Attos' Magazine

Volume #84, December/2009

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Immanuel Velikovsky

Worlds In Collision

By Immanuel Velikovsky

The Hurricane

THE SWIFT shifting of the atmosphere under the impact of the gaseous parts of the comet, the drift of air attracted by the body of the comet, and the rush of the atmosphere resulting from inertia when the earth stopped rotating or shifted its poles, all contributed to produce hurricanes of enormous velocity and force and of worldwide dimensions.

Manuscript Troano and other documents of the Mayas describe a cosmic catastrophe during which the ocean fell on the continent, and a terrible hurricane swept the earth. The hurricane broke up and carried away all towns and all forests. Exploding volcanoes, tides sweeping over mountains, and impetuous winds threatened to annihilate humankind, and actually did annihilate many species of animals. The face of the earth changed, mountains collapsed, other mountains grew and rose over the onrushing cataract of water driven from oceanic spaces, numberless rivers lost their beds, and a wild tornado moved through the debris descending from the sky. The end of the world age was caused by Hurakan, the physical agent that brought darkness and swept away houses and trees and even rocks and mounds of earth. From this name is derived “hurricane,” the word we use for a strong wind. Hurakan destroyed the major part of the human race. In the darkness swept by wind, resinous stuff fell from the sky and participated with fire and water in the destruction of the world. For five days, save for the burning naphtha and burning volcanoes, the world was dark, since the sun did not appear.

The theme of a cosmic hurricane is reiterated time and again in the Hindu Vedas and in the Persian Avesta, and diluvium venti, the deluge of wind, is a term known from many ancient authors. In the Section, “The Darkness,” I quoted rabbinical sources on the “exceedingly strong west wind” that endured for seven days when the land was enveloped in darkness, and the hieroglyphic inscription from el-Arish about “nine days of upheaval” when “there was such a tempest” that nobody could leave the palace or see the faces of those beside him, and the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh which says that “six days and a night the hurricane, deluge, and tempest continued sweeping the land,” and mankind perished almost altogether. In the battle of the planet-god Marduk with Tiamat, “he [Marduk] created the evil wind, and the tempest, and the hurricane, and the fourfold wind, and the sevenfold wind, and the whirlwind, and the wind which had no equal.”

The Maoris narrate that amid a stupendous catastrophe “the mighty winds, the fierce squalls, the clouds, dense, dark, fiery, wildly drifting, wildly bursting,” rushed on creation, in their midst Tawhirima-tea, father of winds and storms, and swept away giant forests and lashed the waters into billows whose crests rose high like mountains. The earth groaned terribly, and the ocean fled.

“The earth was submerged in the ocean but was drawn by Tefaafanau,” relate the aborigines of Paumotu in Polynesia. The new isles “were bated by a star.” In the month of March the Polynesians celebrate a god, Taafanua. “In Arabic, Tyfoon is a whirlwind and Tufan is the Deluge; and the same word occurs in Chinese as Ty-fong.” It appears as though the noise of the hurricane was over-toned by a sound not unlike the name Typhon, as if the storm were calling him by name.

The cosmic upheaval proceeded with a “mighty strong west wind,” but before the climax, in the simple words of the Scriptures, “the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.”

The Israelites were on the shore of the Sea of Passage at the climax of the cataclysm. The name Jam Suf is generally rendered as Red Sea; the Passage is supposed to have taken place either at the Gulf of Suez or at Akaba Gulf of the Red Sea, but sometimes the site of the Passage is identified as one of the inner lakes on the route from Suez to the Mediterranean. It is argued that suf means “reed” (papyrus reed), and since papyrus reed does not grow in salt water, Jam Suf must have been a lagoon of fresh water. We will not enter here into a discussion where the Sea of the Passage was. The inscription on the shrine found in el-Arish may provide some indication where the Pharaoh was engulfed by the whirlpool; in any event, the topographical distribution of sea and land did not remain the same as before the cataclysm of the days of the Exodus. But the name of the Sea of the Passage—Jam Suf—is derived not from “reed,” but from “hurricane,” suf, sufa, in Hebrew. In Egyptian the Red Sea is called shari, which signifies the sea of percussion (mare percussionis) or the sea of the stroke or of the disaster.

The Haggadah of Passover says: “Thou didst sweep the land of Moph and Noph . . . on the Passover.”

The hurricane that brought to an end the Middle Kingdom in Egypt—“the blast of heavenly displeasure” in the language of Manetho—swept through every corner of the world. In order to distinguish, in the traditions of the peoples, this diluvium venti of cosmic dimensions from local disastrous storms, other cosmic disturbances like disappearance of the sun or change of the sky must be found accompanying the hurricane.

In the Japanese cosmogonical myth, the sun goddess hid herself for a long time in a heavenly cave in fear of the storm god. “The source of light disappeared, the whole world became dark,” and the storm god caused monstrous destruction. Gods made terrible noise so that the sun should reappear, and from their tumult the earth quaked. In Japan and in the vast extent of the ocean hurricanes and earthquakes are not rare occurrences; but they do not disturb the day-night succession, nor is there any resulting permanent change in the sky and its luminaries. “The sky was low,” relate the Polynesians of Takaofo Island, and “then the winds and waterspouts and the hurricanes came, and carried up the sky to its present height.”

“When a world cycle is destroyed by wind,” says the Buddhist text on the “World Cycles,” the wind also turns “the ground upside down, and throws it into the sky,” and “areas of one hundred leagues in extent, two hundred, three hundred, five hundred leagues in extent, crack and are thrown upward by the force of the wind” and do not fall again but are “blown to powder in the sky and annihilated.” “And the wind throws up also into the sky the mountains which encircle the earth . . . [they] are ground to powder and destroyed.” The cosmic wind blows and destroys “a hundred thousand times ten million worlds.”

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