by Carl Sagan
Collisions and catastrophism are part and parcel of modern astronomy, and have been for many centuries (see the epigraphs at the beginning of this chapter). For example, in the early history of the solar system, when there were probably many more objects about than there are now-including objects on very eccentric orbits-collisions may have been frequent. Lecar and Franklin (1973) investigate hundreds of collisions occurring in a period of only a few thousand years in the early history of the asteroid belt, to understand the present configuration of this region of the solar system. In another paper, entitled “Cometary Collisions and Geological Periods,” Harold Urey (1973) investigates a range of consequences, including the production of earthquakes and the heating of the oceans, which might attend the collision with the Earth of a comet of average mass of about 1018 grams. The Tunguska event of 1908, in which a Siberian forest was leveled, is often attributed to the collision with the Earth of a small comet. The cratered surfaces of Mercury, Mars, Phobos, Deimos and the Moon bear eloquent testimony to the fact that there have been abundant collisions during the history of the solar system. There is nothing unorthodox about the idea of cosmic catastrophes, and this is a view that has been common in solar system physics at least back to the late-nineteenth-century studies of the lunar surface by G. K. Gilbert, the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey.
What, then, is all the furor about? It is about the time scale and the adequacy of the purported evidence. In the 4.6 billion-year history of the solar system, many collisions must have occurred. But have there been major collisions in the last 3,500 years, and can the study of ancient writings demonstrate such collisions? That is the nub of the issue.
VELIKOVSKY has called attention to a wide range of stories and legends, held by diverse peoples, separated by great distances, which stories show remarkable similarities and concordances. I am not expert in the cultures or languages of any of these peoples, but I find the concatenation of legends Velikovsky has accumulated stunning. It is true that some experts in these cultures are less impressed. I can remember vividly discussing Worlds in Collision with a distinguished professor of Semitics at a leading university. He said something like “The Assyriology, Egyptology, Biblical scholarship and all of that Talmudic and Midrashic pilpul is, of course, nonsense; but I was impressed by the astronomy.” I had rather the opposite view. But let me not be swayed by the opinions of others. My own position is that if even 20 percent of the legendary concordances that Velikovsky produces are real, there is something important to be explained. Furthermore, there is an impressive array of cases in the history of archaeology-from Heinrich Schliemann at Troy to Yigael Yadin at Masada-where the descriptions in ancient writings have subsequently been validated as fact.
Now, if a variety of widely separated cultures share what is palpably the same legend, how can this be understood? There seem to be four possibilities: common observation, diffusion, brain wiring and coincidence. Let us consider these in turn.
Common Observation: One explanation is that the cultures in question all witnessed a common event and interpreted it in the same way. There may, of course, be more than one view of what this common event was.
Diffusion: The legend originated within one culture only, but during the frequent and distant migrations of mankind, gradually spread with some changes among many apparently diverse cultures. A trivial example is the Santa Claus legend in America which evolved from the European Saint Nicholas (Claus is short for Nicholas in German), the patron saint of children, and which ultimately is derived from pre-Christian tradition.
Brain Wiring: A hypothesis sometimes also known as racial memory or the collective unconscious. It holds that there are certain ideas, archetypes, legendary figures, and stories that are intrinsic to human beings at birth, perhaps in the same way that a newborn baboon knows to fear a snake, and a bird raised in isolation from other birds knows how to build a nest. It is apparent that if a tale derived from observation or from diffusion resonated with the “brain wiring,” it is more likely to be culturally retained.
Coincidence: Purely by chance two independently derived legends may have similar content. In practice, this hypothesis fades into the brain-wiring hypothesis.
