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Immanuel Velikovsky (June 10, 1895 – November 17, 1979). Although, earlier in his life, he played a role in the founding of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was a respected psychiastrist/psychoanalyst (he was a pupil of Stekel), Velikovsky is best known as the author of a number of controversial books (particularly the US bestseller Worlds in Collision [1950]).
These primarily used comparative mythology and ancient literary sources (not least the Bible) to propose that the Earth had suffered catastophic close-contacts with other planets in the solar system (principly Venus and Mars), during and before recorded history. He argued that electromagnetic effects played an important role in celestial mechanics. He also proposed a revised chronology of Ancient Egypt, Greece, Palestine and the Near East, aiming to eliminate so-called Dark Ages and reconcile Biblical history with both archeology and Egpytian chronology.
Generally, Velikovsky's theories were vigorously rejected by the academic community, but despite, or perhaps because of this, Velikovsky's books sold well. (Indeed, the dubious conduct of the academics played into Velikovsky's hands, allowing him to use the 'suppressed genius' card to rally his laymen supporters, likening himself to martyred Renaissance scientist/heretic Giordano Bruno.) Controversy continues to this day, with refutation and counter-refutation, and ongoing claims of both rebuttal and substantiation.
Biography
He was born in Vitebsk in what is today Belarus. He learned several languages as a child, performed exceptionally well in Russian and mathematics at the Medvednikov Gymnasium after moving to Moscow, and graduated with a gold medal in 1913. He then travelled to Europe, visiting Palestine, briefly studying medicine at Montpellier, France, and taking premedical courses at the University of Edinburgh.
Having returned to Russia before the outbreak of World War I, Velikovsky enrolled in the University of Moscow and received a medical degree in 1921. Then he left Russia for Berlin, where he married Elisheva Kramer, a young violinist. He edited the journal, Scripta Universitatis, for which Albert Einstein prepared the mathematical-physical section.
From 1924 to 1939 Velikovsky lived in Palestine, practicing psychoanalysis - he had studied under Sigmund Freud's pupil, Wilhelm Stekel in Vienna - and editing Scripta Academica Hierosolymitana. In 1930 he published the first paper to suggest epileptics are characterized by pathological encephalograms, now part of the routine diagnostic procedure. Some of his writings appeared in Freud's Imago.
After reading Freud's Moses and Monotheism, Velikovsky conceived the possibility that Pharaoh Akhnaton, the real hero of Freud's book, was the legendary Oedipus (a thesis later argued in his book, Oedipus and Akhnaton). In 1939, Velikovsky took a sabbatical year, traveling with his family to New York only a few weeks before World War II tore Europe apart. For eight months he worked on Oedipus and Akhnaton in the libraries.
In April 1940, Velikovsky theorized that a great natural catastrophe had taken place at the time of the Israelites' Exodus from Egypt - a time when plagues occurred, the Sea of Passage parted, Mt. Sinai erupted, and the pillar of cloud and fire moved in the sky. Velikovsky claimed he found evidence in an obscure papyrus stored in Leiden in the Netherlands - the lamentations of an Egyptian sage, Ipuwer. The Ipuwer Papyrus, Velikovsky became convinced, parallels the Book of Exodus, describing the same natural catastrophe, the same plagues. As a result he began to reconstruct ancient Middle Eastern history, taking this catastrophe - which brought the downfall of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom - as a starting point from which to synchronize the histories of Egypt and Israel. He titled his work Ages in Chaos.
The cause of the catastrophe terminating the Middle Kingdom remained unexplained. In October, 1940, Velikovsky noticed that the Book of Joshua describes a destructive shower of meteorites occurring before the sun "stood still," in the sky. He believed the authors recorded a cosmic disturbance that must have shaken the entire Earth and might have been related to the upheavals approximately 50 years earlier during the Exodus. A survey of other sources around the world convinced Velikovsky that a global cataclysm had indeed overtaken the Earth, and that Venus played a decisive role in that cataclysm. For ten years he researched and wrote Ages in Chaos and Worlds in Collision. He had by now taken up permanent residence in the United States.
