Immanuel Velikovsky (1895–1979)

Velikovsky wrote this too early. Much of his so-called evidence of anomalies will later be answered by plate tectonics and modern geology. (Velikovsky speaks of Wegener and plate tectonics on pp. 107-111, but dismisses the theory because, he says, there is no proof of plates or a mechanism for their sliding. Of course, now there is.) Still, Velikovsky's point is to underscore the anomalies in the standard, uniformitarian theory of earth's history. In its stead he offers evidence for a show more catastrophism, and offers up evidence that the earth might be affected by outside, cosmic forces. This, then, serves as an adjunct to his theory from Worlds in Collision: look, here is evidence of wild things happening that supports my theory that some wild things happened. It makes sense, of course, only if you already buy Velikovsky's theories. If you don't, but still believe in a catastrophistic geology, say a believer in a Noachian deluge, there is a lot to chew on here. But, a lot of it is outdated. show less

I keep reading the Velikovsky books because there are still some die-hard Velikovskians around and if I ever run into one I don’t want to be accused of not having read his works. Plus it’s practice for spotting logical fallacies. Still, it’s a chore.


Velikovsky’s first published book was Worlds in Collision, which proposed Jupiter had ejected a “comet” in the 15th century BC that zipped around the solar system for a while, causing the various events described in Exodus, show more temporarily stopping the Earth’s rotation, setting the planet on fire, and generally raising havoc until it settled down and became the planet Venus. If he had been ignored, he would have been gradually faded away as one of history’s many loons (ever heard of Lawsonomy? How about World Ice Theory? Both were woowoo once roughly on Velikovsky’s level in terms of temporary popularity). However, astronomers Harlow Shapley and Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin organized a boycott against Velikovsky’s publisher, Macmillan, threatening not to buy textbooks unless Macmillan dropped the book. This was a singularly bad idea; it gave Velikovsky notoriety for “standing up to authority” and Macmillan simply transferred the book to its rival Doubleday, where it made the best-seller list. Science historian Henry Bauer suggested (Beyond Velikovsky) suggested that some of the reaction to Velikovsky was a result of the dethroning liberal arts by the science as the pinnacle of human achievement. For years, a liberal arts degree had been the ticket of admission to the corridors of power; now, suddenly, with the development of atomic weapons and radar and all the other scientific marvels during WWII, physics and chemistry were suddenly important and a liberal arts degree was the ticket to nowhere in particular. In reaction, supposedly, the philosophers and psychologists and sociologists and lawyers all took up Velikovsky’s cause as demonstrating science was flawed – hadn’t Dr. Velikovsky proved the value of classical education by refuting accepted science with his careful study of ancient texts? I don’t know that I buy that argument fully but there may be something to it.


At any rate, Velikovsky followed up Worlds in Collision with a whole shelf full of woowoo, writing Near Eastern history to fit the Old Testament narratives: Ages in Chaos, Oedipus and Ankhenaton, Ramses II and his Time (there are a couple of other books in the series that were never published in paper but are available on line). An interesting thing here is despite Velikovsky’s uncritical and literal acceptance of the Old Testament as history, he was not particularly religious; all the miracles of the Bible had physical explanations and didn’t require any Divine intervention (of course, Velikovsky’s physics was complete woowoo, created on the fly to fit). In the other books, Velkovsky can be credited as the inventor of “phantom history”; the idea that large periods of accepted history are fabrications, invented for political reasons. A corollary is many historical figures are actually the same person under two different names. (The most extreme example is presented by Russian Anatoly Fomenko, who contends all of human history before about 800AD was invented by medieval chroniclers – but that’s another bucket of woo).


The key problem for Velikovsky and the other Biblical phantom history advocates is reconciling the Old Testament accounts with archaeology. The “begats” put the United Monarchy of Israel – the empires of Saul, David, and Solomon – in the Late Bronze Age, but there’s no archaeological evidence that there ever was a “United Monarchy” or that any such persons as Saul, David or Solomon ever existed, and the evidence is that the Levant – including what would eventually be Israel and Judah – were Egyptian colonies during the supposed United Monarchy period. This is the problem that Velikovsky and the other “revised chronologies” and “new chronologies” have to deal with, and the solution is the subtract a big chunk of Egyptian history so it conforms with Old Testament.


