THE DAY THE SUN STOOD STILL

AND HOW WE CAME TO FORGET IT.

REMEMBERING THE STUDIES OF

IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY

By SALIM E. SPOHR

This is a shortened version of an extraordinary scientific and cultural thriller, which in a sense has been withheld from us to this very day. Anybody wishing to understand what makes our day and age tick ought to know of it.

After careful scrutiny and interpretation of the traditions of ancient peoples and cultures (sacred scriptures, sky charts, astronomical tables, myths, legends and fairy tales) and taking into account geological and paleontological data, Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979) reconstructed the emergence of our epoch in historical time. Although unanimously witnessed by our forebears, corroborated through factual observation of natural phenomena and reconfirmed by recent space exploration, this story now strikes us as incredible, even fantastic, but strangely familiar all the same. Velikovsky formulated a radical new concept of natural and world history, which might well shake the foundations of our present astrophysical concept of the world, of our entire culture, as well as of half a dozen academic disciplines along with it. At the same time, his name stands for a scientific and cultural thriller, which shows our confidence in the dependability of science to be naively misplaced and which is important, because it is actually taking place right here and now.

. IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY

Have you ever heard of Immanuel Velikovsky? Anybody answering “no” to this question need not worry: his answer only proves him to be a true child of his times. For to this very day, the displacement or suppression of memories relating to those terrible events, which befell our planet earth in most recent times (1500-750 B.C.), – cosmic aberrations that led to the cataclysmic changes which shaped our solar system to its present form, – appears to be no more than a consistent manifestation of a culture caught up in “collective memory-loss.”(1) Part of its pathology apparently consists in not only having no clue as to the most important of its foundations, but in deliberately insisting on ignorance of these facts.

How else to explain that this man who for his rediscovery of these events should rightly be famed and publicly acclaimed, has to this day not only languished in relative obscurity, but was badly vilified, maligned and suppressed by the self-proclaimed custodians of scientific knowledge at the publication of his very first book? (“If he is right, then all of us are insane.”(2) What do we make of the enormous pressure brought to bear on publishing houses, in order to prevent his book from being published? What reasons lay behind the devastating reviews by critics who at the same time proudly pointed out that they had never read the book; and of one enthusiastic specialist who was unceremoniously fired from his job for advocating an independent inquiry into his claims?

How to make sense of the “un-academic frenzy”(3) that vented itself against this impeccable and unassuming person? The only possible explanation is this: he must have touched a raw nerve! The bone of contention was Velikovsky’s book, entitled “Worlds in Collision” and published in 1950, wherein he set forth his theories.

The idea of world epochs ending through catastrophic upheavals was common to all peoples on earth, as was the belief that “at the end of each epoch various miraculous signs would appear, by which the gods would warn the mortals.”(4) The Etruscans, who were skilled and expert star gazers, carefully observed these signs and noted them down in their scriptures. The pre-Socratic philosophers believed that the world was destroyed by floods or firestorms at regular intervals. Hesiod describes four ages and four successive races of humankind destroyed by the wrath of the planetary gods.

Corresponding traditions still exist in Tibet, India, China, Persia, Egypt, with the Incas, Aztecs and Mayas and on the Hawaiian and Polynesian islands. The number of bygone ages varies between four and ten, but the accompanying circumstances of their passing are always described in the same terms. Cosmic upheavals caused gigantic, catastrophic changes that shook this planet, and in each epoch “a different sky [vaulted] over the earth”(5) and a “new sun”(6) appeared. Now, what does this mean, different suns? Has the earth not always revolved around the same sun from time immemorial? Yes, indeed, it has always been the same sun, but its path through the heavens, i.e. the earth’s movement around it and the its rotation around its own axis have differed from one epoch to the next. The priests of ancient Egypt have assured us that in historical times, since Egypt became a kingdom, the sun “on four occasions rose opposite its habitual rising place: twice it rose where it now sets, and twice it set where it now rises.”(7)

