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Immanuel Velikovsky ( June 10 , 1895 ( NS ) – November 17 , 1979 ) is best known as the author of a number of controversial books on pre-history, particularly the US bestseller '' Worlds In Collision '' ( 1950 ). Earlier in his life, he played a role in the founding of the Hebrew University Of Jerusalem , and was a respected Psychiatrist / Psychoanalyst . His books primarily used Comparative Mythology and ancient literary sources (not least the Bible ) to propose that the Earth had suffered Catastrophic close-contacts with other planets in the solar system (principally 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 Egyptian 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 conduct of many 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 Childhood and education Immanuel Velikovsky was born in 1895 into a Jewish family, in Vitebsk in what is today Belarus , the son of Shimon (Simon Yehiel) Velikovsky (1859-1937) and Beila Grodensky. 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 . There he edited the twin volumes, ''Scripta Universitatis'', for which Albert Einstein prepared the mathematical-physical section. In 1924 he married Elisheva Kramer , a young Violinist . Career as a psychiatrist From 1924 to 1939 Velikovsky lived in Palestine , practicing medicine (both General Practice and Psychiatry ), and also Psychoanalysis (he had studied under Sigmund Freud 's pupil, Wilhelm Stekel in Vienna ). During this time he had a dozen or so papers published in medical and psychoanalytic journals, including, in 1930, the first paper to suggest Epileptics are characterized by pathological Encephalogram s, now part of the routine diagnostic procedure, and papers in Freud's '' Imago '', including a precious analysis of Freud's own dreams. Relocation to the USA and subsequent notoriety as an author In 1939, with the prospect of war looming, Velikovsky travelled with his family to New York , intending to spend a Sabbatical year researching for his book ''Oedipus & Akhnaton'' (which, inspired by Freud's '' Moses And Monotheism '', explored the possibility that Pharaoh Akhnaton was the legendary Oedipus ). Within weeks of his arrival, World War II began. Soon, taking a tangent from his original book project, Velikovsky began to develop the radical Catastrophist Cosmology and revised chronology theories for which he would become notorious (see below). For the remainder of the Second World War, now a permanent resident in New Jersey , he continued to research and write about his ideas, searching for a means to disseminate them to academia and the public. He privately published two small ''Scripta Academica'' pamphlets summarising his theories in 1945 (''Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History'' and ''Cosmos Without Gravitation''). His pressing a copy of the latter onto astronomer Harlow Shapley was to have particular repercussions. In 1950, after eight publishing houses rejected the ''Worlds in Collision'' manuscript, it was finally published by . It was by then a best seller in the US. In 1952, Doubleday published the first installment in Velikovsky's revised chronology, '' Ages In Chaos '', followed by the ''Earth in Upheaval'' (a geological volume) in 1955. For most of the 1950s and early 1960s, Velikovsky was '' Persona Non Grata '' on college and university campuses. An early space probe sent to Venus appeared to confirm some of his predictions, most specifically that Venus would be hot. After this, he began to receive more requests to speak. He lectured, frequently to record crowds, at universities across North America . In 1972, Velikovsky's public profile was raised still higher when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a one-hour television special featuring Velikovsky and his work, and this was followed by a thirty-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 independent 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 intermittent 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 the projected sequels to '' Ages In Chaos '') would ever see publication. The last two years of his life finally saw publication of two volumes of the aforementioned Ages in Chaos series: ''Peoples of the Sea'' (1977) and ''Rameses II and his Time'' (1978). Velikovsky died tended by his wife at his Princeton home in November 17 , 1979 . Posthumous administration of Velikovsky's literary estate Legal wranglings appear to have dogged the release of remaining unpublished work. Velikovsky had appointed Professor Lynn E Rose as his Literary Executor , with plans to issue several more volumes. However, his family managed 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. For many years Velikovsky's estate was controlled by his two daughters, who generally resisted the publication of any further material. (Exceptions