Velikovsky and the Freudians are closer to the truth, but that’s a debate for another time.) It was essential for Velikovsky if he was to explain why the unspeakable horrors of our collisions with Venus and Mars–“the conflagration of the world, accompanied by awful apparitions in the sky … boiling of the sea, submersion of continents, a primeval chaos bombarded by flying hot stones”–were never actually described by the sober chroniclers of antiquity, but need to be reconstructed through a jigsaw-puzzle assembly of mythic and poetic fragments.
“A Collective Amnesia,” he calls it in one of his section headings; and he uses as his epigraph a quote from Plato: “At any rate they seem to have been strangely forgetful of the catastrophe.” Velikovsky must have felt this “strange forgetfulness” all around him, in the sunny optimism of post-War America. Of course we remembered there’d been a World War II–five years after it ended, how could we not? Did we retain any grasp of what a world-shattering calamity it had been–a “Sword-Time, Wolf-Time,” to quote another of Velikovsky’s section headings–its grand finale the birthing of future apocalypse at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Velikovsky did.
And so he wrote a book that’s a 400-page proclamation of the unremembered. And people bought it and believed it, ignoring the scientists’ protests that it was all nonsense, because they recognized within it an unspoken truth.
We UFOlogists, who since Betty and Barney Hill have had our own fascination with the unremembered, might sit up and take notice.
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
Connect to Journal of a UFO Investigator on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/JournalofaUFOInvestigator
and Find David Halperin on Google+
Read about my book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO–coming in 2020 from Stanford University Press.
Don’t have time to keep checking my blog? Sign up for my monthly email newsletter, with summaries and links to the past month’s posts, plus oldies-but-goodies from the archive.
