Attos' Magazine

Volume #92, January/2010

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Immanuel Velikovsky

Worlds In Collision

By Immanuel Velikovsky

Theophany

Earthquakes are often accompanied by a roaring noise that come from the bowels of the earth. This phenomenon was known to early geographers. Pliny wrote that earthquakes are “preceded or accompanied by a terrible sound.” Vaults supporting the ground give way and it seems as though the earth heaves deep sighs. The sound was attributed to the gods and called theophany.

The eruptions of volcanoes are also accompanied by loud noises The sound produced by Krakatoa in the East Indies, during the eruption of 1883, was so loud that it was heard as far as Japan, 3,000 miles away, the farthest distance traveled by sound recorded in modern annals.

In the days of the Exodus, when the world was shaken and rocked, and all volcanoes vomited lava and all continents quaked, the earth groaned almost unceasingly. At an initial stage of the catastrophe, according to Hebrew tradition, Moses heard in the silence of the desert the sound which he interpreted to mean, “I am that I am.” “I am Yahweh,” heard the people in the frightful night at the Mountain of the Lawgiving. “The whole mount quaked greatly” and “the voice of the trumpet sounded long.” “And all the people saw the roars, and the torches, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they trembled, and stood afar off.”

It was a perfect setting for hearing words in the voice of nature in an uproar. An inspired leader interpreted the voice he heard, ten long, trumpetlike blasts. The earth groaned: for weeks now all its strata had been disarranged, its orbit distorted, its world quarters displaced, its oceans thrown upon its continents, its seas turned into deserts, its mountains upheaved, its islands submerged, its rivers running upstream—a world flowing with lava, shattered by meteorites, with yawning chasms, burning naphtha, vomiting volcanoes, shaking ground, a world enshrouded in an atmosphere filled with smoke and vapor.

Twisting of strata and building of mountains, earthquakes and rumbling of volcanoes joined in an infernal din. It was a voice not only in the desert of Sinai; the entire world must have heard it. “The sky and the earth resounded . . . mountains and hills were moved,” says the Midrash. “Loud did the firmament roar, and earth with echo resounded,” says the epic of Gilgamesh. In Hesiod “the huge earth groaned” when Zeus lashed Typhon with his bolts—“the earth resounded terribly, and the wide heaven above.”

The approach of two charged globes toward each other could also produce trumpetlike sounds, varying as the distance between them increased or lessened. It appears that this phenomenon is described by Pseudo-Philo as “testimony of the trumpets between the stars and their Lord.” Here we can trace the origin of the Pythagorean notion of the “music of the spheres” and the idea that stars make music. In Babylonia the spheres of the planets were called “voices” and they were supposed to produce music. According to Midrashic literature, the trumpet sounding at Mount Sinai had seven different pitches (or notes), and the rabbinical literature speaks of “the heavenly music” heard at the revelation. “At the first sound the sky and the earth moved, the seas and the rivers turned to flight, mountains and hills were loosened in their foundations.”

Homer depicts a similar occurrence in these words: “The wide earth rang, and round about great heaven pealed as with a trumpet.” “The world all burns at the blast of the horn,” is said in the Völuspa.

According to the Hebrew tradition, all the nations heard the roaring of the lawgiving. It appears that at Mount Sinai the sound that “sounded long” rose ten times; in this roaring the Hebrews heard the Decalogue.

“Thou shalt not kill” (Lo tirzah); “Thou shalt not commit adultery” (Lo tin’af’); “Thou shalt not steal” (Lo tignov). . . These words [of the Decalogue] . . . were not heard by Israel alone, but by the inhabitants of all the earth. The Divine voice divided itself into the seventy tongues of men, so that all might understand it. . . . The souls of the heathens almost fled from them when they heard it.”

The din caused by the groaning earth repeated itself again and again, but not so loud, as subterranean strata readjusted themselves after being dislocated; earthquakes incessantly shook the ground for years. The Papyrus Ipuwer calls these years “years of noise.” “Years of noise. There is no end to noise,” and again,, “Oh, that the earth would cease from noise, and tumult (uproar) be no more.”

The sound probably had the same pitch all over the world as it came from the deep interior of the earth, all of whose strata were dislocated when it was thrown from its orbit and forced from its axis.

The great king-lawgiver of China, in whose time a dreadful cataclysm took place and the order of nature was disturbed, bore the name Yahou. In the Preface to the Shu King, attributed to Confucius, it is written: “Examining into antiquity, we find that the Emperor Yaou was called Fang-heun.” Yahou was a surname given to him in the time following the flood, apparently inspired by the sound of the earth’s groaning.

The same sound was heard in those years in the Western Hemisphere or wherever the ancestors of the Indians then lived. They relate that once when the heavens were very close to the earth, all mankind lifted the sky little by little at the repeated shouting “Yahu” which rang all over the world.

In Indonesia an oath is accompanied by the invocation of the heavenly bodies. An arrow is shot toward the sky, “while all present raise a cry of ‘ju ju huwe.’ ” The same sound is heard in the very name Jo, Jove (Jupiter). The name Yahweh is preserved in shorter forms, as well, Yahou and Yo, as the name of the Deity in the Bible. Diodorus wrote of Moses that he had received his laws from the God invoked by the name Iao.

In Mexico, Yao or Yaotl is the god of war; the similarity of sound has already been noted.

Nihongi, chronicles of Japan from the earliest times, begins with a reference to the time when “of old, heaven and earth were not yet separated, and the In and Yo not yet divided.” Yo is the earth. The time when the sky touched the earth is the time when the heavy dust and vapor-charged clouds of the comet enveloped the globe and lay very close to the ground.

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