include the biography ''ABA - the Trial and the Torment'', issued in the mid-1990s and greeted with rather dubious reviews; and a Hebrew translation of another ''Ages in Chaos'' volume, ''The Dark Age of Greece'', was published in Israel.) In the late 1990s, a large portion of Velikovsky's unpublished book manuscripts, essays and correspondence became available at the Velikovsky Archive website. In 2005, Velikovsky's daughter Ruth Sharon, presented his entire archive to Princeton University Library . VELIKOVSKY'S THEORIES Notwithstanding Velikovsky's dozen or so publications in medical and psychoanlytic journals in the 1920s and 1930s, the work for which he became notorious was developed by him during the early 1940s, whilst living in New York . He summarised his core ideas in an affidavit in November 1942 , and in two privately published ''Scripta Academica'' pamphlets entitled Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History ( 1945 ) and '''Cosmos without Gravitation''' ( 1946 ). In reality, these theories formed a coherent inter-disciplinary whole. However, rather than have the entire edifice dismissed because of potential flaws in any one area, and with the doors of academic journals seemingly now closed to him, Velikovsky then chose to publish them as a series of book volumes, aimed at a lay audience, dealing separately with his proposals on ancient history, and with areas more relevant to the physical sciences. Velikovsky was a passionate Zionist , and this did steer the focus of his work, although its scope was considerably more far-reaching than this. The entire body of work could be said to stem from an attempt to solve the following problem: that there appeared to be insufficient correlation in the written or archeological records between Jewish history (as recorded in Biblical and other sources) and the history of the adjoining nations (especially Egypt). Velikovsky searched for common mention of events within literary records, and in the Ipuwer Papyrus , he believed he had found a contemporary Egyptian account of the Israelite Exodus - moreover, he interpreted both accounts as descriptions of a great natural catastrophe. Velikovsky attempted to investigate the physical cause of the Exodus event, and extrapolated backwards and forwards in history from this point, cross-comparing written and mythical records from cultures on every inhabited continent, using them to attempt synchronisms of the historical records, yielding what he believed to be further periodic natural catastrophes which can be global in scale. He arrived at a body of radical inter-disciplinary ideas which might be summarized as:
Some of Velikovsky's specific postulated catastrophes included:
As noted above, Velikovsky had conceived the broad sweep of this material by the early 1940s. However, within his lifetime, whilst he continued to research and expand upon the details of his ideas, he released only selected portions of his work to the public in book form:
Several key portions of the ''Revised Chronology'' remained unpublished (although the manuscripts are readily available in the Velikovsky Archive and thus the details of the entire scheme are known). Numerous other authors (such as Donovan Courville , Peter James and David Rohl ) have since taken a cue from Velikovsky to develop their own proposed chronological revisions. Velikovsky's ideas on his earlier Saturn/Mercury/Jupiter events were never published, and the available archived manuscripts are much less developed. However the 'Saturnist' theorists have done much subsequent work in this area, proposing that Earth was indeed a satellite of Saturn (a 'brown dwarf' star) before the Holocene period. Of all the strands of his work, Velikovsky published least on his ideas regarding the role of electromagnetism in astronomy. In fact he retreated from the propositions in his 1946 monograph 'Cosmos without Gravitation', a work he and his supporters preferred to ignore subsequently, and a probable catalyst for the aggressively antipathetic reaction of astonomers and physicists from its first presentation. However other Velikovskian writers such as Ralph Jeurgens , Earl Milton and Wal Thornhill have embraced and developed these themes to propose a scenario where stars are lit not by internal nuclear fusion, but as the anode focii of galactic-scale electrical discharge currents. These radical ideas are often known as the ' Electric Universe ' scenario {Link without Title} . They do not find support in the conventional literature. The Revised Chronology Velikovsky's chronological revision contended that the history of the Near East had been inflated by reliance on chronology based on Sothic Dating and the Egyptian king-lists of Manetho . He proposed that the 'Dark Ages' of Greece were not real, but artifacts introduced by dating Grecian archeological remains according to