Velikovsky’s “UFO”
Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.
“Polymath” Immanuel Velikovsky, derided by academia and science, is a kind of idol for me; his eccentric speculations, that incense formal intellectuals, get an empathetic nod from me, which will incur the wrath of those who imbibe on things that put scholars in their ivory towers (for which Aristophanes penned his comedy The Clouds).
Velikovsky’s incendiary and debunked “masterpiece" Worlds in Collision is said to be the last hurrah of the erroneous “catastrophists,” those who contended that the Earth and its neighbors were arranged and deranged by catastrophes.
(Today, some astronomers slide into a catastrophic mode when they discuss how the Earth’s moon came to be, along with other speculations that mimic Velikovsky’s hypotheses.)
While there seems to be controversies about Velikovsky’s renderings of ancient myths, his observations and cataloguing of the astronomical observations of antiquity are often without equal.
Let me zero in on Velikovsky’s partiality for Venus, as observed and interpreted by the ancients, which he imbues with heft in his magnum opus beginning in earnest in Chapter 8, Part I of the 1965 Delta paperback publication [Page 153].
Velikovsky maintained that Venus was a comet expelled from Jupiter, and since that hypothesis is dramatically wavered by astronomers, I won’t deal with it here, but, rather, take up the abundance of descriptive sightings of Venus from antiquity that Velikovsky used to augment his “theory.”
Like many in the UFO community who ascribe flying saucer sightings, especially the air-ship sightings of the late 19th Century (1896 in particular), to the planet Venus, Velikovsky attributed early historical sightings of strange observations in the skies as the planet.
Velikovsky cites the Bible and ancient records and/or myths voluminously to make his point that Venus was seen as comet-like by astute observers of the night and morning skies.
“During the centuries when Venus was a comet, it had a tail. [Early Mexican tradition] written down in pe-Columbian days, relate that Venus smoked …la estrella que humeava, was Sitlae choloha, which the Spaniards call Venus. [Worlds in Collision, Page 163]
“It is also said in the Vedas that the star Venus looks like fire with smoke. Apparently, the star had a tail, dark in the daytime, and luminous at night. In very concrete form this luminous tail … is mentioned in the Talmud in the Tractate Shabbat: ‘Fire is hanging down from the planet Venus.’
“This phenomenon was described by the Chaldeans. Venus was said to have a beard.
“Venus, with its glowing train, was a very brilliant body … the Chaldeans described it as a ‘bright torch of heaven.”
“The Hebrews similarly described the planet: ‘The brilliant light of Venus blazes from one end of the cosmos to the other end.’” [op. cit. Page 163 ff.]
Velikovsky finishes Chapter 8 describing how ancients saw Venus with horns, the apparent phases of the planet (its crescent).
“Sanchoniathon says that Astarte (Venus) had a bull’s head. The planet was even called Ashteroth-Karnaim, or Astarte of the Horns …
“The Egyptians similarly pictured the planet and worshipped it in the effigy of a bull …
“The people of faraway Samoa, primitive tribes that depend on oral tradition as they have no art of writing, repeat to this day, ‘The planet Venus became wild and horns grew out of her head …
“Because the astronomical works of antiquity have so much to say about the horns of Venus, modern scholars have asked themselves whether the Babylonians could have seen the phases of Venus, which cannot now be distinguished with the naked eye; Galileo saw them for the first time in modern history when he used his telescope.” [italics mine, ibid Pages 166/167]
Velikovsky cites a text – Schaumberger, “Die Hörner der Venus” in Kugler, Sternkunde, 3rd Supplement, pp. 302 ff.: “It is well known that not a few passages in the cuneiform texts on astrology speak of the right or left horn of Venus. It was deduced that the phases of Venus were observed already by the Babylonians and that Galileo, in the sixteenth century, was not the first to see them.” [ibid, Page 167]
In Chapter, Velikovsky provides readers with the ancient writings offering the origins of Venus, its birth or creation, this to support his theory that Venus erupted from Jupiter and wasn’t part of the celestial scheme of things, the creation of the planets and Solar System:
“In every country of the ancient world we can trace cosmological myths of the birth of the planet Venus.” [ibid, Page 168]
Some of the myths are fascinating.
For instance, Velokovsky writes that “In the Iliad it is said that Pallas Athene [Venus] ‘darted down to earth a gleaming star’ with sparks springing from it …” [Page 169]
“The birth of Athene [Venus] was assigned to the middle of the second millennium. Augustine wrote: ‘Minerva [Athene] is reported to have appeared …. In the time of Ogyges.’ This statement is found in The City of God.” [Page 171]
“Under the weight of many arguments, I came to the conclusion – about which I no longer have any doubt – that it was the planet Venus, at the time still a comet, that caused the catastrophe of the days of Exodus.” [Page 173]
In Chapter 10 Velikosky deals with the “irregular” movements of Venus.
He cites the library of Assurbanipal, the Babylonian-Assyrian astrological texts, and the Hindu tables of the movements of the planets, among others, to show that records of Venus were corrupted, “The details referring to Venus … are very difficult to unriddle. No attention at all was paid to the actual movements [of Venus] in the sky.” [Page 200]
“The Babylonians did not note these irregular movements merely as matters of factual interest; they were dismayed by them.” [ibid]
Harking back to Page 158, there is this:
“From the book of Marcus Varro, entitled Of the Race of the Roman People. I cite word for word the following instance: ‘There occurred a remarkable celestial portent; for Caesar records that in the brilliant star Venus, called Vesperugo by Plautus, and the lovely Hesperus by Homer, there occurred so strange a prodigy, that it changed its color, size, form, course, which never happened before nor since.” [bold print mine]
Of course the book is filled with a plethora of examples where Venus is seen rising and falling and moving in the night and daytime skies.
Velikovsky, obsessed with his theory of Venus as a cometary birth didn’t see – even though he was writing his thesis during the flying saucer heyday – that what the ancients were seeing and recording was a recurring UFO.
Now I’m not going to fall into the trap of writing that here we have support for the Ancient Astronaut/Alien suggestions. Though one may be able to make a case for ET visitations being responsible for the Venus myths and records, I’m not inclined, as you know, to see visitors from outer space as the causal factor for such eminent records.
What we have in the records presented by Velikovsky is the possibility that what was seen in the ancient skies was not Venus, the planet but, rather, a UFO or UFOs circumnavigating the ancient world, the nature of the UFO(s) unknown then as now.
Velikovsky was not inclined to see his Venus data as evidence of a UFO because he was excited to create a theory of catastrophic formation of the solar system and its family of planets and moons.
And when he recounts that scholars are inquisitive about how early man could discern the phases (crescent) of Venus when the phases are virtually impossible to see today, without optical help, he offers support for the idea that some people today, who think some UFO sightings are actually a perception of Venus, are intriguingly flawed.
Jupiter (the larger light) and Venus (as it is normally seen):
Velikovsky is fascinating, not for his catastrophic theory but, for his accumulation of ancient texts that add to our understanding of mankind’s mind-set in antiquity, which is hardly different than the mind-set of mankind today, especially that of ufologists.
RR
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Friday, December 21, 2018
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