In this installment of what I’ve been calling the Chronological Revision Chronicles, I truly make of that title a misnomer by continuing to tell the story of those who challenge accepted timelines out of all sensible order. In this edition, I skip back in the timeline, after Nicolai Morosov but before Anatoly Fomenko, to another figure who challenged traditional chronology with a theory that reordered the known past. And he too happened to be a Russian intellectual, although it seems clear that, unlike those I profiled in Part One, he was not motivated by nationalism or any desire to rehabilitate the historical significance of Mother Russia, and he certainly was not motivated by anti-Semitism, for he was himself a Jew with a strong sense of his cultural heritage. Like other chronological revisionists, however, he inevitably ended up engaging in conspiracy theory, but the conspiracies he discerned were not among ancient scribes and establishment historians in the past but rather among his contemporaries. Unlike Morosov before him, his books became a sensation, and unlike Fomenko after him, he found success in America, where he would find himself the center of a controversy over the legitimacy of his ideas. Indeed, it cannot be denied that he ruffled more than a few feathers among not only traditionalist historians but, even more so, among respected scientists, setting himself against all establishment astronomers and physicists. Little wonder, then, that he believed all of academia was dead set against him, denouncing him and his ideas without even giving them their due consideration. But did his ideas deserve any serious consideration?

Before I introduce the principal character of this installment, I feel it may be worthwhile to look even further back, to the beginnings of historical chronology as a science, so that I do not give the wrong impression. Listeners to Part One of these “Chronicles” may have taken from the episode the notion that it was absolutely ridiculous and foolhardy for someone who was not a trained historian to presume to emend chronology based on astronomical and mathematical grounds. Upon further reflection, I don’t want to give that impression. In truth, the two Frenchmen traditionally credited with establishing the modern science of chronology were not historians, per se, and were themselves essentially challenging the accepted chronology established by men who were historians, in an ancient sense of the word. Before the 16th century, few works had attempted to place historical events on a cohesive timeline. The handful of historians who had essayed to forge a chronology, such as Theophilus of Antioch and Sextus Julius Africanus, were mostly concerned with the order of biblical events, and during the Council of Nicaea, Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea, became the most influential of ancient chronologists, establishing a method of measuring time according to the lifespans recorded in the Bible. Now, right away, anyone who’s not a biblical literalist sees the issue here, for the Bible gives us some life spans that are hard to believe, such as Adam, Noah, and Methuselah, who are all said to have lived for almost a thousand years, along with many others whose longevity far surpasses even the oldest living people in today’s modern age of miracle medicine. Through the Middle Ages, the art of chronology became little more than a tool for guessing when Christ would make His triumphal return, a date that kept getting pushed further and further into the future. It was not until the 16th century that Gerardus Mercator, not a historian but a geographer and cartographer, applied astronomical observations and the records of eclipses to the establishment of a chronology, and like Nicolai Morosov after him, his massive work on the subject would be banned by the sociopolitical powers that be—in Mercator’s case the Inquisition, which declared it heretical for its references to other forbidden works.