IF WE ARE TO ASSESS critically such apparent concordances, there are some obvious precautions that must first be taken. Do the stories really say the same thing or have the same essential elements? If they are interpreted as due to common observations, do they date from the same period? Can we exclude the possibility of physical contact between representatives of the cultures in question in or before the epoch under discussion? Velikovsky is clearly opting for the common-observation hypothesis, but he seems to dismiss the diffusion hypothesis far too casually; for example, he says (page 303 [6]): “How could unusual motifs of folklore reach isolated islands, where the aborigines do not have any means of crossing the sea?” I am not sure which islands and which aborigines Velikovsky refers to here, but it is apparent that the inhabitants of an island had to have gotten there somehow. I do not think that Velikovsky believes in a separate creation in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, say. For Polynesia and Melanesia there is now extensive evidence of abundant sea voyages of lengths of many thousands of kilometers within the last millennium, and probably much earlier (Dodd, 1972).
Or how, for example, would Velikovsky explain the fact that the Toltec name for “god” seems to have been teo, as in the great pyramid city of Teotihuacán (“City of the Gods”) near present-day Mexico City, where it is called San Juan Teotihuacán? There is no common celestial event that could conceivably explain this concordance. Toltec and Nahuatl are non-Indoeuropean languages, and it seems unlikely that the word for “god” would be wired into all human brains. Yet teo is a clear cognate of the common Indoeuropean root for “god,” preserved, among other places, in the words “deity” and “theology.” The preferred hypotheses in this case are coincidence or diffusion. There is some evidence for pre-Columbian contact between the Old and New Worlds. But coincidence is also not to be taken lightly: if we compare two languages, each with tens of thousands of words, spoken by human beings with identical larynxes, tongues and teeth, it should not be surprising if a few words are coincidentally identical. Likewise, we should not be surprised if a few elements of a few legends are coincidentally identical. But I believe that all of the concordances Velikovsky produces can be explained away in this manner.
Let us take an example of Velikovsky’s approach to this question. He points to certain concordant stories, directly or vaguely connected with celestial events, that refer to a witch, a mouse, a scorpion or a dragon (pages 77, 264, 305, 306, 310). His explanation: divers comets, upon close approach to the Earth, were tidally or electrically distorted and gave the form of a witch, a mouse, a scorpion or a dragon, clearly interpretable as the same animal to culturally isolated peoples of very different backgrounds. No attempt is made to show that such a clear form-for example, a woman riding a broomstick and topped by a pointed hat-could have been produced in this way, even if we grant the hypothesis of a close approach to the Earth by a comet. Our experience with Rorschach and other psychological projective tests is that different people see the same nonrepresentational image in different ways. Velikovsky even goes so far as to believe that a close approach to the Earth by “a star” he evidently identifies with the planet Mars so distorted it that it took on the clear shape (page 264) of lions, jackals, dogs, pigs and fish; and in his opinion this explains the worship of animals by the Egyptians. This is not very impressive reasoning. We might just as well assume that the whole menagerie was capable of independent flight in the second millennium B.C. and be done with it. A much more likely hypothesis is diffusion. Indeed, I have in a different context spent a fair amount of time studying the dragon legends on the planet Earth, and I am impressed at how different these mythical beasts, all called dragons by Western writers, really are.
As another example, consider the argument of Chapter 8, Part 2 of Worlds in Collision. Veliko
vsky claims a world-wide tendency in ancient cultures to believe at various times that the year has 360 days, that the month has thirty-six days, and that the year has ten months. Velikovsky offers no justification in physics for this, but argues that ancient astronomers could hardly have been so poor at their trade as to slip five days each year or six days each lunation. Fairly soon the night would be brilliant with moonlight at the astrologically official new moon, snowstorms would be falling in July, and the astrologers would be hung by their ears. Having had some experience with modern astronomers, I am not as confident as Velikovsky is in the unerring computational precision of ancient astronomers. Velikovsky proposes that these aberrant calendrical conventions reflect real changes in the length of the day, month and/or year-and that they are evidence of close approaches to the Earth-Moon system by comets, planets and other celestial visitors.