The papyrus Harris speaks of cosmic upheaval, whereby north became south and the earth inclined forwards. The papyrus Ipuver relates that the land spun around as on a potter’s wheel and the earth keeled over headfirst. In Queen Hatshepsut’s chief architect Senmut’s tomb, one area of the ceiling shows the celestial sphere with the southern sky in opposite orientation. Similar reports can be found in Plato’s Politeia, Euripides’ Elektra, in the writings of Seneca and the Pythagoreans, in Mexican and Eskimo traditions, in the Talmud and in many other scriptures. In the Qur’an Allah is described as the “Lord of the Two Easts and Lord of the Two Wests”(8). The Kalevala epic states that “the sun occasionally left its path”(9) and the Aztecs recount: “For many years there had been no sun… The chieftains began to look out into the gloom for the expected light, and they placed bets on which part of the sky it might first appear. Some said, ‘Here’, while other said, ‘There’; but when the sun finally rose, it appeared that they all had guessed incorrectly, for none had placed his bet on the East.”(10)

These traditions are troublesome to the modern reader, because they seem to blatantly contradict the natural and physical sciences of our day and age. However, this only seems to be the case because these reports and any possible conclusions to be drawn therefrom have never been seriously examined. Having grown up in the belief that the earth has been revolving around the sun unremittingly for millions of years, we have completely neglected to cast even a fleeting glance at the deep marks these violent upheavals have made not only on the minds of the ancients but also on the physical body of our planet earth. If one were for once to seriously investigate these evident and generally accessible traces, a wide field of geological, archaeological, paleontological etc. research would be discovered, which might just result in the congruence of the sciences with these very traditions.

For some time now there have been stories in the daily papers reporting that the dinosaurs’ extinction was due to the earth’s collision with another heavenly body some sixty-five million years ago.(11) Velikovsky’s question however was: when and under what circumstances did the last of the great catastrophes take place? What marked the beginning of our present epoch?

This miracle is related in the book of Joshua, the son of Nun:

Then spoke Joshua to the Lord in the day
when the Lord gave the Amorites over to the men of Israel;
and he said in the sight of Israel, “Sun, stand thou still at Gibeon,
and thou, Moon in the valley of Aijalon.”
And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed,
until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. (12)

This account surely surpasses the limits of belief of even the most pious and imaginative person. Yet while on one side of the globe the sun failed to set, the dwellers on the other side lamented the long night that refused to end. What had happened? According to Velikovsky’s reconstruction, this was due to an irritation of the earth’s movement, brought about by a celestial body never seen before. Chinese reports tell of a “brilliant star”, which appeared in the constellation Yin during the reign of Emperor Jahou and was visible in the daytime, “rivalling the sun in brilliance”(13) less of a star than a “fiery ball”(14). In the daytime, the tail of this comet was visible as a trail of smoke, whereas at night it was seen as a gigantic pillar of fire, a “torch spreading across the entire horizon”(15), at the appearance of which both “Heaven and Earth began to tremble.”(16) On its orbit it approached the earth every fifty-two years. It so happened at the time of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt that the earth twice passed through the tail of this unlucky star. The first passage was signalled by a fine, reddish dust that fell upon the earth and turned the rivers “into blood,”(17) and brought about a “severe plague.”(18) Red-hot rocks of increasing size began to strike the earth, earthquakes shook the ground and there was an ceaseless, deafening roar. A pitch-black, burning mass (mineral oil) poured forth upon the earth and, drawn up by the gravitational pull of the foreign star, the waters of the sea rose up as a pillar, mile-high above the mountains and visible to all the peoples of the world. The earth’s second passage through the comet’s tail produced a grandiose scenario, which appeared as a colossal battle to the horrified onlookers:

«When the earth passed through the gases, dust, and meteorites of the tail of the comet, dirsturbed in rotation, it proceeded on a distorted orbit. Emerging from the darkness, the Eastern Hemisphere faced the head of the comet. This head only shortly before had passed close to the sun and was in a state of candescence. The night the great earthquake shook the globe was, according to rabbinical literature, as bright as the day of the summer solstice. Becauce of the proximity of the earth, the comet left its own orbit and for a while followed the orbit of the earth. The great ball of the comet retreated, then again approached the earth, shrouded in a dark column of gases which looked like a pillar of smoke during the day and of fire at night, and the earth once more passed through the atmosphere of the comet, this time at its neck. This stage was accompanied by violent and incessant electrical discharges between the atmosphere of the tail and the terrestrial atmosphere. There was an interval of about six days between these two close approaches. Emerging from the gases of the comet, the earth seems to have changed the direction of its rotation, and the pillar of smoke moved to the opposite horizon.1 (Cf. Exodus 14:19) The column looked like a gigantic moving serpent.