Joseph Justus Scaliger, via Wikimedia Commons

At around the same time as Mercator’s work was suppressed, a French philologist named Joseph Scaliger came to take an interest in chronology through his work on the linguistic analysis of calendars. Like Morosov and Fomenko so many years later, he was not a historian as such, although one might argue that a philologist, as a linguist focusing on historical texts, is far closer to a historian than is a geometer. As a philologist, he found that many of the answers he sought about what literary works had influenced others relied on a better understanding of when each author had lived, of who had preceded whom. At first, he set about arranging the chronologies he required by relying on genealogies, but soon, like Morosov and Fomenko after him, he looked instead to astronomy and mathematics, studying the work of Paulus Crusius who had assigned dates to time periods that Claudius Ptolemy had recorded in his astronomical work, the Almagest. But Scaliger revised Crusius’s findings and proposed a comprehensive chronology of known history in a massive seven-volume work whose title indicates that he was himself a chronological revisionist. It was called in Latin De Emendatione Temporum, or On the Amendment of Time. And also like Morosov and Fomenko, his work was not well-received. Throughout the rest of his career, he revised his theories and published further volumes to correct his mistakes and answer his critics, one of whom, the French theologian Dionysius Petavius, would go on to popularize the use of B.C. for dates before Christ, and A.D. or anno domini, the year of our Lord, for those after Christ’s birth, terminology that became standard until recently, with the use of BCE for Before Common Era, and CE for Common Era, the boundary between which remains the same as that between B.C. and A.D. It is useful, I think, when considering figures like Morosov and Fomenko and our figure of central interest in this installment, Immanuel Velikovsky, to remember that these two French researchers, who today are universally remembered as the fathers of scientific historical chronology, were in their own time scoffed at as out of their depth or doubted because of their use of astronomical and mathematical evidence. But it should also be remembered that Scaliger was caught making some clear errors. For example, because it disagreed with his calculations, he claimed there was no such thing as axial precession, the phenomenon of the slow wobbling of Earth’s axis of rotation, a phenomenon that all astronomers since Copernicus had agreed was a fact. And rather than producing concrete and reliable astronomical observations and calculations as proof of his assertion, he pointed to some Egyptian texts that seemed to indicate certain constellations, such as Sirius and Arcturus, had remained constant in their movements for more than a thousand years. As we have already discussed in Fomenko’s case, making claims based on astronomical observations found in ancient records that are fundamentally fallible makes one’s own conclusions unreliable. And here we see a striking similarity to the assertions of our principal character, Immanuel Velikovsky, who hundreds of years later would also reject established astronomical science based on some clues he found in ancient literature.

Velikovsky and his ideas first came to the attention of the scientific community in January of 1950, when an article appeared in Harper’s ahead of the publication of his book, Worlds in Collision. Advance reviews from literary critics all seemed to indicate that this was a serious work from a learned man, to be published by the academic press Macmillan, and all signs seemed to point to it being a bestseller. However, after the Harper’s article, which offered some insight into Velikovsky’s actual assertions, the backlash began. Scientists and academics of every stripe took to their typewriters, excoriating Harper’s for praising such nonsense and detailing the many ways in which Velikovsky showed himself to be ignorant or his ideas to be ridiculous. Many of these critics had not even read his book, but that did not stop them from tearing it apart. And when it released and became a sensation, the publishing house Macmillan soon found that professors were boycotting them, refusing to adopt their textbooks. In an effort to save their business, they were forced to give the rights to Velikovsky’s work to Doubleday, who happily took over the publication of his books. It was a controversy unlike any in modern science before or since, and certainly it only helped make Velikovsky’s work world famous, and the takeaway today, among many critics, is that the scholarly community was unfair in attacking and suppressing Velikovsky’s ideas rather than addressing them as part of a larger, ongoing academic conversation. However, while it is true that scientists and historians should not suppress ideas simply because they run counter to consensus views… is that what really happened here? I’ve argued before that even outrageous ideas and claims must be given earnest, critical evaluations, but I argue that this is necessary specifically in order to stem the spread of lies and dubious ideas. Were Velikovsky’s ideas worthy of further consideration? Or was the response of scholars an appropriate countermeasure to slow what appeared to be a swiftly spreading lie, to unmask as pseudoscience ideas that they saw being hailed in a huge promotional campaign as revolutionary science that rewrites history?

Imannuel Velikovsky, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Immanuel Velikovsky, like others I’ve discussed in these chronicles, kind of fell backward into the study of the past. He was a witness to much upheaval and catastrophe in his lifetime, including one extraterrestrial impact very much like those about which he would eventually write: the Tunguska Event, the sky-darkening effects of which he surely saw as a boy of 13 living in Moscow in 1908, and he likely took great interest two decades later when it was confirmed to be an impact. But many of the disasters he was witness to in his youth were decidedly man-made, such as Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, and the Revolution of 1905. Nevertheless, Velikovsky flourished, with the benefit of the finest private education, receiving a gold medal in high school for earning the highest possible grade in every subject. He entered medical school in Moscow, even though he was more interested in architecture and literature, because his mother insisted on it, and while studying there, he watched as the Russian Empire was dealt a grievous blow in World War I and thereafter collapsed into revolution and civil war. As the fighting spread, many found themselves and their families in danger, and Velikovsky’s family found themselves especially endangered, for they were “Zionists” who worked as activists promoting the creation of a homeland for the Jews in the Middle East, a quest that would eventually come to fruition with the establishment of Israel but was always met with opposition and scorn. When the Communist secret police arrested a member of the Velikovskys’ group and named Immanuel’s father as its ringleader, the family left everything behind and fled their home in Russia, eventually settling in Berlin. It was here that Velikovsky would first rub shoulders with the greatest mind of his time, for his family published a series of academic texts from Jewish scientists translated into Hebrew, and Immanuel, as its editor, worked directly with the authors, one of whom was the recent Nobel laureate Albert Einstein. And before the end of his career, they would meet again.

