The Age of Catastrophe
/Up until the publication of Sir Charles Lyell’s grand work on the Principles of Geology in 1830,[1] geologists held that the earth had been convulsed, in the not-too-distant past, by immense forces, orders of magnitude greater than those acting today. The upheavals had caused the sea to transgress over land and vice versa not once but several times. Early geologists, in a word, were catastrophists. They held that the earth’s violent motions had produced prodigious quantities of heat; that thousands of cubic miles of water had evaporated from the oceans and re-precipitated, after cooling, into torrential rains that had washed millions of tons of soil into the sea; that the earth’s rotational axis had repeatedly tilted, on occasions causing the poles to change place with one another, etc. What such early geologists could not do was to assign a reasonable cause for their catastrophes: no force originating from within the earth could possibly cause its upturning.[2] Lyell and Hutton had a more plausible case: there was never anything like a catastrophe. The surface of the earth had been “sandpapered,” as it were, by forces acting here and now but acting for a very, very long time, millions of years in fact. This explanation captured the imagination of the public in general and of the professional geologists in particular, and has held sway ever since.
By the end of the 19th century the uniformitarian school had won the day, despite adopting the worst historical method: reading the past in terms of the present, without justifying why. If no good historian judges, say, the 15th century A.D. in terms of the 20th, by what inversion of standards would he be justified in so doing with the 15th century B.C.?
In 1915 Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) threw a spanner in the works of uniformitarian geology, which despite initial hostility refused to go away: the theory of continental drift. It postulated that the crust of the earth is not rigid, that the continents were united at some time in the past, whence they separated to occupy their present geographical position. Before this, historical geology had developed a neat scheme of things based on the evolutionary paradigm, still accepted. Geological time was elegantly divided into Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic and Contemporary Eras. Each era was further subdivided into periods named after some ancient tribes or places where a characteristic rock was first found. Uniformity required all the divisions to have happened little by little: the rise of an imposing range of fold-mountains such as the Andes or the Himalayas went up inch-by-slow-inch over hundreds of millions of years.
The more geological knowledge progressed, however, and the further away from Europe geologists investigated, the less the principle of uniformity could explain observed features. The rocks representing eras were found too often in an inverted sequence (e.g. Heart Mountain of Wyoming); Middle Devonian rocks were found resting directly on Middle Silurian rocks without intermediaries (Jeffersonville limestone-Louisville limestone); fossils were found in strata where they did not belong; and fossils thought extinct were found very much alive, like the Coelacanth, the tuatara lizard;[3] etc.
When pressed for details, uniformitarians are at a loss to explain mountain-building, geosynclines, petroleum, glaciation, dissected plateaux (Ethiopia), dead corals at latitude 78ºN, volcanism, continental uplift, mineral deposits, salt mines, granite, etc. Professional geologists have been aware of this for a long time. In 1948 one of them wrote:
Because of the sterility of its concepts, historical geology, which includes paleontology and stratigraphy, has become static and unproductive. Current methods of delimiting intervals of time, which are the fundamental units of historical geology, and of establishing chronology, are of dubious validity. Worse than that, the criteria of correlation – the attempts to equate in time, or synchronize the geological history of one area with that of another – are logically vulnerable ... The findings of historical geology are suspect because the principles upon which they are based are either inadequate, in which case they should be reformulated, or false, in which case they should be discarded. Most of us refuse to discard or reformulate, and the result is the present deplorable state of our discipline.[4]
VELIKOVSKY'S PLANET GODS
Two years after this was written, a veritable bombshell exploded in the face of geologists, astronomers, paleontologists, historians and geographers, leaving deeply embedded pieces of shrapnel yet to be removed. The bombshell was the publication, in 1950, of Worlds in Collision by Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979) who, like Sir William Herschel, was an outsider to the scientific community. This time the reaction was not one of muted acceptance, like that of the 1780s astronomers, but one of outraged fury. The fever pitch reached such heights that MacMillan, his publishers, were threatened with total boycott of their textbooks if they continued publishing Worlds in Collision. The blackmail succeeded. The rights were sold to Doubleday, who continue to register a steady revenue from the book.
Velikovsky was covered with contumely (and still is) but his ghost, like Wegener’s, refuses to go away. What Worlds in Collision did was to revive the supposedly dead theory of catastrophism. Not only is it still in print, but the geological and astronomical research of the past 65 years, including space research, has added more ammunition to the ordnance of the growing crowd of neo-catastrophists.
Why did that book cause such a stir? Because it gave startling and unexpected answers to many questions, which for the best part of the last 300 years had been drifting apart and entombed, as it were, in the closets of different disciplines. Velikovsky’s train of thought can be best summarized into the following questions and answers.
Q. What shaped the surface of the earth as we see it?
A. Catastrophes did.
Q. What caused these catastrophes?
A. The gods did.
Q. Who were the gods?
A. The planets, mainly Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and Mars, plus another one that disintegrated in a cosmic collision.
Q. How do we know all this?
A. Because the ancient sources of the histories of all nations tell us. We call these stories “myths” for having lost the key to their meaning. The catastrophes have left their signature not only on earth, but also on the surfaces of all the planets involved.
