Attos' Magazine

Volume #72, December/2009

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Immanuel Velikovsky

Worlds In Collision

By Immanuel Velikovsky

The World Ages

A conception of ages that were brought to their end by violent changes in nature is common all over the world. The number of ages differs from people to people and from tradition to tradition. The difference depends on the number of catastrophes that the particular people retained in its memory, or on the way it reckoned the end of an age.

In the annals of ancient Etruria, according to Varro, were records of seven elapsed ages. Censorinus, an author of the third Christian century and compiler of Varro, wrote that “men thought that different prodigies appeared by means of which the gods notified mortals at the end of each age. The Etruscans were versed in the science of the stars, and after having observed the prodigies with attention, they recorded these observations in their books.”

The Greeks had similar traditions. “There is a period,” wrote Censorinus, “called ‘the supreme year’ by Aristotle, at the end of which the sun, moon, and all the planets return to their original position. This ‘supreme year’ has a great winter, called by the Greeks kataklysmos, which means deluge, and a great summer, called by the Greeks ekpyrosis, or combustion of the world. The world, actually, seems to be inundated and burned alternately in each of these epochs.”

Anaximenes and Anaximander in the sixth pre-Christian century, and Diogenes of Apollonia in the fifth century, assumed the destruction of the world with subsequent recreation. Heraclitus (-540 to -475) taught that the world is destroyed in conflagration after every period of 10,800 years. Aristarchus of Samos in the third century before the present era taught that in a period of 2,484 years the earth undergoes two destructions—of combustion and deluge. The Stoics generally believed in periodic conflagrations by which the world was consumed, to be shaped anew. “This is due to the forces of ever-active fire which exists in things and in the course of long cycles of time resolves everything into itself and out of it is constructed a reborn world”—so Philo presented the notion of the Stoics that our world is refashioned in periodic conflagrations. In one such catastrophe the world will meet its ultimate destruction; colliding with another world, it will fall apart into atoms out of which, in a long process, a new earth will be created somewhere in the universe. “Democritus and Epicurus,” explained Philo, “postulate many worlds, the origin of which they ascribe to the mutual impacts and interlacing of atoms, and their destruction to the counterblows and collisions by the bodies so formed.” As this earth goes to its ultimate destruction, it passes through recurring cosmic catastrophes and is re-formed with all that lives on it.

Hesiod, one of the earliest Greek authors, wrote about four ages and four generations of men that were destroyed by the wrath of the planetary gods. The third age was the age of bronze; when it was destroyed by Zeus, a new generation repeopled the earth, and using bronze for arms and tools, they began to use iron, too. The heroes of the Trojan War were of this fourth generation. Then a new destruction was decreed, and after that came “yet another generation, the fifth, of men who are upon the bounteous earth”—the generation of iron. In another work of his, Hesiod described the end of one of the ages. “The life-giving earth crashed around in burning . . . all the land seethed, and the Ocean’s streams . . . it seemed even as if Earth and wide Heaven above came together; for such a mighty crash would have arisen if Earth were being hurled to ruin, and Heaven from on high were hurling her down.”

Analogous traditions of four expired ages persist on the shores of the Bengal Sea and in the highland of Tibet—the present age is the fifth.

The sacred Hindu book Bhagavata Purana tells of four ages and of pralayas or cataclysms in which, in various epochs, mankind was nearly destroyed; the fifth age is that of the present. The world ages are called Kalpas or Yugas. Each world age met its destruction in catastrophes of conflagration, flood, and hurricane. Ezour Vedam and Bhaga Vedam, sacred Hindu books, keeping to the scheme of four expired ages, differ only in the number of years ascribed to each. In the chapter, “World Cycles,” in Visuddhi-Magga, it is said that “there are three destructions: the destruction by water, the destruction by fire, the destruction by wind,” but that there are seven ages, each of which is separated from the previous one by a world catastrophe.

Reference to ages and catastrophes is found in Avesta (Zend-Avesta), the sacred scriptures of Mazdaism, the ancient religion of the Persians. “Bahman Yast,” one of the books of Avesta, counts seven world ages or millennia. Zarathustra (Zoroaster), the prophet of Mazdaism, speaks of “the signs, wonders, and perplexity which are manifested in the world at the end of each millennium.”

The Chinese call the perished ages kis and number ten kis from the beginning of the world until Confucius. In the ancient Chinese encyclopedia, Sing-li-ta-tsiuen-chou, the general convulsions of nature are discussed. Because of the periodicity of these convulsions, the span of time between two catastrophes is regarded as a “great year.” As during a year, so during a world age, the cosmic mechanism winds itself up and “in a general convulsion of nature, the sea is carried out of its bed, mountains spring out of the ground, rivers change their course, human beings and everything are ruined, and the ancient traces effaced.”

An old tradition, and a very persistent one, of world ages that went down in cosmic catastrophes was found in the Americas among the Incas, the Aztecs, and the Mayas. A major part of stone inscriptions found in Yucatan refer to world catastrophes. “The most ancient of these fragments [katuns or calendar stones of Yucatan] refer, in general, to great catastrophes which, at intervals and repeatedly, convulsed the American continent, and of which all nations of this continent have preserved a more or less distinct memory.” Codices of Mexico and Indian authors who composed the annals of their past give a prominent place to the tradition of world catastrophes that decimated humankind and changed the face of the earth.

In the chronicles of the Mexican kingdom it is said: “The ancients knew that before the present sky and earth were formed, man was already created and life had manifested itself four times.”

A tradition of successive creations and catastrophes is found in the Pacific—on Hawaii and on the islands of Polynesia: there were nine ages and in each age a different sky was above the earth. Icelanders, too, believed that nine worlds went down in a succession of ages, a tradition that is contained in the Edda.

The rabbinical conception of ages crystallized in the post-Exilic period. Already before the birth of our earth, worlds had been shaped and brought into existence, only to be destroyed in time. “He made several worlds before ours, but He destroyed them all.” This earth, too, was not created at the beginning to satisfy the Divine Plan. It underwent reshaping, six consecutive remoldings. New conditions were created after each of the catastrophes. On the fourth earth lived the generation of the Tower of Babel; we belong to the seventh age. Each of the ages or “earths” has a name.

Seven heavens were created and seven earths were created: the most removed, the seventh, Eretz; the sixth, Adamah; the fifth, Arka; the fourth, Harabab; the third, Yabbashah; the second, Tevel; and “our own land called Heled, and like the others, it is separated from the foregoing by abyss, chaos, and water.” Great catastrophes changed the face of the earth. “Some perished by deluge, others were consumed by conflagration,” wrote the Jewish philosopher Philo.

According to the rabbinical authority Rashi, ancient tradition knows of periodic collapses of the firmament, one of which occurred in the days of the Deluge, and which repeated themselves at intervals of 1,656 years. The duration of the world ages varies in Armenian and Arabian traditions.

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