When the tidal waves rose to their highest point, and the seas were torn apart, a tremendous spark flew between the earth and the globe of the comet, which instantly pushed down the miles-high billows. Meanwhile, the tail of the comet and its head, having become entangled with each other by their close contact with the earth, exchanged violent discharges of electricity. It looked like a battle between the brillant globe and the dark column of smoke. In the exchange of electrical potentials, the tail and the head were attracted one to the other and repelled one from the other. From the serpentlike tail extensions grew, and it lost the form of a column. It looked now like a furious animal with legs and with many heads. The discharges tore the column to pieces, a process that was acccompanied by a rain of meteorites upon the earth. It appeared as though the monster were defeated by the brilliant globe and buried in the sea, or wherever the meteorites fell. The gases of the tail subsequently enveloped the earth …” (19)

The peoples of the world interpreted these celestial happenings as the fight of an evil monster-serpent with the god of light, of Marduk with the dragon Tiamat, between Isis and Seth, Vishnu and the snake, Krishna and the snake, Ormuz and Ahriman or Zeus and Typhon. Velikovsky points out that it is difficult “to find even a single people or tribe on earth where this motive does not form the focal point of its religious ideas.”(20) The star was known to different peoples by different names, here are some of them:

Agni, Ahriman, al-Usa, Anaitis, Anat, Anat-Yahou, Aphrodite, Api, Ashterot, Apopi, Astarte, Athena, Azasel, Baal, Beelzebub, Charka, Coniraya-Viracocha, Fauma, Gukumatz, Gula, Hathor, Hesperos, Horus, Ishtar, Isis, Istehar, Kukulcan, Kumara, Lucifer, Mane, Mazzaroth, Archangel Michael, Midgard, Minerva, Mithra, Noga, Pallas, Phaeton, Phosphorus, Quetzal-Cohautl, Rahab, Satan, Sekhret, Surabbi, Taafanua, Tefnut, Tiamat, Typhon, Uzza, Vishnu oder Zebbaj.(21)

Who was the comet? Where did it come from? Can it still be seen today? Indeed, it can, even though in the meantime it has lost its glowing tail. Having been ejected by Jupiter, after several encounters with other members of the solar system it has now transformed into the harmless planet we observe with the naked eye as the morning or evening star, which today we call Venus. At the time, however, Venus was a “smoking”(22) comet, which had a “beard”(23) or a “mane”(24). It was said: “Fire hangs down from the planet Venus”(25), and “her shining light blazes from one end of the universe to the other.”(26) The Chaldeans called her “marvelous spectacle of heaven”(27), to the Egyptians she was the “spinning star that spreads about its fire in flames”(28). She was the most feared and most venerated planetary goddess of antiquity. Thus she is invoked in the Babylonian hymn:

O Ishtar, Queen of all nations,
Blazing torch of the heavens and the earth
The thought of your name
makes Heaven and Earth
to tremble
and the earth to lose heart.
Mankind worships thy mighty name
And bows low before thy might.

How long wilt thou tarry,
O Mistress of Heaven and Earth?

Terrible in battle,
Irresistible, mighty in combat!
O whirlwind that causes your foes to reel
and fells those in power!
O raging Ishtar,
who summons to war! (29)

If in certain phases of her orbit her tail formed crescent-shaped protrusions and she obscured the sun, “she who has taken the disk of the sun between her horns”(30), balancing it upon her head, she became the “sun remover” and was venerated as a sphinx, lion or bull. Aaron’s golden calf was one of her images, and the Avesta has this to say: the star that attacks the planets “merges its form with light, while he moves along in the shape of a golden-horned bull.”(31) In Mycenae a golden cow’s head with a star on its forehead was found, and on Samoa the islanders say to this very day: “The planet Venus turned wild and horns grew from its head.”(32)