Q. But how could the planets cause all these upheavals from such enormous distances?
A. They are enormously distant now, but formerly, until they settled into the present cosmic order, their orbits occasionally intersected, repeatedly upsetting and convulsing the Earth.
Q. And when did the solar system settle into the present cosmic order?
A. About the end of the 8th and the beginning of the 7th century B.C.
There is a unanimous tradition in the history of the world transcending all cultural boundaries, but largely unexamined to this day out of overspecialization, faulty education and mental inertia, alone or together. It is the tradition of the age of cosmic catastrophes.
Whether one peruses the histories of the Middle East, Far East, the Americas, Africa or anywhere else, ancient sources unfailingly tell the same tale: our Earth was repeatedly shaken, overturned, singed, scarred and flooded by close passages of the ancient gods, namely the planets of the Solar System. Until the close of the 8th and beginning of the 7th century B.C., i.e. Isaiah’s times, they occupied orbits that brought them threateningly close to the Earth, and the forecasting of which was the main occupation of seers, astrologers and wise men, not to mention kings, emperors and army chieftains, who waited for the passing of the god to unleash their military campaigns, thus adding their violent exploits to that of whatever cosmic body was approaching.[5] Whenever one of these disturbances affected the Earth, it upset its balance to the point of overturning it. They scorched, flooded it, bolted it with cosmic electric discharges, pelted it with asteroid and other cosmic junk, and shook it to its very core with earthquakes orders of magnitude greater than those experienced today. Continents rose and sank, primeval forests burned and on being buried by sediments turned into coal and oil, rocks melted, oceans evaporated and the water re-precipitated as torrential rain. Unsurprisingly, large sections of mankind were destroyed, together with large populations of animals and plants of all kinds: what we call “fossils” are in fact their remains embedded in solidified sedimentary rocks.
LIVING RECORDS
This is the kernel of the neo-catastrophist’s argument. Such phenomena as mountain building, overthrusts, volcanism, and a whole gamut of geological puzzles still unexplained in terms of uniformity, were suddenly brought within history. Man was now a living witness of all these upheavals, leaving records, even written, some still extant: we can read them, and with the right key we can interpret and understand them.
In such a scenario there is no room for evolution. The millions of years with which geologists have decorated their texts since Hutton and Lyell were swept away, as it were, in one single deft movement, not unlike that of a magician’s removing a table cloth while leaving all the crockery and cutlery in place. What is more, the neo-catastrophist view cuts across a number of apparently unrelated disciplines. In one breathtaking sweep it welds together mythology, physical geography, ancient history, archaeology, astronomy and many other subjects, each of which had, over the years, built up its own paradigm oblivious of, or at variance with, the rest.
Whether it was a practical result of Velikovsky’s book is difficult to say, but in the 20 years 1950-70 Wegener’s heresy became accepted orthodoxy. Every geography textbook sports Wegener’s theory of plate tectonics: the original land mass Pangaea was first split into northern Laurasia and southern Gondwanaland; a second event split Laurasia into North America and Eurasia, and Gondwanaland into South America, Africa, India (a moving island at the time), while Antarctica-Australia remained a single continent. A third movement united the two Americas, smashed India into the Asian continent uplifting the Himalayas, and separated Australia from Antarctica, shoving it into its present island-continent position.
All this, however, is still anchored to the uniformitarian time-scale, so that it is supposed to have happened 180 million years ago for the first split, 135 for the drifting, 65 for the second splitting and 20 or so for the last. It took 55 years for the scientific establishment to accept Wegener. Evidence is mounting now that,[6] while still reviling Velikovsky officially, the same establishment is slowly incorporating his views into the scientific paradigm: it is now accepted orthodoxy that the dinosaurs were wiped out by some cosmic collision, but again, zillions of years ago. The catastrophes are relegated to such wonderfully distant past that nobody notices (I stand to be corrected) that there is an uncanny correspondence between the four geological eras developed last century and the four configurations of the earth masses developed since Wegener.
Myth, the Concise Oxford Dictionary informs us, is a “Traditional narrative usually involving supernatural or fancied persons etc. and embodying popular ideas on natural or social phenomena etc.; allegory (Platonic myth); fictitious person or thing or idea.” What the C.O.D. does not say is that the body of myth, globally and without exception, reports the same story, namely a story of upheavals, or cosmological discontinuities, agreeing on substance but differing in detail, and of course in the names given to those “supernatural or fancied persons’ of the “myth” narrative. I will not attempt to repeat here even one of these stories; they can be read in works like Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology; here I start by unconventionally redefining myth as “Narrative of traditional cosmogony, cosmology and early history in anthropomorphic key, the meaning of which has been obscured by lack of understanding and excessive specialization.” The contents of the Larousse Encyclopedia reveal a pattern:
All myths unanimously mention cosmic upheavals repeatedly interrupting the course of history, each interval between upheavals being termed “World Age”; they differ as to how many ages there have been and when.