Immanuel Velikovsky married a violinist in 1923, and together with the rest of the family, they immigrated yet again, although this time it was more of a homecoming, for they made themselves a home in Israel, the Jewish nation his parents had long dreamed would be founded. In Israel, Immanuel practiced medicine, but like Alfred Russel Wallace, another scientist enamored of pseudoscience that I spoke about in a recent patron exclusive, he felt more drawn to metaphysical fields such as Spiritualism and parapsychology, taking an especial interest in mind-reading, and it was perhaps this interest that led directly to his study of psychiatry and Freudian psychoanalysis. With the means and connections at his disposal, he actually reached out to and picked the brains of the giants in this very contemporary field, like Carl Jung and even Sigmund Freud himself, before transitioning from practicing medicine to providing psychotherapy. And Freud can also be blamed for the bizarre swerve his career took years later. In his 1939 book Moses and Monotheism, Freud argued that Moses, a central figure in Jewish belief, was actually Egyptian rather than Jewish, a contention with which Velikovsky, as well as many other Jews, took umbrage, for it seemed to rewrite their history by changing the identity of a great leader they had always claimed as their own. Ironically, Velikovsky would go on to rewrite history to a far greater degree in his efforts to refute Freud’s assertion. The same year, Velikovsky moved his wife and his daughters to New York City so that he could make use of its libraries’ research materials in his work, and he set about investigating ancient Egyptian history, reasoning that he should be able to find some Egyptian records describing some of the catastrophic events detailed in Exodus—plagues, fiery pillars, disturbed seas, and a huge population of displaced Hebrew refugees—and if he did find it, perhaps he might find proof of Moses’s heritage and thus refute Freud. Scouring not only the Old Testament and the Talmud, but also translations of ancient Egyptian papyri and ancient Greek mythology, Velikovsky attempted to argue against Freud’s identification of the monotheist pharaoh Akhenaten with Moses by instead arguing that Akhenaten could be identified with Oedipus, another figure important in Freud’s psychoanalytical theories. However, for this to work, the accepted timeline of history had to be revised, so Velikovsky shelved his treatise on Akhenaten and Oedipus to concentrate on chronological revision, an undertaking encouraged when he became aware of an ancient Egyptian papyrus that he believed did indeed describe the events of Exodus.

Velikovsky’s 1947 passport, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

It was called the Ipuwer Papyrus, a document dated to between 1991 and 1803 BCE that recorded a sage’s complaints over the reigning chaos of his era, including mention of servants escaping and a river running red with blood, which of course Velikovsky identified with the departure of the Hebrew slaves and the first plague of Exodus 7: 14. The dating of this document to the Middle Kingdom disagrees with the traditional date given to the events of Exodus by religious scholars as well as by Egyptologists. The former contend the Hebrews left Egypt around 1440 BCE based mostly on scripture, while the latter argue that Exodus is largely myth, but based on mention of “Asiatics” enslaved in Egypt and on the first recorded mention of Israelites in Canaan, they would place such an event around 1290 BCE. Either of these dates is hundreds of years removed from the date attributed to the Ipuwer Papyrus. Many have challenged the validity of the hypothesis that Ipuwer was referring to those biblical events, for the papyrus itself mentions the “Asiatics” usually identified with the Hebrews as arriving, not leaving, and the river of blood business may be explained by the reddish hue the Nile takes on during flooding. But Velikovsky chose instead to question the validity of all ancient chronology because, of course, it helped his Oedipus/Akhenaten hypothesis. So he went to work, like Morosov before him and Fomenko after him, searching through ancient records for dynasties he would claim were duplicates of each other and pointing to the so-called Greek Dark Ages, the entire notion of which has been rejected by some scholars in the same way as the idea of the Western European Dark Ages has been. This “Revised Chronology” of Velikovsky’s, although written first, would not be published in its entirety until 1952, in his follow-up to Worlds in Collision, Ages in Chaos, and would not see a robust response from historians for another decade or more, when respected Assyriologists and Egyptologists would accuse Velikovsky of misleading and sloppy work, misconstruing cuneiform, over-relying on translations rather than original languages, and generally taking material out of context to support his claims, as we see he was already doing with the Ipuwer Papyrus. But the controversy of Velikovsky’s Revised Chronology was to be forever overshadowed by the subject to which he afterward turned his attention, for the resulting volume, which Macmillan decided should be published before his work on chronology, would catapult him into infamy.