Why does Venus no longer pose a threat to us nowadays? According to Velikovsky, this is because at the beginning of the seventh century she collided with Mars.
“Even though he himself was hurled out of the ring, he still managed to force Venus from an elliptical orbit into an almost circular one. Seen from the earth, Venus was steered from an orbit rising steeply towards the zenith into her present one… Venus, for many centuries the terror of all the world, turned into a tame
planet.”(33)

Whereas as Michael she had fought with the dragon,
as Lucifer she plunged from high heaven
and “her hands were tied by God.”(34)

The end of the reign of terror, which Venus had upheld for eight centuries, since the days of the exodus from Egypt, moved Isaiah to utter the following words: “How you have fallen from heaven, o Day Star, son of Dawn! (…) You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high;”(35) (Isaiah 14/12-13) In Velikovsky’s opinion, more than three-hundred generations of exegetes have tried in vain to interpret this passage.

Whereas Mars through his collision with Venus prevented total catastrophe from befalling the earth, in his new orbit he now became the terror of all peoples; they would anxiously anticipate his return every fifteen years, until on March 23, 687 B.C. he made contact with the earth one final time. Since this last catastrophe, in which the earth staggered about “like one drunk” and was thrown about like a “hanging bed”(36), the solar system has remained as we know it today, and our present era began with a year of twelve months and three-hundred and sixty-five and a quarter day.

A new calendar was introduced all over the world, not because mankind had finally learned to count correctly the days of the year, as in our modern arrogance we like to believe, but because the year had in actual fact lengthened by five days, “days without name,”(37) “days exceeding the year” or “days of nothingness,” (38) which were regarded as dark and unlucky days.

By not assigning the testimony of antiquity to whimsical fantasy of the ancients, in his further research Velikovsky presents results that signify a revolution for the study of history, astronomy and the geosciences, and that caused a shudder to ripple through various parts of the academic establishment. In his „_284 Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History_”, which he later expanded to a work of six volumes, “_Ages in Chaos_”, he concludes that in conventional Egyptian chronology five-hundred years were counted twice, and that all ancient history based on Egyptian chronology needed to be revised. Thus adjusted, many classical mysteries simply vanish; for instance, why the heroes of Troy had to fight their battles 1300 years BC, even though Homer was able to describe them more than five-hundred years later with such sparkling freshness, as if he had been personally familiar and acquainted with them. If Akhenaton, as he maintains, lived not in the 14th but in the 9th century, the Trojans will be recognized as being Etruscans, as the Romans had maintained all along; and the mysterious “Queen of Sheba” who visited King Solomon, easily becomes Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt.

Velikovsky’s theses received positive reviews by Prof. Gertrude E. Stein,(39) to which even the superstar of classical archaeology, William F. Albright, consented, albeit after lengthy and heated debates on the battlefield of dating excavation finds, which led to the latter’s estrangement from his students. But the overwhelming majority of historians and archaeologists insisted on accepted chronology. Books continue to be written about these mysteries of antiquity, particularly about the “Dark Ages”, even though Velikovsky had clearly shown the alleged darkness to be only the product of an erroneous chronology.

Yet belief persists in the successive destruction through wars or local earthquakes of the various cities whose ruins are found, despite the fact that Claude F. Schaefer, the excavator of Ugarith already in 1948, before he had ever heard of Velikovsky’s work, discovered that the sites of ancient habitation found in Palestine, Syria, Cyprus, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor and Caucasia must have perished at one and the same time under the impact of gigantic catastrophes.(40) In his book “Earth in Upheaval,” which deals with geological and paleontological problems, Velikovsky claims that there never were such ice ages as we are taught in school. Rather, the polar ice caps occasionally slid out of place on account of a repositioning of the earth’s axis, without, however, any change to their extent.

The mammoths found embedded in layers of Siberian ice who still had remnants of fresh greenery stuck between their teeth must have instantaneously been trapped in the frozen zones by a sudden shift of the earth’s axis. This serves only to confirm Velikovsky’s theory, as does other geo-historical evidence: seashells way up on Mount Everest, fissures coursing right through the Atlantic Ocean, the tip of the Matterhorn being older than its base, huge boulders strewn over the face of the earth etc.

