Attos' Magazine

Volume #97, March/2010

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Immanuel Velikovsky

Worlds In Collision

By Immanuel Velikovsky

Changes in the Times and the Seasons

Many agents collaborated to change the climate. Insolation was impaired by heavy clouds of dust, and the radiation of heat from the earth was equally hindered. Heat was generated by the earth’s contacts with another celestial body; the earth was removed to an orbit farther from the sun; the polar regions were displaced; oceans and seas evaporated and the vapors precipitated as snow on new polar regions and in the higher latitudes in a long Fimbul-winter and formed new ice sheets; the axis on which the earth rotated pointed in a different direction, and the order of the seasons was disturbed.

Spring follows winter and fall follows summer because the earth rotates on an axis inclined toward the plane of its revolution around the sun. Should this axis become perpendicular to that plane, there would be no seasons on the earth. Should it change its direction, the seasons would change their intensity and their order.

The Egyptian papyrus known as Papyrus Anastasi IV contains a complaint about gloom and the absence of solar light; it says also:

“The winter is come as (instead of) summer, the months are reversed and the hours are disordered.”

“The breath of heaven is out of harmony. . . . The four seasons do not observe their proper times,” we read in the Texts of Taoism.

In the historical memoirs of Se-Ma Ts’ien, as in the annals of the Shu King which we have already quoted, it is said that Emperor Yahou sent astronomers to the Valley of Obscurity and to the Sombre Residence to observe the new movements of the sun and of the moon and the syzygies or the orbital points of the conjunctions, also “to investigate and to inform the people of the order of the seasons.” It is also said that Yahou introduced a calendar reform: he brought the seasons into accord with the observations; he did the same with the months; and he “corrected the days.”

Plutarch gives the following description of a derangement of seasons: “The thickened air concealed the heaven from view, and the stars were confused with a disorderly huddle of fire and moisture and violent fluxions of winds. The sun was not fixed to an unwandering and certain course, so as to distinguish orient and occident, nor did he bring back the seasons in order.”

In another work of his, Plutarch ascribes these changes to Typhon, “the destructive, diseased and disorderly,” who caused “abnormal seasons and temperatures.”

It is characteristic that in the written traditions of the peoples of antiquity the disorder of the seasons is directly connected with the derangement in the motion of the heavenly bodies.

The oral traditions of primitive peoples in various parts of the world also retain memories of this change in the movement of the heavenly bodies, the seasons, the flow of time, during a period when darkness enveloped the world. As an example I quote the tradition of the Oraibi in Arizona. They say that the firmament hung low and the world was dark, and no sun, no moon, nor stars were seen. “The people murmured because of the darkness and the cold.” Then the planet god Machito “appointed times, and seasons, and ways for the heavenly bodies.”

Among the Incas the “guiding power in regulating the seasons and the courses of the heavenly bodies” was Uira-cocha. “The sun, the moon, the day, the night, spring, winter, are not ordained in vain by thee, O Uira-cocha.”

The American sources, which speak of a world colored red, of a rain of fire, of world conflagration, of new rising mountains, of frightening portents in the sky, of a twenty-five-year gloom, imply also that “the order of the seasons was altered at that epoch.” “The astronomers and geologists whose concern is all this . . . should judge of the causes which could effect the derangement of the day and could cover the earth with tenebrosity,” wrote a clergyman who spent many years in Mexico and in the libraries of the Old World which store ancient manuscripts of the Mayas and works of early Indian and Spanish authors about them. It did not occur to him that the biblical narrative of the time of the Exodus contains the same elements.

With the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, when the Israelites left that country, the old order of seasons came to an end and a new world age began. The Fourth Book of Ezra, which borrows from some earlier sources, refers to the “end of the seasons” in these words: “I sent him [Moses] and led my people out of Egypt, and brought them to Mount Sinai, and held him by me for many days. I told him many wondrous things, showed him the secrets of the times, declared to him the end of the seasons.”

Because of various simultaneous changes in the movement of the earth and the moon, and because observation of the sky was hindered when it was hidden in smoke and clouds, the calendar could not be correctly computed; the changed lengths of the year, the month, and the day required prolonged, unobstructed observation. The words of the Midrashim, that Moses was unable to understand the new calendar, refer to this situation; “the secrets of the calendar” (sod ha-avour), or more precisely, “the secret of the transition” from one time-reckoning to another, was revealed to Moses, but he had difficulty in comprehending it. Moreover, it is said in rabbinical sources that in the time of Moses the course of the heavenly bodies became confounded.

The month of the Exodus, which occurred in the spring, became the first month of the year: “This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you.” Thus, the strange situation was created in the Jewish calendar that the New Year is observed in the seventh month of the year: the beginning of the calendar year was moved to a point about half a year away from the New Year in the autumn.

With the fall of the Middle Kingdom and the Exodus, one of the great world ages came to its end. The four quarters of the world were displaced, and neither the orbit nor the poles nor, probably, the direction of rotation remained the same. The calendar had to be adjusted anew. The astronomical values of the year and the day could not be the same before and after an upheaval in which, as the quoted Papyrus Anastasi IV says, the months were reversed and “the hours disordered.”

The length of the year during the Middle Kingdom is not known from any contemporaneous document. Because in the Pyramid texts dating from the Old Kingdom there is mention of “five days,” it was erroneously concluded that in that period a year of 365 days was already known. But no inscription of the Old or Middle Kingdom has been found in which mention is made of a year of 365 days or even 360 days. Neither is any reference to a year of 365 days or to “five days” found in the very numerous inscriptions of the New Kingdom prior to the dynasties of the seventh century. Thus the inference that “the five days” of the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom signify the five days over 360 is not well founded.

There exists a direct statement found as a gloss on a manuscript of Timaeus that a calendar of a solar year of three hundred and sixty days was introduced by the Hyksos after the fall of the Middle Kingdom; the calendar year of the Middle Kingdom apparently had fewer days.

The fact I hope to be able to establish is that from the fifteenth century to the eighth century before the present era the astronomical year was equal to 360 days; neither before the fifteenth century, nor after the eighth century was the year of this length. In a later chapter of this work extensive material will be presented to demonstrate this point.

The number of days in a year during the Middle Kingdom was less than 360; the earth then revolved on an orbit somewhat closer to the present orbit of Venus. An investigation into the length of the astronomical year during the periods of the Old and Middle Kingdoms is reserved for that part of this work which will deal with the cosmic catastrophes that occurred before the beginning of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt.

Here I give space to an old Midrashic source which, taking issue with a contradiction in the scriptural texts referring to the length of time the Israelites sojourned in Egypt, maintains that “God hastened the course of the planets during Israel’s stay in Egypt,” so that the sun completed 400 revolutions during the space of 210 regular years. These figures must not be taken as correct, since the intention was to reconcile two biblical texts, but the reference to the different motion of the planets in the period of the Israelites’ stay in Egypt during the Middle Kingdom is worth mentioning.

In Midrash Rabba, it is said on the authority of Rabbi Simon that a new world order came into being with the end of the sixth world age at the revelation on Mount Sinai. “There was a weakening (metash) of the creation. Hitherto world time was counted, but henceforth we count it by a different reckoning.” Midrash Rabba refers also to “the greater length of time taken by some planets.”

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