In 1946 the author completed his second book, which would be published first, in 1950. In 1949, in the preface, he warns that man who had always had godlike pretensions was on the verge of nuclear destruction. The publisher faced such pressure from academia, including threats to cancel text book orders, that he had to go to a second publisher. The knives of the priests of lie craft came out and Velikovsky was not permitted to rebut any charges in science journals.
In his first preface, he named himself a heretic, and never had the text redone to address any charges or any mistakes, wanting to see how his work held up against the many new scientific findings that most scientists thought would not happen, as having split the atom, they had achieved godhood. He notes that this act, was merely a use “of a few of the bricks of which the universe is built,” for man’s own purposes.
In the preface to the recent edition, an editor of Paradigma Limited, states that the author of World in Collision was “harshly punished by members of the scientific establishment,” and that his work was placed in a “purposeful oblivion.”
What was hilarious, though never corrected, about the charges, was that Velikovsky used Hesiod’s account of Venus being an unrelated and late-coming deity as a clue to that planet’s weird nature in all cosmologies. He predicted that Venus would be much hotter than the science of 1949 predicted [only 7 degrees above earth temperature] and that it would be found to have either no rotation or a slow retrograde rotation, both of which were proven by probes in the early 1960s. In fact, the temperature on Venus proved to be more than 100 times hotter than the best science had predicted. The ancients, once again, were proved right.
I regard this work as one of scientifically-informed comparative mythology and investigation. For an amateur researcher looking into a few certain regions, having had an obsessive professional scouring the world record for common threads is a great help. Further, in a world where science has lied to us obsessively since the mid 1980s, a campaign that intensified to a science hysteria in 2020, it is nice to see a scientist taking historical records before the newspaper [1] era at face value.
He named himself a heretic for going against Newtonian and Darwinian Law in 1949. Then in 1965, declared, that the few retractions claimed he merely had an unusual intuition rather than a use, rather than worship of, science. To this he declared, that he must therefore by charged as well with “sorcery, not only of heresy.”
In the body of his work, in the first section, the author demonstrates that no aspect of the solar system, from the moons, to the planets, the short and long period comets, held to any of the theories ascribed to their actions and origins. He methodically demonstrates that science had not one satisfactory explanation for the origins or actions of the sun, the planets, comets, orbits, or of planetary densities, sizes, processions and orbital bodies.
Further, he assess the reigning slow motion and erosion theories of geology and Darwinian evolution and finds these grotesquely wanting. Even Newton’s Laws are found wanting, and in one major case not even explained by the author, who did write primarily on religious matters. There are many theories masquerading as laws, that are mere educated guesses. When these are contradicted by Facts, he notes that facts should be taken over laws, in particular such laws as have internal contradictions that disprove themselves.
On man’s puny position in the cosmos he notes that this being inhabits: “a third [planet] in the row,” of a small, young sun, and that man has fancied himself in many guises as the “Prince of Creation” and “has felt godly long before he could talk to his fellow men on the other side of the globe,” and that now he would soon possess the means of destroying that globe. I would suspect that science came after its rogue practitioner for failing to worship the fraternity, on account of his doubting the unique godliness of Atomic America.
Perhaps it was due to his naming modern scientific man as “homo Ignoramus” that he struck a contentious chord with his fellows. He warns against “sacred law in science,” of man claiming to know all when science could not explain mountains to its own satisfaction, let alone why the Bronze Age came before the Iron Age, how the massive Andean monuments came to be built, how mammoths with undigested food in their mouths frozen in blocks of ice so perfectly as to be eaten by sled dogs in the 1790s, came to their state of preservation, and how the Ice Ages actually came and went.
Finding the mechanics for all of the planetary sciences of his day wanting, and proven right often in the intervening age of ignorance despite means, Velikovsky admitted to be leaving a barely inventoried trove of “amazing questions for the future reader of earth’s riddles.”
The ancient astronomers of many nations declared that Venus or Aphrodite came lately to the dance of planets, that she was an adulteress, wed to Science [2] lover to Mars. Should it surprise us that her night side is hotter than that facing the sun?
The defamed Doctor used the Bible, Herodotus and myriad sources attempting to fill in the cataclysmic past of our shared garden-like delusion. It is of great interest, to have listened to pulp horror/fantasy Writer Clark Ashton Smith an hour earlier, who spoke through a learned acolyte of an ancient earth, who had finally learned enough in service to his master to glimpse his own doom, when he spun these words:
“And many but nameless are the visitants who have come to us… In my master’s marble house I have written.”
-The Double Shadow
That a pulp writer of a hundred years ago understands more of science than our so called scientists, is quite an indictment of man’s haughty belief that he can delve for, capture, and control every aspect of the unknown—and above all, that there is no unknowable, no omniscience beyond Holy Science.
I read Worlds in Collision as a youth and as a young man, and turned away from the text when a college man told me it was bunk. Since I have since discovered that college learning is mere indoctrination that prevents actual self-learning, I have returned to the old book as a meditating mirror upon the epics, myths and histories of the ancients.
Thanks, Mrs. Lockhart for the audio version.
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Notes
-1. Newspaper writing is structurally hyperbolic, deceptive and obfuscating all at the same time and has disabled most modern and post modern readers from extracting useful information from the written word in general. The honesty of pre Newspaper Era authors in placing blame upon their own faith or race or nation, and the plunge into jingoistic afterthought pretending to be inquiry since, has rendered most modern history mute, and as well struck the reader deaf.
-2. Hephasteus, or Vulcan, maker of the Shield of Achilles [Homeric totem of Civilization itself] and reluctant jailer of Prometheus.
