Attos' Magazine

Volume #76, December/2009

Home Page

Immanuel Velikovsky

Worlds In Collision

By Immanuel Velikovsky

On the Other Side of the Ocean

The Book of Joshua, compiled from the more ancient Book of Jasher, relates the order of events. “Joshua . . . went up from Gilgal all night.” In the early morning he fell upon his enemies unawares at Gibeon, and “chased them along the way that goes up to Beth-boron.” As they fled, great stones were cast from the sky. That same day (“in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites”) the sun stood still over Gibeon and the moon over the valley of Ajalon. It has been noted that this description of the position of the luminaries implies that the sun was in the forenoon position. The Book of Joshua says that the luminaries stood in the midst of the sky.

Allowing for the difference in longitude, it must have been early morning or night in the Western Hemisphere.

We go to the shelf where stand books with the historical traditions of the aborigines of Central America.

The sailors of Columbus and Cortes, arriving in America, found there literate peoples who had books of their own. Most of these books were burned in the sixteenth century by the Dominican monks. Very few of the ancient manuscripts survived, and these are preserved in the libraries of Paris, the Vatican, the Prado, and Dresden; they are called codici, and their texts have been studied and partly read. However, among the Indians of the days of the conquest and also of the following century there were literary men who had access to the knowledge written in pictographic script by their forefathers.

In the Mexican Annals of Cuauhtitlan —the history of the empire of Cuthuacan and Mexico, written in Nahua-Indian in the sixteenth century—it is related that during a cosmic catastrophe that occurred in the remote past, the night did not end for a long time.

The biblical narrative describes the sun as remaining in the sky for an additional day (“about a whole day”). The Midrashim, the books of ancient traditions not embodied in the Scriptures, relate that the sun and the moon stood still for thirty-six itim, or eighteen hours, and thus from sunrise to sunset the day lasted about thirty hours. In the Mexican annals it is stated that the world was deprived of light and the sun did not appear for a fourfold night. In a prolonged day or night time could not be measured by the usual means at the disposal of the ancients.

Sahagun, the Spanish savant who came to America a generation after Columbus and gathered the traditions of the aborigines, wrote that at the time of one cosmic catastrophe the sun rose only a little way over the horizon and remained there without moving; the moon also stood still.

I am dealing with the Western Hemisphere first, because the biblical stories were not known to its aborigines when it was discovered. Also, the tradition preserved by Sahagun bears no trace of having been introduced by the missionaries: in his version there is nothing to suggest Joshua ben Nun and his war against the Canaanite kings; and the position of the sun, only a very little above the eastern horizon, differs from the biblical text, though it does not contradict it.

We could follow a path around the earth and inquire into the various traditions concerning the prolonged night and prolonged day, with sun and moon absent or tarrying at different points along the zodiac, while the earth underwent a bombardment of stones in a world ablaze. But we must postpone this journey. There was more than one catastrophe when, according to the memory of mankind, the earth refused to play the chronometer by undisturbed rotation on its axis. First, we must differentiate the single occurrences of cosmic catastrophes, some of which took place before the one described here, some after it; some of which were of greater extent, and some of lesser.

Estadísticas de tráfico