In order to explain these traditions, Velikovsky needed to assume certain forces operating in the solar system that for the astronomers of the day did not exist. While they attributed all movements of heavenly bodies to the effects of gravity, Velikovsky considered gravity to be only a function of magnetism and electromotive force. The sun had to possess electrical charge, and its voltage had to be high enough to exert influence over the planets in their orbits. The magnetic field of the earth had to extend as far the moon, and Zeus-Jupiter, the father of Athena, had to emit radio waves, while Venus even as a very young planet must have had extremely high temperatures.

The high priests of astronomical science regarded these views as sheer nonsense. Harlow Shapley, theoretician of the Milky Way and director of the Harvard Observatory, led the academic phalanx against Velikovsky, whom he chose to insult as „one of the most erudite charlatans.”(41)

Alarmed by a preprint of Velikovsky’s theses, he organized a public rejection by five specialists in five different disciplines, none of whom had ever read the book. Mrs. Payne-Gaposchkin wrote a vitriolic review and was even proud of her ignorance of the text under review. During these months, so wrote the Harvard Crimson on September 25, 1950: “…an astonishing number of astronomers abandoned their telescopes be and devoted themselves to writing damning criticisms of ‘Worlds in Collision’”. Shapley managed to blackmail the Macmillan publishers into withdrawing the publication. Gordon Atwater, who had advocated an independent, unprejudiced investigation of Velikovsky’s theses, was sacked from his position as director of the Hayden Planetarium and head of the Section of Astronomy.

D. Menzel, astronomer at Harvard, in order to ridicule Velikovsky before the students, had mischievously calculated the incredibly high figure of 1019 for the sun’s voltage if Velikovsky were to be believed. It is a poignant irony in the history of science that his Australian colleague V.A. Bailey later famously computed this very same figure for the sun’s charge.(42)

During the moon landing Velikovsky had asked NASA to mark the position of the lunar rocks brought back to earth because of their magnetism. He had received the answer that no provision was made for this, since there existed no magnetism on the moon. When magnetic rocks were brought back from the moon, their line was: “Nobody in the scientific community had expected any residual magnetism.”(43)

On December 14, 1962 Mariner II confirmed Velikovsky’s thesis of extremely high temperatures on Venus, which until that time had been thought to be freezing cold (-15 degrees Celsius).

When Albert Einstein, with whom Velikovsky had communicated for many years (in German language, incidentally), learned shortly before his death that Jupiter does emit radio waves as Velikovsky had been claiming for decades, he offered to use his influence on order to facilitate further experiments according to Velikovsky instructions. But it was already too late. When Einstein died, an open copy of Velikovsky’s book “Worlds in Collision” was found lying on his desk.44

Some time ago, when Haley’s Comet so exercised the media, did it occur to anybody to mention our catastrophist theoretician? No, of course not! Not even the populist German TV show “Haley Rendezvous”? Never! No one ever mentioned Velikovsky at all, instead a Dr. Fred Whipple was proudly presented as a specialist on comets, director of the Harvard Observatory and successor to Shapley who in his day in one of his critiques had hurled this at Velikovsky, „Are you a hoax or a crank?”(45) Later Velikovsky simply commented on this: „I took it.”(46) In the same article, Whipple had confronted him saying: “„Your book is blasphemy to science and religion!” whereby he unmasked himself. For if one feels that a good argument is a “blasphemy to science”, one evidently regards science as a sacred cow and oneself as its high priest.

A closer look at the Velikovsky affair exposes it not only as a thriller of recent scientific history, but a central problem of our entire culture: Plato in his dialogue about the stars reported that Solon had been to Egypt and told the Egyptians about the great flood (of Noah). An aged priest had risen from his seat, laughed aloud and said: “ O you Greeks, you will never age, you will remain ever as youths! The Flood, of which you speak as of a fairy tale, has actually taken place several times. It has to do with a shift in the stars’ course that actually took place. The only problem was that your unfortunate people perished during each one of these catastrophic events and were forced each time to regain their language and culture anew. Therefore, o son of Solon: Greeks are not made for hoary old age.”(47)

As true descendants of the Greeks, we too adopt this attitude. By Newton’s time the matter had become particularly explosive: Whiston claimed that formerly the year had had only three hundred and sixty days. This led him into conflict with Newton who regarded it as a theological problem: God had arranged everything in the best possible manner and made the planetary system to resemble a clockwork. Should there be any irregularity, He would fix it by means of a comet. Leibniz commented that Newton obviously thought of God as a clockmaker, but evidently quite a bad one, hence the need for frequent repairs.