As World War II erupted overseas and Velikovsky became a permanent resident of New York, his mind turned to catastrophism. Standing in contrast to uniformitarianism, which contends that changes to the earth occurred over vast stretches of time through slow processes like erosion, catastrophism suggests that changes may happen suddenly, disastrously, through natural upheavals. This view was championed by theologians who saw God’s agency in it and believed it corresponded well with biblical accounts of the flood, but in more recent years, with the Alvarez Hypothesis and the discovery of the Chicxulub Crater, it has been accepted as a cofactor along with slower geological processes in producing planetary change. Velikovsky’s ideas, however, were somewhere in-between biblical literalism and rational science. He claims that the idea struck him one crisp autumn afternoon, as he sat by his kitchen window reading Joshua chapter 10. In that passage, two miracles won the day for the armies of Israel: “great stones,” also referred to as hailstones, fell from heaven on their enemies, and then Moses’s successor, Joshua, “commanded the Sun and Moon to stand still in the sky,” thereby lengthening the day until the Israelites had routed their foes. With a bolt of inspiration, Velikovsky concluded that those stones were in fact meteorites, and the sun had stood still because the rotation of the Earth was somehow halted. This caused Velikovsky to go back to the drawing-board, as it were, and reimagine all of history, every miracle in Exodus and strange celestial account in mythology from every culture, as descriptions of terrible cosmic cataclysms. His eventual theory to encompass every odd description of catastrophe or celestial wonder he could scrounge from ancient records was that Jupiter had expelled a massive comet, which thereafter traveled around the sun on an extended elliptical orbit, passing extraordinarily close to Earth twice within about 52 years around 1500 BCE, such that their atmospheres and magnetic fields interfered with each other, causing Earth to temporarily stop rotating each time. After further interfering with the orbit of Mars, this comet eventually fell into a stable orbit, becoming what we now recognize as Venus. The theory was certainly cinematic, if nothing else, for he painted an astonishing picture of these close encounters, with gargantuan bolts of electricity arcing between the planetary bodies, and tempestuous disturbances of weather and the sea. But where was his proof?

"Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still" by Gustave Dore, via Wikimedia Commons

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as I’ve said before. So what evidence did Velikovsky present for his bold assertions? Well, he claimed that no historical documents mention Venus before the 7th century BCE, and he points to numerous mythological and religious texts whose descriptions of catastrophes and specifically of the Sun stopping its movement seem to support his hypothesis, but as we’ve seen before, relying on literary texts to support scientific hypotheses simply doesn’t work, and just as he had to ignore some aspects of the Ipuwer Papyrus to develop his chronology, he also ignores any portions of his evidence that contradict his catastrophist doctrine. For example, he points out that Herodotus, when visiting Egypt in the 5th century BCE, heard a story of the Sun twice moving in reverse—rising in the west and setting in the east—but this is hearsay of folklore, and Herodotus in the same breath says he was told that the strange motions of the Sun neither affected their crops nor was accompanied by any of the widespread devastation Velikovsky described, all of which Velikovsky omits from his analysis. As for the notion that Venus had never been seen before the 7th century BCE, that has been proven false. We have Babylonian cuneiform tablets detailing astronomical observations of Venus going back a thousand years before that, and we see Venus associated with the Sumerian goddess Inanna even further back in history. And these are just historical rebuttals; scientists provided manifold refutations of Velikovsky’s work, not the least of which was the simple fact that he did not go about his theorizing in a scientific manner. He never performed experiments or collected observational data; he did not maintain scientific objectivity. Rather, an idea occurred to him almost like a vision, and he made up his mind that it was fact, then set about searching for any evidence that might support it.