the Egyptian scheme. Likewise the apparent unreliability of Herodotus as an historian, and the apparent lack of correlation between Old Testament and Midrash ic Jewish history with archeology in Palestine could be thus explained. Velikovsky anchored the beginning of his revised scheme by synchronising the Ipuwer Papyrus , from the beginning of Egypt's Second Intermediate Period , with the Biblical Exodus . The Ipuwer Papyrus was conventionally dated to approximately 350 years before the conventional date of the Exodus (1450 BCE). He introduced the concept of alter egos: historical figures who were known by different names in two different sources (e.g. Egyptian and Greek), and were conventionally considered to be entirely different people living in different centuries, but were proposed by Velikovsky to be actually erroneously dated accounts of the same individuals and events. Hatshepsut , the woman pharaoh of Egypt, is identified as the Queen Of Sheba who visited Solomon , and Solomon's kingdom is identified as the land of Punt (normally believed to be somewhere in Ethiopia or southern Arabia ) to which Hatshepsut led an expedition. Hatshepsut's temple is said to have been modelled on Solomon's. Thutmose III then becomes King Shishak who sacked Jerusalem at the time of Rehoboam . Velikovsky then separated Horemheb and the 19th Dynasty pharaohs from the earlier 18th Dynasty pharaohs. Instead, the 22nd through 25th dynasties follow upon the earlier part of the 18th, leading down to the Assyrian invasions of the early 7th century BCE. It is here that Horemheb and the 19th Dynasty are to be found, and Velikovsky identifies each of the major 19th dynasty pharaohs with a corresponding pharaoh of the 26th . Thus, Rameses I becomes Necho I , Seti I becomes Psamtik I , Rameses II is Necho II , and Merneptah is Apries . In order to make these identifications work, Velikovsky postulates that the Neo- Babylonian kings are actually identical to the Kings of the Hittites , and therefore that Rameses II's battle with the Hittites at Kadesh is identical to Necho's fight against Nebuchadrezzar at Carchemish . Thus Nabopolassar is Mursili II , Neriglissar is Muwatalli , Labashi-Marduk is Urhi-Teshup , and Nebuchadrezzar II is Hattusili III . Having arrived at the Persian conquest, Velikovsky now has the problem of fitting in Manetho's 20th and 21st dynasties. The 20th dynasty here becomes identified with the dynasties which ruled a newly independent Egypt in the early 4th century BCE, and the Sea Peoples against whom Rameses III fought are now identified as the Greek mercenaries of the Persian Kings (who are here identified with detailed justification as the Peleset, normally seen as another name for the Philistines ). The 21st dynasty then becomes a line of priest-kings who ruled simultaneously with the Persians. CRITICISM ''"…Velikovsky is neither crank nor charlatan—although to state my opinion and to quote one of my colleagues, he is at least gloriously wrong."'' - Stephen J. Gould ''Velikovsky in Collision'' . Put most concisely, it can be said that Velikovsky's theories have been wholly rejected by mainstream academia, often vociferously. Ironically, some of the concepts Velikovsky originally put forward in the 1940s, which at the time were heretical, are in fact much more widely accepted within the mainstream today. These include:
However mainstream academia contends that their acceptance of such ideas little or nothing to do with Velikovsky's work, which is generally regarded as erroneous it all its detailed conclusions. Morevover Velikovsky's unorthodox methodology (for example using comparative mythology to derive scenarios in celestial mechanics) is viewed by most orthodox scholars as an unacceptable way to arrive at conclusions. Criticism of Worlds in Collision Velikovsky's bestselling and consequently most-criticized book is '' Worlds In Collision ''. Astronomer Harlow Shapley, along with others such as Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin , instigated a hostile campaign against the book before it was even published. They were highly critical of publisher Macmillian's initial notion to include it on their text book list. The fundamental criticism against this book from the astronomy community was that its celestial mechanics where irreconcilable with Newtonian Celestial Mechanics , requiring planetary orbits which could not be made to conform with the laws of Conservation Of Energy and Conservation Of Angular Momentum . Velikovsky tried to protect himself from criticism of his celestial mechanics by removing the original Appendix on the subject from ''Worlds in Collision'', hoping that the merit of his ideas would be evaluated on the basis of his comparative mythology and use of literary sources alone. However this strategy did not protect him: the appendix was an expanded version of the ''Cosmos Without Gravitation'' monograph, which he had already distributed to Shapley and others in the late 1940s - and they had regarded the physics within it as egregious. In the 1960s, some of Velikovsky's specific predictions which appeared to be confirmed by space probe findings, for instance:
