Attos' Magazine

Volume #96, January/2010

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Immanuel Velikovsky

Worlds In Collision

By Immanuel Velikovsky

The Quarters of the World Displaced

The traditions gathered in the section before last refer to various epochs; actually, Herodotus and Mela say that according to Egyptian annals, the reversal of the west and east recurred: the sun rose in the west, then in the east, once more in the west, and again in the east.

Was the cosmic catastrophe that terminated a world age in the days of the fall of the Middle Kingdom and of the Exodus one of these occasions, and did the earth change the direction of its rotation at that time? If we cannot assert this much, we can at least maintain that the earth did not remain on the same orbit, nor did its poles stay in their places, nor was the direction of the axis the same as before. The position of the globe and its course were not settled when the earth first came into contact with the onrushing comet; in Plato’s terms, already partly quoted, the motion of the earth was changed by “blocking of the course” and went through “shaking of the revolutions” with “disruptures of every possible kind,” so that the position of the earth became “at one time reversed, at another oblique, and again upside down,” and it wandered “every way in all six directions.”

The Talmud and other ancient rabbinical sources tell of great disturbances in the solar movement at the time of the Exodus and the Passage of the Sea and the Lawgiving. In old Midrashim it is repeatedly narrated that four times the sun was forced out of its course in the few weeks between the day of the Exodus and the day of the Lawgiving.

The prolonged darkness (and prolonged day in the Far East) and the earthshock (i.e., the ninth and the tenth plagues) and the world conflagration were the result of one of these disturbances in the motion of the earth. A few days later, if we follow the biblical narration, immediately before the hurricane changed its direction, “the pillar of cloud went from before their faces and stood behind them”; this means that the column of fire and smoke turned about and appeared from the opposite direction. Mountainous tides uncovered the bottom of the sea; a spark sprang between two celestial bodies; and “at the turning of the morning,” the tides fell in a cataclysmic avalanche.

The Midrashim speak of a disturbance in the solar movement on the day of the Passage: the sun did not proceed on its course. On that day, according to the Psalms (76 : 8), “the earth feared and was still.” It is possible that Amos (8 : 8-9) is reviving the memory of this event when he mentions the “flood of Egypt,” at the time “the earth was cast out of the sea, and dry land was swallowed by the sea,” and “the sun was brought down at noon,” although, as I show later on, Amos might have referred to a cosmic catastrophe of a more recent date.

Also, the day of the Lawgiving, when the worlds collided again, was, according to numerous rabbinical sources, a day of unusual length: the motion of the sun was disturbed.

On this occasion, and generally in the days and months following the Passage, the gloom, the heavy and charged clouds, the lightning, and the hurricanes, aside from the devastation by earthquake and flood, made observation very difficult, if not impossible. “They walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course” (Psalms 82:5) is a metaphor used by the Psalmist.

The Papyrus Ipuwer, which says that “the earth turned over like a potter’s wheel” and “the earth is upside down,” was written by an eyewitness of the plagues and the Exodus. The change is described also in the words of another papyrus (Harris) which I have quoted once before: “The south becomes north, and the earth turns over.”

Whether there was a complete reversal of the cardinal points as a result of the cosmic catastrophe of the days of the Exodus, or only a substantial shift, is a problem not solved here. The answer was not apparent even to contemporaries, at least for a number of decades. In the gloom that endured for a generation, observations were impossible, and very difficult when the light began to break through. The Kalevala relates that “dreaded shades” enveloped the earth, and “the sun occasionally steps from his accustomed path.” Then Ukko-Jupiter struck fire from the sun to light a new sun and a new moon, and a new world age began.

The Aztecs related: “There had been no sun in existence for many years. . . . [The chiefs] began to peer through the gloom in all directions for the expected light, and to make bets as to what part of heaven he [the sun] should first appear in. Some said ‘Here,’ and some said ‘There’; but when the sun rose, they were all proved wrong, for not one of them had fixed upon the east.”

Similarly, the Mayan legend tells that “it was not known from where the new sun would appear.” “They looked in all directions, but they were unable to say where the sun would rise. Some thought it would take place in the north and their glances were turned in that direction. Others thought it would be in the south. Actually, their guesses included all directions because the dawn shone all around. Some, however, fixed their attention on the orient, and maintained that the sun would come from there. It was their opinion that proved to be correct.”

According to the Compendium of Wong-shi-Shing (1526-1590), it was in the “age after the chaos, when heaven and earth had just separated, that is, when the great mass of cloud just lifted from the earth,” that the heaven showed its face.

In the Midrashim it is said that during the wandering in the desert the Israelites did not see the face of the sun because of the clouds. They were also unable to orient themselves on their march.

The expression repeatedly used in the Books of Numbers and Joshua, “the east, to the sunrising,” is not tautology, but a definition, which, by the way, testifies to the ancient origin of the literary materials that served as sources for these books; it is an expression that has its counterpart in the Egyptian “the west which is at the sun-setting.”

The cosmological allegory of the Creeks has Zeus, rushing on his way to engage Typhon in combat, steal Europa (Erev, the evening land) and carry her to the west. Arabia (also Erev) kept its name, “the evening land,” though it lies to the east of the centers of civilization -Egypt, Palestine, Greece. Eusebius, one of the Fathers of the Church, assigned the Zeus-Europa episode to the time of Moses and the Deucalion Flood, and Augustine wrote that Europa was carried by the king of Crete to his island in the west, “betwixt the departure of Israel out of Egypt and the death of Joshua.”

The Creeks, like other peoples, spoke of the reversal of the quarters of the earth and not merely in allegories but in literal terms.

The reversal of the earth’s rotation, referred to in the written and oral sources of many peoples, suggests the relation of one of these events to the cataclysm of the day of the Exodus. Like the quoted passage from Visuddhi-Magga, the Buddhist text, and the cited tradition of the Cashinaua tribe in western Brazil, the versions of the tribes and peoples of all five continents include the same elements, familiar to us from the Book of Exodus: lightning and “the bursting of heaven,” which caused the earth to be turned “upside down,” or “heaven and earth to change places.” On the Andaman Islands the natives are afraid that a natural catastrophe will cause the world to turn over. In Greenland also the Eskimos fear that the earth will turn over.

Curiously enough, the cause of such perturbation is revealed in beliefs like that of the people of Flanders in Belgium. Thus we read: “In Menin (Flanders) the peasants say, on seeing a comet: ‘The sky is going to fall; the earth is turning over!’”

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