As for the scientific specifics, in 1974, the American Association for the Advancement of Science hosted a symposium on Velikovsky’s ideas, partly to save some face after the criticism the scientific community had received for their reception, or some would say repression, of Velikovsky’s work, but also to create an opportunity to once and for all refute his pseudoscience publicly. It was a well-attended affair, and Velikovsky himself appeared and engaged in debate with Carl Sagan and others. Sagan delivered what every scientist present believed to be a devastating debunking of Velikovsky’s principal claims, pointing out that the energy required to expel Venus from Jupiter’s gravitational pull would have been so great as to destroy Venus, that everything we know about planetary orbits suggests the proposed orbit of Venus after its expulsion that would have allowed for the collisions Velikovsky hypothesized would be absurdly unlikely and that its changing from an elongated to a circular orbit would have been impossible, and that the stopping and restarting of Earth’s rotation simply could not have happened. His further objections related to Earth’s geological record standing contrary to Velikovsky’s claims and the chemical composition of Venus being different than that of Jupiter. In reply, Velikovsky cited outdated and long refuted sources and quibbled over Sagan’s representation of his claims and back-of-the-envelope calculations to disprove them. The result was that, while scientists came away satisfied that Velikovsky had been exposed as a fraud, Velikovsky’s followers believed he had won the debate.

Sagan and Velikovsky, via everythingselectric.com

Velikovsky liked to portray himself as, and may have genuinely believed himself to be, a lone genius martyr standing against a tidal wave of reactionary ignorance with truth that he alone had surmised through great erudition and sheer perspicacity. In truth, though, just as Fomenko today owes much to the ideas of Morosov, Velikovsky owes a great deal to the ideas of one of the great writers of pseudohistory, Ignatius Donnelly. You may recognize Donnelly’s name if you’ve ever read or listened to a podcast about Atlantis, because he wrote the quintessential fringe text on the lost continent, Atlantis: the Antediluvian World. A year later, he published Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, which proposed that 12,000 years in the past, an advanced civilization was destroyed by a massive comet strike that had many of the same effects that Velikovsky claims occurred during Venus’s close passing. Unlike Fomenko with Morosov, though, Velikovsky doesn’t credit Donnelly, perhaps because he wanted to be taken more seriously than modern scholars took Donnelly. If that is the case, though, it is strange that Velikovsky made such hard to believe assertions in his work. For example, he asserts that the flood of Noah was caused by a cosmic cloud of water released when Saturn experienced a collision, and that when all this water reached Earth, it also brought with it alien plant life. And that is not the only alien visitor that probably arrived here in the wake of a collision, for he claims insects were introduced to Earth when their larvae rained down from the tail of the Venus comet. The story of manna, that miraculous food, falling from heaven when the Israelites most needed it he explains as an alien carbohydrate that just happened to rain down and be edible. Likewise, oil and diamonds fell from the sky during these planetary close calls, and the electromagnetic disturbances these passages caused once scrambled humanity’s brains, which is what really caused the confusion of languages described in the biblical Tower of Babel story. Not content to take on astronomers and historians only, he challenged the tenets of biology and geology and paleontology as well, claiming that rather than changing and evolving over extremely long periods of time, the Earth was changed suddenly. Dinosaurs went extinct only thousands of years ago in these catastrophes, which preserved their remains. There were no Ice Ages; mammoths had been flash frozen because of a tilting in the Earth’s axis. Worldwide fires created our coal deposits. Species evolved not slowly but abruptly because of radiation from these interplanetary calamities. Before his work’s publication in 1950, he encountered Albert Einstein once again, as the two both lived in Princeton, New Jersey, and he asked Einstein to read his work and give an opinion. Einstein suggested that Velikovsky might have a hard time finding a publisher, specifically because “every sensible physicist” would realize that the catastrophes Velikovsky described would have completely destroyed the Earth’s crust. Nevertheless, Einstein was kind about his criticism, and Velikovsky was undeterred. But years later, in Einstein’s very last interview, his opinion was less delicate: “[I]t really isn’t a bad book,” he said, laughing. “The only trouble with it is, it is crazy.”