There is an alternative explanation, which derives from the fact that there are not a whole number of lunations in a solar year, nor a whole number of days in a lunation. These incommensurabilities will be galling to a culture that has recently invented arithmetic but has not yet gotten as far as large numbers or fractions. As an inconvenience, these incommensurabilities are felt even today by religious Muslims and Jews who discover that Ramadan and Passover, respectively, occur from year to year on rather different days of the solar calendar. There is a clear whole-number chauvinism in human affairs, most easily discerned in discussing arithmetic with four-year-olds; and this seems to be a much more plausible explanation of these calendrical irregularities, if they existed.
Three hundred and sixty days a year provides an obvious (temporary) convenience for a civilization with base-60 arithmetic, as the Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian cultures. Likewise, thirty days per month or ten months per year might be attractive to enthusiasts of base-10 arithmetic. I wonder if we do not see here an echo of the collision between chauvinists of base-60 arithmetic and chauvinists of base-10 arithmetic, rather than a collision of Mars with Earth. It is true that the tribe of ancient astrologers may have been dramatically depleted as the various calendars rapidly slipped out of phase, but that was an occupational hazard, and at least it removed the mental agony of dealing with fractions. In fact, sloppy quantitative thinking appears to be the hallmark of this whole subject.
An expert on early time-reckoning (Leach, 1957) points out that in ancient cultures the first eight or ten months of the year are named, but the last few months, because of their economic unimportance in an agricultural society, are not. Our month December, named after the Latin decem, means the tenth, not the twelfth, month. (September = seventh, October = eighth, November = ninth, as well.) Because of the large numbers involved, prescientific peoples characteristically do not count days of the year, although they are assiduous in counting months. A leading historian of ancient science and mathematics, Otto Neugebauer (1957), remarks that, both in Mesopotamia and in Egypt, two separate and mutually exclusive calendars were maintained: a civil calendar whose hallmark was computational convenience, and a frequently updated agricultural calendar-messier to deal with, but much closer to the seasonal and astronomical realities. Many ancient cultures solved the two-calendar problem by simply adding a five-day holiday on at the end of the year. I hardly think that the existence of 360-day years in the calendrical conventions of prescientific peoples is compelling evidence that then there really were 360 rather than 365¼ rotations in one revolution of Earth about the Sun.
This question can, in principle, be resolved by examining coral growth rings, which are now known to show with some accuracy the number of days per month and the number of days per year, the former only for intertidal corals. There appears to be no sign of major excursions in recent times from the present number of days in a lunation or a year, and the gradual shortening (not lengthening) of the day and the month with respect to the year as we go back in time is found to be consistent with tidal theory and the conservation of energy and angular momentum within the Earth-Moon system, without appeal to cometary or other exogenous intervention.
Another problem with Velikovsky’s method is the suspicion that vaguely similar stories may refer to quite different periods. This question of the synchronism of legends is almost entirely ignored in Worlds in Collision, although it is treated in some of Velikovsky’s later works. For example (page 31), Velikovsky notes that the idea of four ancient ages terminated by catastrophe is common to Indian as well as to Western sacred writing. However, in the Bhagavad Gita and in the Vedas, widely divergent numbers of such ages, including an infinity of them, are given; but, more interesting, the duration of the ages between major catastrophes is specified (see, for example, Campbell, 1974) as billions of years. This does not match very well Velikovsky’s chronology, which requires hundreds or thousands of years. Here Velikovsky’s hypothesis and the data that purport to support it differ by a factor of about a million. Or (page 91) vaguely similar discussions of vulcanism and lava flows in Greek, Mexican and Biblical traditions are quoted. There is no attempt made to show that they refer to even approximately comparable times and, since lava has flowed in historical times in all three areas, no common exogenous event is necessary to interpret such stories.
