Attos' Magazine

Volume #73, December/2009

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Immanuel Velikovsky

Worlds In Collision

By Immanuel Velikovsky

The Sun Ages

An oft-repeated occurrence in the traditions of the world ages is the advent of a new sun in the sky at the beginning of every age. The word “sun” is substituted for the word “age” in the cosmogonical traditions of many peoples all over the world.

The Mayas counted their ages by the names of their consecutive suns. These were called Water Sun, Earthquake Sun, Hurricane Sun, Fire Sun. “These suns mark the epochs to which are attributed the various catastrophes the world has suffered.”

Ixtlilxochitl (circa 1568—1648), the native Indian scholar, in his annals of the kings of Tezcuco, described the world ages by the names of “suns.” The Water Sun (Or Sun of Waters) was the first age, terminated by a deluge in which almost all creatures perished; the Earthquake Sun or age perished in a terrific earthquake when the earth broke in many places and mountains fell. The world age of the Hurricane Sun came to its destruction in a cosmic hurricane. The Fire Sun was the world age that went down in a rain of fire.

“The nations of Culhua or Mexico,” Humboldt quoted Gómara, the Spanish writer of the sixteenth century, “believe according to their hieroglyphic paintings, that, previous to the sun which now enlightens them, four had already been successively extinguished. These four suns are as many ages, in which our species has been annihilated by inundations, by earthquakes, by a general conflagration, and by the effect of destroying tempests.” Every one of the four elements participated in each of the catastrophes; deluge, hurricane, earthquake, and fire gave their names to the catastrophes because of the predominance of one of them in the upheavals. Symbols of the successive suns are painted on the pre-Columbian literary documents of Mexico.

“Cinco soles que son edades,” or “five suns that are epochs,” wrote Gómara in his description of the conquest of Mexico. An analogy to this sentence of Gómara may be found in Lucius Ampelius, a Roman author, who, in his book Liber memorialis, wrote: “Soles fuere quinque” (There were five suns): It is the same belief that Gómara found in the New World.

The Mexican Annals of Cuauhtitlan, written in Nahua-Indian (circa 1570) and based on ancient sources, contains the tradition of seven sun epochs. Chicon-Tonatiuh or “the Seven Suns” is the designation for the world cycles or acts in the cosmic drama.

The Buddhist sacred book of Visuddhi-Magga contains a chapter on “World Cycles.” “There are three destructions: the destruction by water, the destruction by fire, the destruction by wind.” After the catastrophe of the deluge, “when now a long period has elapsed from the cessation of the rains, a second sun appeared.” In the interim the world was enveloped in gloom. “When this second sun appears, there is no distinction of day and night,” but “an incessant heat beats upon the world.” When the fifth sun appeared, the ocean gradually dried up; when the sixth sun appeared, “the whole world became filled with smoke.” “After the lapse of another long period, a seventh sun appears, and the whole world breaks into flames.” This Buddhist book refers also to a more ancient “Discourse on the Seven Suns.”

The Brahmans called the epochs between two destructions “the great days.”

The Sibylline books recite the ages in which the world underwent destruction and regeneration. “The Sibyl told as follows: ‘The nine suns are nine ages. . . . Now is the seventh sun.’” The Sibyl prophesied two ages yet to come—that of the eighth and of the ninth sun.

The aborigines of British North Borneo, even today, declare that the sky was originally low, and that six suns perished, and at present the world is illuminated by the seventh sun.

Seven solar ages are referred to in Mayan manuscripts, in Buddhist sacred books, in the books of the Sibyl. In all quoted sources the “suns” are explained (by the sources themselves) as signifying consecutive epochs, each of which went down in a great, general destruction.

Did the reason for the substitution of the word “sun” for “epoch” by the peoples of both hemispheres lie in the changed appearance of the luminary and in its changed path across the sky in each world age?

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