To this very day, the false security that Aristotle and Newton have given us, i.e. that “the earth has been revolving around the sun for millions of years,” has tranquilized us and downgraded our ancestors, who may have reported things otherwise, to clairvoyants and diviners. We seem to dread the terrible truth that the earth’s rotation and orbit are instable. But whatever the case may be, whether it is Whiston or Newton, Velikovsky or Einstein who got the facts right, the scandal of it is that we never learned about the dispute itself, neither in school nor anywhere else. We have all heard of Newton and Einstein, but never of Whiston or Velikovsky. This circumstance needs to be acknowledged.

How is it that we do not believe our own ancestors, how come we judge something to be impossible, just because it has not occurred during the past two and a half thousand years? Why do we regard the experience of this most recent period as authoritative, while there is overwhelming testimony to the opposite, and echoes of those momentous events still resound in the traditions and customs of all peoples, perceptible even to this day?

Thus the notion of destruction is still echoed in many languages: in the name for the highest holiday of Christendom, “Easter”, in “Hathor” (Egyptian), “Ishtar” (Babylonian). “Astor” (Hebrew), “Astron” (Greek), “Astron” (Latin), “(A)stern” (German), “disaster” (English), synonymous for all manner of misfortune.

The chanting of a psalm, “What ails you, O sea, that you flee? (…) O mountains that you skip like rams? O hills, like lambs?” (Psalms/114) or a child asking his mother, “Why does the devil have horns?” – any reminder can serve as an eye opener. After all, every reader of “Asterix” knows what the Gauls fear most: the sky falling on their heads!

But German TV would deprive its viewers of what is familiar to Asterix. After a programme about the Mayan temples of Palénque, the ZDF (Second German TV Channel) was informed that the mysteries mentioned in the broadcast could be resolved through Velikovsky’s line of thought. The ZDF replied that this might well be, but it would be too difficult for the German people to grasp. But resorting to the excuse of another’s stupidity is easily unmasked as one’s own lack of courage and imaginative faculty.

Here we enjoin on the reader to trust the witnesses of old, and with Velikovsky-sharpened vision to finally unearth the treasures that our culture has kept concealed from him for thousands of years.

However, if one continues to read the traditions as mere metaphors as do the theologians, or to analyze them psychoanalytically as many a storyteller does, not only will he be doing the ancients an injustice, but he will also be reinforcing a longstanding mental aberration and quietly permitting a millennium-old trauma to continue unabated. The fashionable psychoanalytical interpretation of ancient myths is itself far more deserving of analysis, in its operation as an organ of suppression of all memory relating to the true meaning of the myths. Velikovsky’s discovery seems to be something of a master key for the uncovering of the disorders central to our society and culture.

IMMANUEL KANT

Or should we agree with him who maintained that Velikovsky couldn’t possibly be right, because if he were, the scientific community would certainly acknowledge him? May we be preserved by the insight of that other Immanuel who said: “Old and ingrained prejudices are indeed hard to fight, because they justify themselves and act as it were as their own judges”.(48)

As the drama of the suppression of those traumatic events has accompanied us from the beginning of this world epoch into the present era, and as it has determined our conception of the world and our mental disposition to this very day, the prejudice relating to Velikovsky can indeed be called ancient and ingrained. Now that we are in a position to know better, the time to examine these self-appointed judges has finally come. In the process, that denial for the sake of fake security of the perturbation of heaven and earth will, God-willing, decidedly turn out to be the appallingly fathomless ‘foundation’ upon which our culture rests, and vice versa, its implicit building plan or project, i.e. ultimately this culture itself, will be shown up as being a total fraud. Dizzyingly abysmal are the supposedly secure foundations of our world epoch and of a mindset, which despite its best efforts to attain certainty – as yet the unresolved problem of all philosophical theory constructs, and of an enormous deployment of security industries of police, military and insurance agents – to this day has not been able to bring peace to the hearts of men. Quite the contrary: in actuality the towering heights of glass-fronted bank palaces and insurance buildings appear to be no more than the conspicuously obvious benchmarks for that very loss of devotion and trust in God, which in Arabic is called Islam, with which we as children once came into this world. It is essential to understand that nowadays the official representatives of learning have only synthetic provender to offer the hungry, not just in questions of the heart, or of wisdom and religion, but even in the sciences. Velikovsky’s story amply demonstrates how jealously they guard against any member of their order offering people real food. The veil covering the emergence of our world epoch enshrouds us, and everything we do. It is the condition, and at the same time the symptom for a strangely twisted, mindless era.