He didn’t seem so crazy in the 1960s, though, when he and his followers began to claim that certain “predictions” of Velikovsky’s had borne out and thus proven him right. In his work, Velikovsky mentioned that some kind of radio emissions might be expected to emanate from Jupiter because of the electricity and heat that still remained after spitting out Venus. And lo and behold, radio astronomers had since detected radio emissions from Jupiter. Similarly, he had said that Venus must be hot because of its relatively recent ejection from Jupiter and collisions with other planets, and in 1962, the Mariner 2 had confirmed a surface temperature of more than 400 degrees Celsius. Finally, since Venus had supposedly been forged as part of Jupiter, Velikovsky predicted that it would have an atmosphere rich in hydrogen, and in 1963, NASA confirmed that the Mariner 2 had collected evidence of hydrocarbon clouds. So, indeed, science seemed to be turning Velikovsky’s way. The only problem was, a publicist at NASA had made the statement about hydrocarbon clouds in error, prompting NASA to retract. The clouds, it turns out, are mostly sulphuric acid. But Velikovsky refused to believe this retraction, claiming instead that NASA was out to make him look bad. So, it appears that claiming NASA is conspiring to hide the truth has long been a recourse of the pseudoscientist and conspiracist. As for the temperature of Venus and the radio emissions of Jupiter, he was right… but for the wrong reasons. Jupiter’s radio emissions are non-thermal, caused by ions trapped in its magnetosphere, not by its heat. And the high temperature of Venus appears to be caused by its proximity to the Sun and the fact that its clouds trap the heat—in other words, the greenhouse effect. But again, Velikovsky seems to have been in denial, ironic for a Freudian psychotherapist, for he refused to believe that the greenhouse effect could be responsible, claiming it violated thermodynamic laws and again resorting to conspiracy theory, suggesting this finding had been invented just to spite him.

Mariner 2, the world’s first successful interplanetary spacecraft, via Wikimedia Commons

So, our question was whether the scientific community was out of line in opposing the publication and popularity of Velikovsky’s work. By my own argument on this topic, which I spoke about at Harvard last year, it should be considered the duty of experts and journalists and educators to confront and examine dubious ideas, and not to ignore them for being too fringe to take seriously. So in that sense, given that Velikovsky’s claims were clearly disprovable and pseudoscientific and yet seemed poised to be taken as genuine science by a great many readers, I would argue that scientists and scholars acted according to their convictions in keeping with the principles of their calling when they exposed the problems in Velikovsky’s theories. But I also think that Velikovsky composed his work in earnest, even if he was often myopic and driven by confirmation bias. Notwithstanding his eventual cosmic craziness, how crazy were his ideas about history at the beginning of his research? How unbelievable was his Revised Chronology after all? Must all attempts to revise chronology be dismissed out of hand as ridiculous? Our discussion of the genuine questions raised by Fomenko in Part One—questions posed because of solid work in the hard sciences of astronomy and celestial mechanics, show us chronologies might be justifiably questioned in some cases. And Velikovsky himself raised some seemingly valid points about Egyptian chronology having been settled before the Rosetta Stone made the translation of hieroglyphs possible, and using the Sothic dating system, which relied on observations of the star Sirius and had been the object of criticism for a long time, being already seen in Velikovsky’s day unreliable. Our discussion of Scaliger demonstrates that revising chronology is what led to our current understanding of history. While today, Scaliger is remembered as the founder of scientific chronology, he was doubted and criticized at the time, just like Velikovsky and Fomenko, a fact that may encourage us to view Velikovsky’s intentions in drafting a Revised Chronology with a bit more respect. Indeed, Scaliger and Petavius did not have the final word in chronology until the rise of these 20th century revisionists. Rather, there has been a long line of chronological revisionists, some of whom were untrustworthy while others are still recognized today as the greatest intellectuals in history. Find out who else challenged the timeline and why next time, in the final installment of my Chronological Revision Chronicles.

The Chronological Revision Chronicles, Part Two: The Velikovsky Catastrophe

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