Attos' Magazine

Volume #81, December/2009

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Immanuel Velikovsky

Worlds In Collision

By Immanuel Velikovsky

The Darkness

The earth entered deeper into the tail of the onrushing comet and approached its body. This approach, if one is to believe the sources, was followed by a disturbance in the rotation of the earth. Terrific hurricanes swept the earth because of the change or reversal of the angular velocity of rotation and because of the sweeping gases, dust, and cinders of the comet.

Numerous rabbinical sources describe the calamity of darkness; the material is collated as follows:

An exceedingly strong wind endured seven days. All the time the land was shrouded in darkness. “On the fourth, fifth, and sixth days, the darkness was so dense that they [the people of Egypt) could not stir from their place.”‘The darkness was of such a nature that it could not be dispelled by artificial means. The light of the fire was either extinguished by the violence of storm, or else it was made invisible and swallowed up in the density of the darkness. . . . Nothing could be discerned. . . . None was able to speak or to hear, nor could anyone venture to take food, but they lay themselves down their outward senses in a trance. Thus they remained, overwhelmed by the affliction.”

The darkness was of such kind that “their eyes were blinded by it and their breath choked”; it was “not of ordinary earthy kind.” The rabbinical tradition, contradicting the spirit of the Scriptural narrative, states that during the plague of darkness the vast majority of the Israelites perished and that only a small fraction of the original Israelite population of Egypt was spared to leave Egypt. Forty-nine out of every fifty Israelites are said to have perished in this plague.

A shrine of black granite found at el-Arish on the border of Egypt and Palestine bears a long inscription in hieroglyphics. It reads: “The land was in great affliction. Evil fell on this earth. . . . There was a great upheaval in the residence. . . . Nobody could leave the palace [there was no exit from the palace) during nine days, and during these nine days of upheaval there was such a tempest that neither men nor gods [the royal family] could see the faces of those beside them.”

This record employs the same description of the darkness as Exodus 10 : 22: “And there was a thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days. They saw not one another, neither rose any from his place for three days.”

The difference in the number of the days (three and nine) of the darkness is reduced in the rabbinical sources, where the time is given as seven days. The difference between seven and nine days is negligible if one considers the subjectivity of the time estimation under such conditions. Appraisal of the darkness with respect to its impenetrability is also subjective; rabbinical sources say that for part of the time there was a very slight visibility, but for the rest (three days) there was no visibility at all.

It should be kept in mind that, as in the case I have already discussed, a day and a night of darkness or light can be described as one day or as two days.

That both sources, the Hebrew and the Egyptian, refer to the same event can be established by another means also. Following the prolonged darkness and the hurricane, the pharaoh, according to the hieroglyphic text of the shrine, pursued the “evil-doers” to “the place called Pi-Khiroti.” The same place is mentioned in Exodus 14: 9:

“But the Egyptian pursued after them, all the horses and chariots of Pharaoh . . and overtook them encamping by the sea, beside Pi-ha-khiroth.”

The inscription on the shrine also narrates the death of the pharaoh during this pursuit under exceptional circumstances: “Now when the Majesty fought with the evil-doers in this pool, the place of the whirlpool, the evil-doers prevailed not over his Majesty. His Majesty leapt into the place of the whirlpool.” This is the same apotheosis described in Exodus 15:19: “For the horse of Pharaoh went in with his chariots and with his horsemen into the sea, and the Lord brought again the waters of the sea upon them.”

If “the Egyptian darkness” was caused by the earth’s stasis or tilting of its axis, and was aggravated by a thin cinder dust from the comet, then the entire globe must have suffered from the effect of these two concurring phenomena; in either the eastern or the western parts of the world there must have been a very extended, gloomy day.

Nations and tribes in many places of the globe, to the south, to the north, and to the west of Egypt, have old traditions about a cosmic catastrophe during which the sun did not shine; but in some parts of the world the traditions maintain that the sun did not set for a period of time equal to a few days.

Tribes of the Sudan to the south of Egypt refer in their tales to a time when the night would not come to an end.

Kalevala, the epos of the Finns, tells of a time when hailstones of iron fell from the sky, and the sun and the moon disappeared (were stolen from the sky) and did not appear again; in their stead, after a period of darkness, a new sun and a new moon were placed in the sky. Caius Julius Solinus writes that “following the deluge which is reported to have occurred in the days of Ogyges, a heavy night spread over the globe.”

In the manuscripts of Avila and Molina, who collected the traditions of the Indians of the New World, it is related that the sun did not appear for five days; a cosmic collision of stars preceded the cataclysm; people and animals tried to escape to mountain caves. “Scarcely had they reached there when the sea, breaking out of bounds following a terrifying shock, began to rise on the Pacific coast. But as the sea rose, filling the valleys and the plains around, the mountain of Ancasmarca rose, too, like a ship on the waves. During the five days that this cataclysm lasted, the sun did not show its face and the earth remained in darkness.”

Thus the traditions of the Peruvians describe a time when the sun did not appear for five days. In the upheaval, the earth changed its profile, and the sea fell upon the land.”

East of Egypt, in Babylonia, the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh [Gilgamish] refers to the same events. From out the horizon rose a dark cloud and it rushed against the earth; the land was shriveled by the beat of the flames. “Desolation . . . stretched to heaven; all that was bright was turned into darkness. . . Nor could a brother distinguish his brother. . . . Six days . . . the hurricane, deluge, and tempest continued sweeping the land . . . and all human back to its clay was returned.”

The Iranian book Anugita reveals that a threefold day and three fold night concluded a world age, and the book Bundahis, in a context that I shall quote later and that shows a close relation to the events of the cataclysm I describe here, tells of the world being dark at midday as though it were in deepest night: it was caused, according to the Bundahis, by a war between the stars and the planets.

A protracted night, deepened by the onrushing dust sweeping in from interplanetary space, enveloped Europe, Africa, and America, the valleys of the Euphrates and the Indus also. If the earth did not stop rotating but slowed down or was tilted, there must have been a longitude where a prolonged day was followed by a prolonged night. Iran is so situated that, if one is to believe the Iranian tradition, the sun was absent for a threefold day, and then it shone for a threefold day. Farther to the east there must have been a protracted day corresponding to the protracted night in the west.

According to “Bahman Yast,” at the end of a world age in eastern Iran or in India the sun remained ten days visible in the sky.

In China, during the reign of the Emperor Yahou, a great catastrophe brought a world age to a close. For ten days the sun did not set. The events of the time of the Emperor Yahou deserve close examination; I shall return to the subject shortly.

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