That, finally, brings us to Ramses II and His Time. Velikovsy uses the “duplicate historical figure” argument; Ramses II of the 19th Dynasty is actually the same person as the “Pharaoh Necho” of the Old Testament (rather than the Egyptological assignment of Pharaoh Necho to Nekau Wahemibre of the 26th Dynasty). What’s more, the Hittite King Hattusili II is actually the Neobabylonian (Velikovsky uses the obsolete term “Chaldean”) Nebuchadnezzar, and there never was any such thing as a “Hittite Empire”; it was actually the Chaldeans. Velikovsky’s arguments for this partially based on the unstated assumption that anybody mentioned in the Old Testament must be important and therefore Pharaoh Necho can’t possibly be the obscure Nekau Wahemibre. Velikovsky’s second line of evidence of supposed parallel accounts of the battle of Carchemish in Jeremiah and the battle of Kadesh in Egypt. Jeremiah’s account (chapter 46) has Necho (who Velikovsky claims is Ramses II) defeated by Nebuchadnezzar (who Velikovsky claims is Hatusili II) at Carchemish (which Velikovsky claims is Kadesh) and fleeing to the north; the Egyptian accounts (Velikovsky mentions The Poem of Pentaur and inscriptions at Abu Simbel) have Ramses II defeated by Hatusili II at Kadesh and part of the Egyptian army retreating to the north. QED, according to Velikovsky.


Except, of course, it doesn’t end there; Velikovsky completely ignores the remainder of the Egyptian descriptions of Kadesh. The Hittites stop their pursuit to plunder the Egyptian baggage; the Egyptians rally, additional forces come up, and now it’s the Hittites turn to be routed; the Egyptian army does not withdraw in defeat as Jeremiah describes. This omission has to be deliberate.


There are many other things that Velikovsky cites as “evidence”. As noted by several of his critics, Velikovsky couldn’t read any of the ancient texts he cites in the original language and had to depend on translations. He cherry-picked translations to fit his claims; he habitually used obsolete translations, and he only used archaeological reports when they seemed to fit his theses. There really isn’t much point in going into all of them.


Some photographs. Good maps of the Near East on the endpapers. No bibliography; you would have to peruse all the footnotes to track Velikovsky’s sources. As mentioned, only of interest if you need to debunk a Velikovskian, which would probably be as futile as trying to argue with a Flat Earther or an antivaxxer. show less

Immanuel Velikovsky is probably the patriarch of 20th century pseudoscientists. Perhaps it’s not quite right to call him a pseudoscientist, as he didn’t have much use for science – pseudohistorian or pseudoarchaeologist don’t seem to fit either.


The irony of Velikovsky’s career is that he probably would have been ignored as just another minor loon with crackpot ideas were it not for Harlow Shapely and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who organized a boycott against the publisher of Worlds show more in Collision. It was during the McCarthy era, and the idea of censorship put a lot of backs up; thus Velikovsky became a cause célèbre among a coterie who hadn’t the faintest idea of what he was talking about.


The gist of Velikovsky’s method is:


* The Old Testament (as far as “history” goes; Velikovsky never address Creation) is factually correct.

* Any other ancient text is also factually correct, insofar as it agrees with the Old Testament.

* If archaeological evidence – stratigraphy, sequence dating, etc. – disagrees with (1) or (2), it is wrong.

* If scientific evidence or theory – radiocarbon dating, celestial mechanics, etc. – disagrees with (1) or (2), it is also wrong.


From the above come a couple of corollaries:


* Since archaeological, astronomical, and radiometric dating methods are all incorrect (at least, insofar as they disagree with Velikovsky), and all ancient texts are factually correct as long as they don’t disagree with Velikovsky, any texts that appear to describe similar events actually do so, even if one is a 14th century CE Aztec codex and the other is Exodus. The apparent discrepancy in chronology is incorrect.


* If an account of a particular catastrophe – for example, the Earth’s rotation stopping and the planet catching fire - doesn’t appear in a particular culture’s mythology or written record, it’s because the event was so traumatic it induced “collective amnesia”.