In 1950, after more than a dozen publishing houses rejected the two manuscripts, Macmillan published Worlds in Collision. Even before its appearance, the book was enveloped by furious controversy. Macmillan, intimidated by threats from academicians and scientists – the people who write and buy its textbooks – transferred the book to Doubleday. Worlds in Collision was then the number one best seller in the nation. In 1952 Doubleday published the first volume of Ages in Chaos, which details Velikovsky's historical reconstruction from ca. 1450 BC to 840 BC (A sequel, extending the reconstruction to 33 BC was originally due to appear shortly after the initial volume but was re-worked and enlarged to four volumes, The Assyrian Conquest, The Dark Age of Greece, Rameses II and His Time and Peoples of the Sea.)
Earth in Upheaval, presenting geological and paleontological evidence supposed to buttress "Worlds in Collision" (and also offering a new understanding of evolution that conflicts with Darwinian theory), came off the press in 1955; in 1960, Oedipus and Akhnaton was published.
For nearly a decade prior to the early Sixties, Velikovsky was persona non grata on college and university campuses. Early space probes sent to Venus, Mars and Jupiter confirmed some of his predictions, most specifically that Venus would be hot. After that, he began to receive more requests to speak. He lectured, frequently to record crowds, at universities across North America.
In February, 1972, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a one-hour television special featuring Velikovsky and his work, and this was followed by a 30 minute documentary on the BBC in 1973.
The remainder of the 1970s saw Velikovsky devoting a great deal of his time and energy rebutting his critics in academia, and continuing to tour North America and also Europe, delivering lectures on his theories.
Several idependant societies and journals sprang up to provide a forum for his work, including Pensée and Kronos in the US, and the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies in the UK. By now an elderly man, Velikovsky suffered from diabetes and intermittant depression, seemingly brought on by the academic establishment's continuing rejection of his work, and many wondered if the remaining promised volumes of his work (including a prequel to Worlds in Collision and a sequel to Ages in Chaos) would ever see publication.
The last two years of his life finally saw publication of two portions of the aforementioned sequel: Peoples of the Sea (1977) and Rameses II and his Time (1978). Velikovsky died in his sleep at his Princeton home in 1979.
Legal wranglings appear to have dogged the release of remaining unpublished work. Velikovsky appointed Prof. Lynn E Rose as his literary executor, with plans to issue several more volumes, however his family used a legal loophole to retain control of his literary estate. Under the supervision of Velikovsky's wife, two posthumous books appeared: the psychoanalytic work Mankind in Amnesia (1982) and also Stargazers and Gravediggers (1983), which chronicled the hostility of academia to Velikovsky's work.
Currently Velikovsky's estate is controlled by his two daughters, who have generally resisted the publication of any further material from Velivosky's considerable archive. (Execeptions include the biography ABA - the Trial and the Torment, issued in the mid-1990s and greeted with rather dubious reviews; also a Hebrew translation of another Ages in Chaos volume, The Dark Age of Greece, was published in Isreal.)
This intransigence in the paper publishing world aside, a large portion of Velikovsky's unpublished book manuscripts, essays and correspondance is now available at the Velikovsky Archive (http://www.varchive.org/) site.
Theories and Criticism
"And Velikovsky is neither crank nor charlatanalthough to state my opinion and to quote one of my colleagues, he is at least gloriously wrong." - Stephen J. Gould Velikovsky in Collision (http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/gould_velikovsky.html).
Velikovsky's most criticized book, Worlds in Collision, states that around the 15th century B.C., a comet or comet-like object (now called the planet Venus) "sprang out of Jupiter", then passed near Earth, changing its orbit and axis and causing innumerable catastrophes, mentioned in early mythologies and religions around the world. Fifty-two years later, it passed close by again, stopping the Earth's rotation for a while, thus causing more catastrophes. Then, in the 8th and 7th centuries B.C., Venus and Mars almost collided near the Earth; this incident caused a new round of disturbances and disasters on Earth. After that, the current "celestial order" was established.
The plausibility of the theory was rejected practically unanimously by the physicist community. Both the cosmic chain of events, and the fact that they left no trace on Earth except as myths, were described as simply contradicting the basic laws of physics.
Supporters contend that a few of Velikovsky's predictions have been validated. Amongst the most promiment is the prediction that Venus would be very hot. This argument has been countered by noting that Venus is indeed very hot, but not at all for the reasons proposed by Velikovsky. Critics further claim that the vast majority of Velikovsky's predictions turned out to be far from correct. His supporters have continued to claim counter-refutations.