However in all such cases, the scientific community did not accept that these successful predictions could be used as proof of Velikovsky's ''Worlds in Collision'' scenario, preferring alternative explanations such as a "runaway Greenhouse Effect " on Venus. By 1974, the controversy surrounding Velikovsky's work had permeated US society to the point where the ''. It was not until the 1980s that a very detailed critique of ''Worlds in Collision'' was made in terms of its use of mythical and literary sources, when Bob Forrest published a highly critical examination of them (see Below ). A short analysis of the position of arguments in the late 20th century is given by Dr Velikovsky's ex-associate, and Kronos editor, C. Leroy Ellenberger , in his ''A Lesson from Velikovsky'' . More recently, the absence of supporting material in Ice-core Studies (such as the Greenland Dye-3 and Vostok Cores ) is claimed to have removed any basis for the proposition of a global catastrophe of the proposed dimension within the later Holocene period. Criticism of the Revised Chronology Velikovsky's "Revised chronology" has been rejected by nearly all mainstream Historians and Egyptologists . It was claimed that Velikovsky's usage of material for proof is often very selective. In 1965 the leading cuneiformist Abraham Sachs , in a forum at Brown University , dismissed Velikovsky's use of Mesopotamian cuneiform sources. Velikovsky was never able to refute Sachs' attack. In 1978, following the much-postponed publication of further volumes in Velikovsky's ''Ages in Chaos'' series, the UK's Society for Interdisciplinary studies organised a conference in Glasgow specifically to debate the revised chronology. The ultimate conclusion of this work, by names including Peter James , Jon Bimson, Geoffrey Gammonn, and David Rohl , was that the Revised Chronology was untenable. Specifically, Michael Jones contended that it was impossible to separate the 18th, 19th and 20th Dynasties by centuries as Velikovsky proposed, presenting evidence from genealogies of construction workers which spanned the three dynasties contiguously. However, inspired by Velikovky's original premise that the Manethian chronology of Egypt was flawed, James, Rohl and several other authors have gone on to publish their more conservative chronological revisions. "The Velikovsky Affair" Such was the hostility directed against Velikovsky from some quarters (particular the original campaign led by Harlow Shapley), that over the years numerous commentators have made an analysis of the furor in itself. The most prominent of these was a study by '' American Behavioral Scientist '' magazine, eventually published in book form as ''The Velikovsky Affair''. Some historians of science have found the events to be an illuminating example of how science in the 20th century science dealt with new Paradigms , and how members of particular academic disciplines reacted to ideas from workers from outside their field, illustrating an aversion to permitting people to cross Inter-disciplinary boundaries. The scientific press generally refused to permit Velikovsky a forum to rebut his critics. On occasions where astronomers did agree to printed debate in popular periodicals (most notably Prof. John Q. Stewart of Princeton University in Harper's Magazine , June 1951, and Prof Lloyd Motz of Columbia University in Yale Scientific Magazine , April 1967), Velikovsky's legal training, skill as a debater and polymath knowledge of the humanities generally left lay audiences with the impression that he'd left the astronomers floundering. Naturally, whilst never conceding for a minute that he was correct in his ideas, the scientific community found Velikovsky's rhetorical skill at swaying public opinion exasperating. The storm of controversy created by Velikovsky's publications may have helped revive the Catastrophist movement in the second half of the 20th century; however it is also held by some working in the field that progress has actually been retarded by the negative aspects of the so-called Velikovsky Affair. Works with similar themes, such as those of de Santillana and von Dechend, Allan and Delair, and Clube and Napier (see References below), have met in part with an academic tolerance never experienced by Velikovsky himself, and even with acclaim by critics of the originals. BOOKS BY VELIKOVSKY All published by Doubleday :
REFERENCES
EXTERNAL LINKS Velikovsky works available online
Critiques of Velikovsky
Organisations sympathetic to Velikovsky's work:
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