Attos' Magazine

Volume #78, December/2009

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Immanuel Velikovsky

Worlds In Collision

By Immanuel Velikovsky

The Red World

In the middle of the second millennium before the present era, as I intend to show, the earth underwent one of the greatest catastrophes in its history. A celestial body that only shortly before had become a member of the solar system—a new comet—came very close to the earth. The account of this catastrophe can be reconstructed from evidence supplied by a large number of documents.

The comet was on its way from its perihelion and touched the earth first with its gaseous tail. Later in this book I shall show that it was about this comet that Servius wrote: “Non igneo sed sanguineo rubore fuisse” (It was not of a flaming but of a bloody redness).

One of the first visible signs of this encounter was the reddening of the earth’s surface by a fine dust of rusty pigment. In sea, lake, and river this pigment gave a bloody coloring to the water. Because of these particles of ferruginous or other soluble pigment, the world turned red.

The Manuscript Quiche of the Mayas tells that in the Western Hemisphere, in the days of a great cataclysm, when the earth quaked and the sun’s motion was interrupted, the water in the rivers turned to blood.

Ipuwer, the Egyptian eyewitness of the catastrophe, wrote his lament on papyrus: “The river is blood,” and this corresponds with the Book of Exodus (7: 20): “All the waters that were in the river were turned to blood.” The author of the papyrus also wrote: “Plague is throughout the land. Blood is everywhere,” and this, too, corresponds with the Book of Exodus (7 : 21): “There was blood throughout all the land of Egypt.”

The presence of the hematoid pigment in the rivers caused the death of fish followed by decomposition and smell. “And the river stank” (Exodus 7: 21). “And all the Egyptians digged round about the river for water to drink; for they could not drink of the water of the river” (Exodus 7 : 24). The papyrus relates: “Men shrink from tasting; human beings thirst after water,” and “That is our water! That is our happiness! What shall we do in respect thereof? All is ruin.”

The skin of men and of animals was irritated by the dust, which caused boils, sickness, and the death of cattle— “a very grievous murrain.” Wild animals, frightened by the portents in the sky, came close to the villages and cities.

The summit of mountainous Thrace received the name “Haemus”, and Apollodorus related the tradition of the Thracians that the summit was so named because of the “stream of blood which gushed out on the mountain” when the heavenly battle was fought between Zeus and Typhon, and Typhon was struck by a thunderbolt. It is said that a city in Egypt received the same name for the same reason.

The mythology which personified the forces of the cosmic drama described the world as colored red. In one Egyptian myth the bloody hue of the world is ascribed to the blood of Osiris, the mortally wounded planet god; in another myth it is the blood of Seth or Apopi; in the Babylonian myth the world was colored red by the blood of the slain Tiamat, the heavenly monster.

The Finnish epos of Kalevala describes how, in the days of the cosmic upheaval, the world was sprinkled with red milk. The Altai Tatars tell of a catastrophe when “blood turns the whole world red,” and a world conflagration follows. The Orphic hymns refer to the time when the heavenly vault, “mighty Olympus, trembled fearfully . . . and the earth around shrieked fearfully, and the sea was stirred [heaped], troubled with its purple waves.”

An old subject for debate is: Why is the Red Sea so named? If a sea is called Black or White, that may be due to the dark coloring of the water or to the brightness of the ice and snow. The Red Sea has a deep blue color. As no better reason was found, a few coral formations or some red birds on its shores were proposed as explanations of its name.

Like all the water in Egypt, the water on the surface of the Sea of the Passage was of a red tint. It appears that Raphael was not mistaken when, in painting the scene of the passage, he colored the water red.

It was, of course, not this mountain or that river or that sea exclusively that was reddened, thus earning the name Red or Bloody, as distinguished from other mountains and seas. But crowds of men, wherever they were, who witnessed the cosmic upheaval and escaped with their lives, ascribed the name Haemus or Red to particular places.

The phenomenon of “blood” raining from the sky has also been observed in limited areas and on a small scale in more recent times. One of these occasions, according to Pliny, was during the consulship of Manius Acilius and Gains Porcius. Babylonians, too, recorded ted dust and rain falling from the sky; instances of “bloody rain” have been recorded in divers countries. The red dust, soluble in water, falling from the sky in water drops, does not originate in clouds, but must come from volcanic eruptions or from cosmic spaces. The fall of meteorite dust is a phenomenon generally known to take place mainly after the passage of meteorites; this dust is found on the snow of mountains and in polar regions.

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