In fact, Velikovsky started from myths and traditions of ancient peoples and cultures, postulated that they are based on actual events, including a chain of worldwide global catastrophes, and then he constructed an account to physically explain these events. He made no attempt to analyze his theory from a physical point of view — he was not a physicist — and often remarked that if they contradict physics' theories, then physicists must correct their theories.
In addition, Velikovsky's revised chronology of Egypt also came under attack from the Egyptologist community. It was claimed that Velikovsky's usage of material for proof is often very selective. His theories are also claimed to be inconsistent with current theories about the actual basis of mythologies.
By 1974, the controversy surrounding Velikovsky's work had permeated US society to the point where the American Association for the Advancement of Science felt obliged to address the situation, and devoted a scientific meeting to Velikovsky, featuring (among others) Velikovsky himself and Carl Sagan. Sagan gave a bitter critique of Velikovsky's ideas, (the book version of Sagan's critique is much longer than that presented in the talk, see below). Sagan's arguments were popular in nature, some of them were imprecise, and he did not remain to debate Velikovsky in person, facts that were used by Velikovsky's followers to discredit his analysis completely (see Ginenthal in References below).
A very thorough examination of the original material cited in Velikovsky's publications was published by Bob Forrest (see below). A short analysis of the position of arguments in the late 20th Century position is given by Dr Velikovsky's ex-associate, and Kronos editor, Leroy Ellenberg, in his A Lesson from Velikovsky (http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/vlesson.html).
The storm of controversy created by his publications revived the Catastrophist movements in the second half of the twentieth century. Works with similar themes, such as those of de Santillana and von Dechend, Allain and Delair, and Clube and Napier (see References below), have met with an academic tolerance never experienced by Velikovsky himself, and even with acclaim by bitter critics of the originals.
Books by Velikovsky
- Worlds in Collision (1950)
- Ages in Chaos (1952)
- Earth In Upheaval (1956)
- Oedipus and Akhnaton (1960)
- Peoples of the Sea (1977)
- Ramses II and His Times (1978)
- Mankind in Amnesia (1982)
- Stargazers and Gravediggers (1983)
External links
Organisations sympathetic to Velikovsky's work:
References
- Allan, D.S. and J.B. Delair (1995). When The Earth Nearly Died. Gateway Books, UK. published in USA as Cataclysm by Bear & Co, 1997. A precis is here (http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/cat/earth/).
- Bauer, Henry H. (1984). Beyond Velikovsky. The History of a Public Controversy. University of Illinois, Urbana.
- Clube, V. and Bill Napier (1982). The Cosmic Serpent. Universe Books, New York.
- Clube, V. and Bill Napier (1990). The Cosmic Winter. Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
- de Grazia, Alfred, Juergens R.E., Stecchini L.C. (Eds.) (1978). The Velikovsky Affair - Scientism versus Science. 2ed., Metron Publications, Princeton, New Jersey. Also online (http://www.grazian-archive.com/quantavolution/QuantaHTML/index_all.htm#v15).
- de Santillana, Giorgio and Hertha Von Dechend (1977). Hamlet's Mill: an Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time. Godine, Boston.
- Forrest, Bob (1981). Velikovsky's Sources. In 6 parts, with Notes & Index Volume. Privately published by the author, Manchester.
- Ginenthal, Charles (1995). Carl Sagan & Immanuel Velikovsky. New Falcon Publications, Tempe Arizona
- Miller, Alica (1977). Index to the Works of Immanuel Velikovsky. Glassboro State College, Glassboro.
- Pearlman, Dale, (Ed.) (1996) Stephen J. Gould and Immanuel Velikovsky. Ivy Press Books, Forest Hills, N.Y.
- PENSÉE. 1972-1975. Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered. I - X. Student Academic Freedon Forum, Portland.
- Ransom, C.J. (1976) The Age of Velikovsky. Delta, New York.
- Rohl, David (1996) A Test of Time. Arrow Books.
- Sagan, S. (1979) Broca's Brain. Random House. Reissued 1986 by Ballantine Books. ISBN: 0345336895
- Talbott, Stephen L. (1977) Velikovsky Reconsidered. Warner Books, New York.*
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