At different locations but at the same time, 7th-6th centuries B.C. there appear what we may call “rationalizers” who replaced the faith in the ancient gods with the powerful instrument of rational inquiry. The early Greek philosophers in the west, Zoroaster in Persia, Buddha in India, Lao Tze in China, and the first emperor Temmu in Japan are contemporaries. The transition from the faith in the ancient gods to the new world order was not always pacific, vide the expulsion of Buddha from India. The Japanese smooth transition from the heavenly to the political order repeats, centuries later, what had happened in Egypt in the times of Menes the first human ruler of the land of Mizraim son of Ham (whether Mizraim and Menes were one and the same person can be argued, but not here).
Western civilization was the first to lose intellectual contact with its own mythological roots. On imposing itself on other civilizations, it either made fun of their traditions, or made war on them, forcing these people into ridiculing what they had always held sacred. Hence conflict, persecution, misunderstandings, war and the rest.
Before inserting the myths into where they belong, let me remark upon an additional “coincidence” between the World Ages and what we have already seen. All mythologies agree that there were four World Ages; some add one or two minor ones.
If man has existed as long as the earth, he must have left records of it, both written and unwritten. And sure he has, but uniformitarian dogma and the reluctance of official science to rid itself of the sacred cows Hutton and Lyell, have caused written records to be misread or pooh-poohed and the archaeological ones either re-interpreted in uniformitarian key, or unceremoniously swept under the carpet when proved intractable. An exhaustive list is impossible, but the most significant data should be enough to induce readers to take their mythology more seriously than “scientific” dicta resting on no more than academic authority.
[…]
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Footnotes:
[1] Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Everyman p.294
[2] Catastrophe is Greek for upturning. I will use the term in this restricted sense from now on, and the term cataclysm as a transgression of ocean waters over land following a catastrophe.
[3] These and dozens of more examples can be found in The Genesis Flood, by Whitcomb and Morris, The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, Philadelphia 1964 pp.172 ff.
[4] Robin S. Allen, Geological Correlation and Palaeontology, in Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, Vol.59 January 1948 p.2. Quoted by Whitcomb & Morris, op. cit. p.170
[5] The works of Immanuel Velikovsky can be found at www.varchive.org.
[6] There was no internet when this article was first drafted in 1997.
[7] Histories, II 142
[8] Worlds In Collision, Chapter East and West
[9] The Statesman, quote to be completed.
[10] Timaeus, 43 B and C
[11] The City of God, XVIII 12. Emphasis added.
[12] The City of God, XVIII 13
[13] S. Th. I Q.1 a.10
[14] Exposition on the Book of Psalms
[15] Mt.24:29
[16] Is.13:10-13
[17] Commentary to Mt. 24:29
[18] The Guide For the Perplexed, quoted by Velikovsky, op.cit. p.216
[19] Lk.17:27-28. Emphasis added
[20] Critias 112a
[21] Personal observation: I saw hundreds of miniature earth pillars after exceptional heavy rains in the year 1977.
[22] This is not the place to expose such trends.
[23] The Glacial Nightmare and the Flood. A second appeal to common sense from the extravagance of some recent Geology. Sampson Low, Marston & Co. London 1892 Vol.I p.xiv-xv. Emphases added.
[24] Comyns Beaumont, The Riddle of Prehistoric Britain, Rider & Co. 1945
[25] The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover Publications, New York 1974
[26] Secrets of the Lost Races, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis/New York 1977
[27] The Sourcebook Project, Glen Arm, Maryland 21057
[28] Youtube channels are rich in such material.
[29] Joshua 10:12-13
[30] The City of God XXI, 6
[31] Confessions, 11, 14
[32] A Reading of the Pyramid Texts, in Pensée III 1 1973 p.15
[33] The translation is Velikovsky's. The Douay has `And he shall continue with the sun, and before the moon, throughout all generations.' Knox: `Ageless as sun or moon he shall endure.' Neither of these matches the contents of the subsequent verses as well as Velikovsky's translation.
[34] R.K.Harrison, Archaeology of the Old Testament, E.U.P. p.18
[35] National Geographic Magazine, January 1993
[36] Nature, January 26 (271, 345; 1978)
[37] The Chinese Classics, translated & annotated by J.Legge, Hong Kong Ed. III Pt. I, 125. Quoted by Velikovsky, World in Collision p.228
[38] Egyptian Architecture, quoted by Velikovsky in The Orientation of the Pyramids in Pensée III, 1973
[39] National Geographic Magazine, January 1951 p.42
[40] Jewish Antiquities I, IV, 2. Emphasis added.
[41] I, 178
[42] Jewish Antiquities I, III, 9
[43] Gen. 14:3
[44] Jewish Antiquities I, III, 9 v. The Cosmic Fragment, quoted by Stanley Jaki in Science and Creation p.107
[45] Acts 7:42-43
[46] Antiquities of the Jews, I, VII, 1. Emphasis added.
[47] Deut 17: 2-5. Emphasis added.
[48] J.P. Arendzen, article BABYLONIA in Catholic Encyclopedia, New York 1913 Vol.II p.188d
[49] J.P.Arendzen, loc.cit.
[50] This is the thesis of Stanley L. Jaki in his Science and Creation, Scottish Academic Press 1986
[51] The City of God, XII 13