As loyal members of an intrinsically hypocritical society with no firm foundation and with no knowledge of our actual purpose (in life), we have rehearsed falseness and error and the pretence that we alone are the lords of the world. Immensely arrogant in our perception of self and others, we are hideous, immoral and stupid, endangering our own lives and souls, and worse yet, risking what may follow hereafter.

All things being equal, our persistence in remaining silent and suppressing the truth must one day return to haunt us. Perhaps this will happen only at that portentous hour when long forgotten, ominous signs show themselves in the heavens, prefiguring a new catastrophe and signalling the end of our era. Then the hearts will resound as has never been heard before. Should it really be possible to keep the truth under cover up until that time?

Translated from German by NADINE MILLER

The original German edition of this essay you will find here:
«DER TAG, AN DEM DIE SONNE STILLSTAND …»

ENDNOTES

1 Velikovsky (1)
2 “Pensée”, p. 23.
3 Newsweek, after Grazia, p. 23.
4 Velikovsky (1), S. 41.
5 ibid., p. 44.
6 ibid., p. 45.
7 ibid., p. 105.
8 Qur’an, 55/16.
9 Velikovsky (1), p. 115.
10 ibid., p. 125.
11 eg.. Bonner General-Anzeiger, Oct. 13, 1983.
12 Joshua 10/12-13.
13 Velikovsky (1), p. 152.
14 Müller, p. 154.
15 after Heinsohn.
16 Velikovsky (1), p. 77.
17 ibid., p. 58.
18 ibid.
19 Velikovsky (1), pp. 77 f.
20 ibid., p. 83.
21 cf. Miller, pp. 261-262.
22 Velikovsky (1), p. 151.
23 ibid.
24 ibid., p. 152.
25 ibid., p. 151.
26 ibid., p. 152.
27 ibid.
28 ibid.
29 cf. Müller, p. 150.
30 ibid., p. 148.
31 Velikovsky (1), p. 153.
32 ibid.
33 ibid, p. 234.
34 ibid.
35 Isaiah, 14/12-13.
36 Velikovsky (1), p. 196.
37 ibid., p. 302.
38 ibid., p. 303.
39 cf. Chicago Tribune, April 3, 1960.
40 cf. Heinsohn, Chapter 9.
41 Velikovsky (5), p. 20.
42 cf. Heinsohn, Chapter 4.
43 ibid.
44 Grazia, p. 50.
45 Velikovsky (4), p. 199.
46 ibid.
47 paraphrasing Plato’s Timaios, 22.
48 Immanuel Kant, Academy-Edition, Vol. 9, p. 81

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grazia, Alfred de, The Velikovsky Affair, New York, 1978.
Heinsohn, Gunnar, Über die heiße Venus…’ in: Freibeuter, 1979.
Miller, Alice, Index To Velikovsky , Vol. I, New York, 1977.
Müller, Angelika, “Der Löwe, der die Sonne fraß„ in: Sphinx 10, Basel, 1985.
Editors of Pensée, Velikovsky Reconsidered, London, 1976.
Velikovsky, Immanuel (1), Worlds in Collision, New York, 1950.
Velikovsky, Immanuel (2), Earth in Upheaval, New York, 1956.
Velikovsky, Immanuel (3), Ages in Chaos, Vol.1, 9th Edition, London, 1972.
Velikovsky, Immanuel (4), Stargazers and Gravediggers, New York, 1983. (posthumous)
Velikovsky, Immanuel (5), Mankind in Amnesia, New York, 1992.