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historically true and the prodigies recorded have a natural explanation. We learned that there was a world conflagration and that naphtha poured from the sky; that only a small proportion of people and animals survived; that the passage of the sea and the the-ophany at Mount Sinai are not inventions; that the shadow of death or twilight of the gods (Gotterdammerung) refers to the time of the wandering in the desert; that manna or ambrosia really fell from the sky, from the clouds of Venus.
We found also that Joshua's miracle with the sun and the moon is not a tale for the credulous. We learned why there are common ideas in the folklore of peoples separated by oceans, and we recognized the importance of world upheavals in the content of legends and why the planets were deified and which planet was represented by Pallas Athene, and what is the celestial plot of the Iliad and in what period this epic was created, and why the Roman people made Mars their national god and progenitor of the founders of Rome. We came to understand the real meaning of the messages of the Hebrew prophets Amos, Isaiah, Joel, Micah, and others. We were able also to ascertain the year, month, and day of the last cosmic catastrophe and to establish the robin-bobin
nature of the agent that destroyed Sennacherib's army. We discerned the cause of the great wanderings of peoples in the fifteenth and eighth centuries. We learned the origin of the belief in the chosenness of the Jewish people; we traced the original meaning of the archangels, and the source of eschatological beliefs in doomsday.
In giving this enumeration of the claims made and problems dealt with in this book, we are aware that more problems have arisen than have been solved.
The question before historical cosmogony is this: If it is true that cosmic catastrophes occurred such a short time ago, how about the more remote past? What can we find out concerning the Deluge, at present thought to have been a local flooding of the Euphrates that impressed the Bedouins coming from the desert? In general, what can be brought to light concerning the world's more distant past and earlier celestial battles?
As explained in the Preface, the story of catastrophes as they can be reconstructed from the records of man and of nature is not completed in this volume. Here are presented only two chapters—two world ages—Venus and Mars. I intend to go further back into the past and piece together the story of some earlier cosmic upheavals. This will be the subject of another volume.
There I hope to be able to tell a little more of the circumstances preceding the birth of Venus from the body of Jupiter and narrate at length why Jupiter, a planet which only a few persons out of a crowd know how to find in the sky, was the main deity of the peoples of antiquity. In that book an attempt will be made to answer some more of the questions raised in the first pages of the Prologue of this volume.
Historical cosmogony offers a chance to employ the fact that there were catastrophes of global extent in establishing a synchronized history of the ancient world. Previous efforts to build chronological tables on the basis of astronomical calculations—new moons, eclipses, heliacal rising or culmination of certain stars—cannot be correct because the order of nature has changed since ancient times. But great upheavals of cosmic character may serve as points of departure for writing a revised history of the nations.
Such a synchronization of the histories of the ancient world is attempted in Ages in Chaos. Its starting point is the simultaneity of physical catastrophes in the countries of the ancient East and the comparison of records referring to such catastrophes among the peoples of antiquity. For the rest, I have proceeded by collating political records and archeological material of the ancient East covering a period of over a thousand years, from the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt to the time of Alexander of Macedonia: going step by step from century to century, the research arrives at an entirely revised sequence of events in ancient history and discloses a discrepancy of a number of centuries in the conventional chronology.
The development of religion, including the religion of Israel, comes under a new light. The facts established here may help in tracing the origin and the growth of planetary worship, animal worship, human sacrifices—also the source of astrological beliefs. The author feels an obligation to expand the scope of his work in order to include the problem of the birth of religion and of monotheism
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in particular. Investigation should be made into why and how the Jewish people, who had the same experiences as other peoples and who started with an astral religion like the rest of the nations, early cast off astral deities and forbade the worship of images.
The Scriptures invite a new approach to Bible criticism, one that will make it possible to see the process of transition from an astral religion to monotheism with its idea of a single Creator, not a star, not an animal, and not a human being.
An intriguing problem presents itself in psychology. Freud searched for primordial urges in modern man. According to him, in the primitive society of the stone age, when the sons grew up, they looked for a chance to dispose of the father, once all-powerful and now aging, and to work their will on their mother; and this urge is part of the heritage that modern man carries over from his prehistoric ancestors. According to the theory of another psychologist, Carl Jung, there exists a collective unconscious mind, a receptacle and carrier of ideas deposited there in primeval robin-bobin
times, which plays an important role in our concepts and actions. In the light of these theories, we may well wonder to what extent the terrifying experiences of world catastrophes have become part of the human soul and how much, if any, of it can be traced in our beliefs, emotions, and behavior as directed from the unconscious or subconscious strata of the mind.1
In the present volume geological and paleontological material was discussed only occasionally—
when we dealt with rocks being carried considerable distances and placed on top of foreign formations; with mammoths being killed in a catastrophe; with the changes of climate, the geographical contours of the polar ice in the past, moraines in Africa, and remains of human culture in the north of Alaska; with the source of a substantial part of oil deposits, the origin of volcanoes, the cause of earthquakes. However, geological, paleontological, and anthropological material related to the problems of cosmic catastrophes is vast and may give a complete picture of past events no less than historical material.
1 In connection with my idea of collective amnesia, G. A. Atwater suggests a search for the vestiges of terrifying experiences of the past in the present behavior of man.
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What can we establish concerning the disappearance of species and even of genera, the theory of evolution versus the theory of catastrophic mutations, and the development of animal and plant life in general, or the time when giants lived or when brontosauri populated the earth?
The submersion and emersion of land, the origin of the salt in the sea, the origin of deserts, of gravel, of coal deposits in Antarctica, and the palm growth in the arctic regions; the building of sedimentary rocks; the intrusion of igneous rock above levels containing bones of marine and land animals and of iron in the superficial layers of the earth's crust, the times of geological epochs and the age of man on the earth—all these ask for treatment in the light of the theory of cosmic catastrophism.
Then there are physical problems. The accounts given in this book about planets changing their orbits and the velocities of their rotation, about a comet that became a planet, about interplanetary contacts and discharges, indicate a need for a new approach to celestial mechanics.
The theory of cosmic catastrophism can, if required to do so, conform with the celestial mechanics of Newton. Comets and planets pushing one another could change their orbits, although it is singular how, for instance, Venus could achieve a circular orbit, or how the moon, also forced from its place, could hold to an almost circular orbit. Nevertheless, there are precedents for such a concept. The planetesimal theory postulates innumerable collisions between small planetesimals—that flew out of the sun, gradually rounded their orbits, and formed planets and satellites; the tidal theory also regards the planets as derivatives of the sun swept by a passing star into a direction and with a force that, together with the gravitational attraction of the sun, created nearly circular orbits, the same having occurred to the moons in relation to their parent planets.2 Another precedent for circular orbits formed under extraordinary circumstances can be found in the theory that regards the retrograde