“My oath to Hypocrates” declared the clinical psychiatrist who had actually worked with Freud, Jung, and Professor Oigon Boiler, the dean of that dubious medical field in the 1920s and 30s, required him to try and convince humanity that it shared a collective subconscious. He, Velikovsky passed on November 17 of 1979 at age 84, this work still unpublished. He had wished dearly to have his work on collective amnesia published in advance of nuclear war. “Mankind in amnesia has not only to do with the past, as in my other books, but with the future.” The Inability of people to consider the overwhelming evidence and catastrophe, he suggests is a defensive mechanism of the mass mind, of “suppressing racial memories.”
Velikovsky discusses dervishes, auto hypnosis, hypnosis, telekinises, remote viewing and even man’s “house he calls soul,” from the perspective of physical sciences. This began when, as a post-doctorate student in Berlin and Zurich in the 1920s and 30s, he posited that such conditions as epilepsy would be found to have physical causes. Velikovsky’s theories on the brain were proved correct when means to measure these things with instruments were developed.
Another foundation of this thinking was a primitive collective mind in man’s primitive stages, similar to the migration of young birds, the collective work of bees and ants and the actions of animals herds and packs, also in “the human herd, the mass.” Velikovsky further discusses shoaling of fish and the stampeding of normally antagonistic species of animals, together from natural events, which was discussed by Hesiod in Works and Days [2], writing at the time of one of the cosmic disasters Velikovsky charts in Worlds in Collision.
V cites his correspondence with Freud and Jung, who both lost their minds in various ways, with Freud seemingly bat-shit crazy from the outset. As in his other latter book, In the Beginning, in which he has letter exchanges with Einstein, who proves himself a fraud in that exchange [indeed the theory of relativity was ripped off of a German scientist of the late 1800s], Velikovsky’s records of discussions with the recognized fathers of 20th Century Science are enlightening. [1]
Freud descended into depraved cave man theories of incest and patricide, and Jung went the Far Eastern cosmic rout, both side-stepping the uncomfortable question of racial memory, Jung orbiting the truth and Freud putting his head in the sewer.
Propaganda: The Public Mind in the Making [0] published in 1928 by Freud’s nephew, which disgusted Freud, was close to Velikovsky’s collective subconscious. Vee would have been better served consulting Spengler in university, [1] but that scholar was passed by the time he was making his ranging inquires.
“If we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors,” that our powers of reasoning are just tools, often employed to protect us through diverted understanding from a truth we cannot handle. Religious and ideological “dogma is a way of replacing the natural collective unconscious… a protective wall of sacred images.”
A reading of Hesiod has taught me that V’s investigation, which fried the brains of many modern scientists and caused a crusade among frustrated skeptics, was well understood by the ancient poet, who spoke directly of the powers that modern religions and ethos’, to include “science” obscures with and without intent.
V goes on to discuss the fact, that he knew, as demonstrated in the first edition of World’s in Collision, that his charting of the world of cataclysms past would cause an emotional backlash from the scientific establishment, which it did. What surprised V, was that people who had, and had not, read this work, immediately occupied two warring camps: one the modern doctrine of Uniformity, the gradual world evolution, and the other the traditional view of cataclysmic action. He had expected to be called a heretic, knowing what scientists have generally denied, that they were the collective architects of a mechanistic religion, a faith in a Promethean becoming. What surprised him was how believers in his theory, even those who had not read his book, took up his cause with crusading zeal!
This polarity, of action and reaction, is the collective emotional axis along which the making and management of the modern mass mind is based on. It is the logic of movie narratives and of military and law enforcement indoctrination, of good guy vs bad guy, us versus them, and the denial of a gray area between the white and black divide. The American two party system is evolved from this emotive male/female split in the mind which has been nurtured by the psychotic American obsession with spectacting at team sporting events and the splitting of the electorate by sex and race, contrary to the fabric of traditional democratic societies, which evolved as and maintained themselves as ethnically homogeneous bodies of voting men. This collective unconscious, which flinches at the prospect of recalling ancient disasters that nearly wiped out the race, has been harnessed by our masters for our herd management.
The Good Earth
“The dogmatic opposition to the heliocentric view of the earth,” proposed by Aristotle was maintained by the Christen Church for a thousand years. V’s chilling overview of the solar system, and a view of the galaxy, which causes the author to actually consider divine protection for earth, is postulated as too fearful for most of mankind to confront directly.
Aristotle on Poetics, where the architect of the earth centric cosmology, discusses the desirable structure of a tragedy, gives Doctor V a fine point of discussion. Aristotle, who lived only 300 years after meteor storms, fire storms and hurricanes changed the very orbit of the earth and lengthened the year, “the huge earth groaned” sang Hesiod at the time of this disaster. Yet Aristotle on tragedy, suggests that when bad things happen to a protagonist, that the character should not be overly innocent, or overly bad, but normal, not having caused through their actions the terrible happening. This, V points out, seems to have been an emotional shield, an aegis [storm-shield] of play composition.
Fate and Will [1] are not compatible in most individuals and rarely in the mass mind, which is more of the vegan herd mentality, where the Willful action tends to be a more predacious impulse. Hence, mass movements predicated on the triumph of human will, have been doomed from early times.
Once by Water, Twice by Fire, [2] the human world was nearly extinguished, yet the mass mind has developed “delusions” which are varied emotional states of mind, in terms of their character. For instance, modern man suffers from a delusion that rights are real, that rights exist and have power. Hesiod in Works and Days discusses how violent actors are often suffering from delusions, this being the delusion that they have ultimate power, when in fact their petty violations against even weaker persons were merely cloaking their own powerlessness before the powers of heaven and earth.
When the Cyclopeans agree to help Prometheus help Zeus in his battle against the Titans, Prometheus, Forethought, is credited by them with their deliverance from ruin and their reemergence under the sun. We are not Promethean but Epimethean; Afterthinking.
“We were brought up in a deception—in the self assurance that nothing earth-shaking can happen to us.”
Our forgetting it collectively, according to Doctor V, is in part a collective repression of a terrible racial memory.
The Five-Pointed Star worn by the millions of soldiers of the three competing nuclear powers of China, Russia and America, is suggested as a meditation on the nuclear brink, for that five-pointed star was a symbol of power ever since a comet or planet caused great havoc in about 1400 B.C. and again in the time of Homer, Hesiod and Hezekiah and Isiah.
We shy from the numerous accounts of antiquity by reflex, and so are of a nature that begs to be misinformed by the current makers and shakers of our public mind.
Notes
-0. ‘Our Minds Molded’: On Steerage: Impressions of Propaganda by Edward L. Bernays
-1. The Idea of Destiny and the Principle of Causality: The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler
-2. Hesiod Theogony, Works and Days, the Shield of Herakles