Despite copious references, there also seem to me to be a large number of critical and undemonstrated assumptions in Velikovsky’s argument. Let me mention just a few of them. There is the very interesting idea that any mythological references by any people to any god that also corresponds to a celestial body represents in fact a direct observation of that celestial body. It is a daring hypothesis, although I am not sure what one is to do with Jupiter appearing as a swan to Leda, and as a shower of gold to Danaë. On page 247 the hypothesis that gods and planets are identical is used to date the time of Homer. In any case, when Hesiod and Homer refer to Athena being born full-grown from the head of Zeus, Velikovsky takes Hesiod and Homer at their word and assumes that the celestial body Athena was ejected by the planet Jupiter. But what is the celestial body Athena? Repeatedly it is identified with the planet Venus (Part 1, Chapter 9, and many other places in the text). One would scarcely guess from reading Worlds in Collision that the Greeks characteristically identified Aphrodite with Venus, and Athena with no celestial body whatever. What is more, Athena and Aphrodite were “contemporaneous” goddesses, both being born at the time Zeus was king of the gods. On page 251 Velikovsky notes that Lucian “is unaware that Athene is the goddess of the planet Venus.” Poor Lucian seems to be under the misconception that Aphrodite is the goddess of the planet Venus. But in the footnote on page 361 there appears to be a slip, and here Velikovsky for the first and only time uses the form “Venus (Aphrodite).” On page 247 we hear of Aphrodite, the goddess of the Moon. Who, then, was Artemis, the sister of Apollo the Sun, or, earlier, Selene? There may be good justification, for all I know, in identifying Athena with Venus, but it is far from the prevailing wisdom either now or two thousand years ago, and it is central to Velikovsky’s argument. It does not increase our confidence in the presentation of less familiar myths when the celestial identification of Athena is glossed over so lightly.
Other critical statements which are given extremely inadequate justification, and which are central to one or more of Velikovsky’s major themes, are: the statement (page 283) that “Meteorites, when entering the earth’s atmosphere, make a frightful din,” when they are generally observed to be silent; the statement (page 114) that “a thunderbolt, when striking a magnet, reverses the poles of the magnet”; the translation (page 51) of “Barad” as meteorites; and the contention (page 85) “as is known, Pallas was another name for Typhon.” On page 179 a principle is implied that when two gods are hyphenated in a joint name, it indicates an attribute of a celestial body-as, for example, Ashteroth-Karnaim, a horned Venus, which Velikovsky interprets as a crescent Venus and evidence that Venus was once close enough to Earth to have its phases discernible to the naked eye. But what does this principle imply, for example, for the god Ammon-Ra?
Did the Egyptians see the sun (Ra) as a ram (Ammon)?
There is a contention (page 63) that instead of the tenth plague of Exodus killing the “first born” of Egypt, what is intended is the killing of the “chosen.” This is a rather serious matter and at least raises the suspicion that where the Bible is inconsistent with Velikovsky’s hypothesis, Velikovsky retranslates the Bible. The foregoing queries may all have simple answers, but the answers are not to be found easily in Worlds in Collision.
I do not mean to suggest that all of Velikovsky’s legendary concordances and ancient scholarship are similarly flawed, but many of them seem to be, and the remainder may well have alternative, for example diffusionist, origins.
With the situation in legend and myth as fuzzy as this, any corroboratory evidence from other sources would be welcomed by those who support Velikovsky’s argument. I am struck by the absence of any confirming evidence in art. There is a wide range of paintings, bas-reliefs, cylinder seals and other objets d’art produced by humanity and going back to at least 10,000 B.C. They represent all of the subjects, especially mythological subjects, important to the cultures that created them. Astronomical events are not uncommon in such works of art. Recently (Brandt, et al., 1974), impressive evidence has been uncovered in cave paintings in the American Southwest of contemporary observations of the Crab Supernova event of the year 1054, which was also recorded in Chinese, Japanese and Arab annals. Appeals have been made to archaeologists for information on cave painting representations of the earlier Gum Supernova (Brandt, et al., 1971). But supernova events are not nearly so impressive as the close approach of another planet with attendant interplanetary tendrils and lightning discharges connecting it to Earth. There are many unflooded caves at high altitudes, distant from the sea. If the Velikovskian catastrophes occurred, why are there no contemporary graphic records of them?