I’ve been reading my way through Velikovsky’s work over the years – he was very prolific – and came up with one of the rarer works in a used book store. [Oedipus and Akhnaton is peripheral to the main Velikovsky theme of repeated catastrophes – he just stepped aside for a moment to muck about in Egyptian history. Here, Velikovsky states – I almost said “proposes” but there’s never any room for testable hypotheses in Velikovsky’s work – that Akhenaton (that’s my preferred spelling) and Oedipus were the same person. Yep; Akhenaton “killed” his father (at least, Velikovsky acknowledges this was symbolic – by chiseling Amenhotep III’s name of monuments), married his mother (Queen Tiye/Jocasta), was denounced by Tiresias (Amenhotep son of Hapu), and went blind. His sons (Eteocles/Polynices –Tutankhamen/Smenkhkare) warred against each other; his successor (Creon/Ay) forbid the burial of Polynices/Smenkhkare and entombed Baketaten/Antigone alive when she performed it. All spelled out by carefully selected texts, thoroughly documented in footnotes. As just one example, Cadmus, the founder of Thebes in Greece, was (according to Velikovsky) the same as Niqmaddu II of Ugarit (who Velikovsky refers to as “King Nikmed”). Velikovsky has Nikmed marrying an Egyptian princess (I confess I’m not up to speed on Ugaritic history, but AFAIK the only evidence for this is a relief that shows Niqmaddu accompanied by a lady in what can be interpreted as Egyptian dress, which Velikovsky cites as if it were a textual reference); Cadmus had an Egyptian wife (Velikovsky’s authority for this is an encyclopedia published in 1724 that names Cadmus’s wife as “Sphinx”); thus, since Niqmaddu II was a contemporary of Akhenaton he brought the story to Greece – where presumably all the names were changed to avoid embarrassing the participants.


There’s an interesting epilogue – Velikovsky was a Freudian, and he gives great credit to The Master for elucidating the Oedipus Complex. However, he is forced to dismiss Freud’s last work – Moses and Monotheism. Freud has Moses picking up monotheism as a disciple of Akhenaton; this is doubly heretical for Velikovsky since he doesn’t consider Akhenaton a monotheist (rather a “monolatrist”) and because Akhenaton has to come much later than Moses for Velikovsky’s chronology to work.


Velikovsky’s been gone for decades now, but even a minor amount of Web searching discloses he still has numerous followers. Catastrophism is always popular, and some like that; Velikovsky was “persecuted” by “the Establishment” and some like that; Velikovsky appeals to Biblical literalists by finding “scientific” explanations for the miracles documented in Exodus; and Velikovsky’s sanctification of the written word and his methods of using texts appeal to deconstructionists. I can recommend Oedipus and Akhnaton to anybody who’s interested in studying the workings of a mind like Velikovsky; as Egyptian history it is, of course, valueless. show less

I have read many classics of Fortean literature that turned out to be anthropologically intriguing, entertainingly written or simply striking historical objects. This is not one of them and I regret bothering to pull it down from my shelf.

The scholarship is atrocious. Velikovsky rarely builds an argument by strict reason, preferring instead to state his interpretation then beat the reader in to submission with page upon page of quotes from historical sources that he feels support it. What show more constitutes evidence varies: sometimes a close apparent synchronicity in time and event, but more often than not a superficial similarity of incident or general closeness in era. Metaphorical texts may be read as literal and vice versa if it suits the author's purpose. The cataclysms proposed are justified by the interpretation of the examples, while the interpretation of the examples is made in the context of the same supposed cataclysms; and down the drain of circular reasoning the book goes for page after endless page. (Velikovsky only briefly discusses the scholarly merits of his interpretative approach around page 300. I imagine he did not want the reader to look at it too closely.)

The sources cited are seldom from within two decades of the book's publication which is a particular issue for Velikovsky's scientific arguments, which supposedly ground the whole endeavour. (One cannot make points about astronomy in 1950 based on the state of the science in 1800-1930.) The author casually treats planets and comets as similar entities (except where his argument requires them to be wholly distinct classes of objects) in a manner that suggests a disinterest in this side of his own case. The coup de grace comes in the desperate Epilogue, where Velikovsky argues that we must make way for a new astronomy on the basis of these historical cataclysms, although the idea that the cataclysms themselves occurred depends entirely on those selfsame astronomical ideas. This is a book that is constantly trying to lift itself up by its own bootstraps.

This was ostensibly a deeply controversial book in the 1970s (when my copy was printed and at which point most of its sources were four decades or more out of date). Its popular appeal had led me to assume it must at least have some drive or scholarly strength despite its ultimately wrongheaded conclusions. Instead it somehow manages to be as tedious as it is fatuous. show less