Attos' Magazine

Volume #98, March/2010

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Immanuel Velikovsky

Worlds In Collision

By Immanuel Velikovsky

The Shadow of Death

AN ENTIRE YEAR after the eruption of Krakatoa in the East Indies in 1883, sunset and sunrise in both hemispheres were very colorful. Lava dust suspended in the air and carried around the globe accounted for this phenomenon.

In 1783, after the eruption of Skaptar-Jökull in Iceland, the world was darkened for months; records of this phenomenon are found in many contemporary authors. One German contemporary compared the gloomy world of the year 1783 with the Egyptian plague of darkness.

The world was gloomy in the year of Caesar’s death, -44. “After the murder of Caesar the dictator and during the Antonine var,” there was “almost a whole year’s continuous gloom,” wrote Pliny. Virgil described this year in these words: “The sun . . . veiled his shining face in dusky gloom, and godless age feared everlasting night. . . . Germany heard the clash of arms through all the sky; the Alps rocked with unwonted terrors . . . and spectres, pale in wondrous wise, were seen at evening twilight.”

On September 23, -44, a short while after the death of Caesar, on the very day when Octavian performed the rites in honor of the deceased, a comet became visible at daytime; it was very bright and moved from north to west. It was seen for only a few days and vanished while still in the north.

It appears that the gloom which enveloped the world the year after Caesar’s death was caused by the dust of the comet dispersed in the atmosphere. The “clash of arms” heard “through all the sky” was probably the sound that accompanied the entrance of the gases and dust into the earth’s atmosphere.

If the eruption of a single volcano can darken the atmosphere over the entire globe, a simultaneous and prolonged eruption of thousands of volcanoes would blacken the sky. And if the dust of the comet of -44 had a darkening effect, contact of the earth with a great cinder-trailing comet of the fifteenth century before this era could likewise cause the blackening of the sky. As this comet activated all the volcanoes and created new ones, the cumulative action of the eruptions and of the comet’s dust must have saturated the atmosphere with floating particles.

Volcanoes vomit water vapor as well as cinders. The heating effect of the contact of the globe with the comet must have caused a great evaporation from the surface of the seas and rivers. Two kinds of clouds -water vapor and dust- were formed. The clouds obscured the sky, and drifting very low, hung as a fog. The veil left by the gaseous trail of the hostile star and the smoke of the volcanoes caused darkness, not complete, but profound. This condition prevailed for decades, and only very gradually did the dust subside and the water vapors condense.

“A vast night reigned over all the American land, of which tradition speaks unanimously: in a sense the sun no longer existed for this ruined world which was lighted up at intervals only by frightful conflagrations, revealing the full horror of their situation to the small number of human beings that had escaped from these calamities.”

“Following the cataclysm caused by the waters, the author of the Codex Chimalpopoca, in his history of the suns, shows us terrifying celestial phenomena, twice followed by darkness that covered the face of the earth, in one instance for a period of twenty-five years.” “This fact is mentioned in the Codex Chimalpopoca and in most of the traditions of Mexico.”

Gómara, the Spaniard who came to the Western Hemisphere in the middle of the sixteenth century, shortly after the conquest, wrote: “After the destruction of the fourth sun, the world plunged in darkness during the space of twenty-five years. Amid this profound obscurity, ten years before the appearance of the fifth sun, mankind was regenerated.”

In the years of this gloom, when the world was covered with clouds and shrouded in mist, the Quiché tribe migrated to Mexico, crossing a sea enveloped in a somber fog. In the so-called Manuscript Quiché it is also narrated that there was “little light on the surface of the earth . . . the faces of the sun and of the moon were covered with clouds.”

In the Ermitage Papyrus in Leningrad previously mentioned there are lamentations about a terrible catastrophe, when heaven and earth turned upside down (“I show thee the land upside down; it happened that which never had happened”). After this catastrophe, darkness covered the earth: “The sun is veiled and shines not in the sight of men. None can live when the sun is veiled by clouds. . . None knoweth that midday is there; the shadow is not discerned. . . Not dazzled is the sight when he [the sun] is beheld; he is in the sky like the moon.”

In this description the light of the sun is compared to the light of the moon; but even in the light of the moon objects cast a shadow. If the midday could not be discerned, the disc of the sun was not clearly visible, and only its diffused light made the day different from the night. The gloom gradually lifted with the passing years as the clouds became less thick; little by little the sky and the sun appeared less and less veiled.

The years of darkness in Egypt are described in a nnmber of other documents. The Papyrus Ipuwer, which contains the story of the plagues of Egypt, says that the land is without light [dark] . In the Papyrus Anastasi IV the years of misery are described, and it is said: “The sun, it hath come to pass that it riseth not.”

It was the time of the wandering of the Israelites in the desert. Is there any indication that the desert was dark? Jeremiah says (2 : 6): “Neither said they, Where is the Lord that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, that led us through the wilderness, through a land of deserts and of pits, through a land of drought, and of the shadow of death, through a land that no man passed through, and where no man dwelt?”

The “shadow of death” is related to the time of the wanderings in the desert after the Exodus from Egypt. The sinister meaning of the words “shadow of death” corresponds with the description of the Ermitage Papyrus: “None can live when the sun is veiled by clouds.”

At intervals the earth was lighted by conflagrations in the desert.

The phenomenon of gloom enduring for years impressed itself on the memory of the Twelve Tribes and is mentioned in many passages of the Bible: “Thou hast . . . covered us with the shadow of death” (Psalms 44: 19); “The people that walked in darkness . . . in the land of the shadow of death” (Isaiah 9 : 2). The Israelites “wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way . . . hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them,” and the Lord “brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death” (Psalms 107); “The terrors of the shadow of death” (Job 24 : 17).

In Job 38 the Lord speaks: “Who shut up the sea with doors [barriers], when it brake forth. . . When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddling band for it . . . and caused the dayspring to know his place; that it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it?”

The low and slowly drifting clouds enshrouded the wanderers in the desert. These clouds dimly glowed at night; their upper portion reflected the sunlight. The glow being pale during the day and red after sunset, the Israelites were able to distinguish between day and night. They were protected by the clouds from the sun during the wandering in the desert, and according to the Midrashic literature, they saw sun and moon for the first time only at the end of the wandering.

The clouds that covered the desert during the wandering of the Twelve Tribes were called a “celestial garment” or “clouds of glory.” “He spread a cloud for a covering; and fire to give light in the night.” “And the cloud of the Lord was upon them by day.” For days or months the cloud tarried in one place, and the Israelites “journeyed not”; but when the cloud moved, the wanderers followed it, and revered it because of its celestial origin.

In Arabic sources, too, we read that the Amalekites, who left Hedjaz because of plagues, followed the cloud in their wandering through the desert.

On their way to Palestine and Egypt they met the Israelites, and in the battles between them the screen of clouds played an important part.

Nihongi, a chronicle of Japan from the earliest period, refers to a time when there was “continuous darkness” and “no difference of day and night.” It describes in the name of the Emperor Kami Yamato an ancient time when “the world was given over to widespread desolation; it was an age of darkness and disorder. In this gloom Hiko-hono-ninigi-no-Mikoto fostered justice, and so governed this western border.”

In China the annals telling of the time of the Emperor Yahou refer to the Valley of Obscurity and to the Sombre Residence as places of astronomical observations.

The name “shadow of death” expresses the influence of the sunless gloom upon the life processes. The Chinese annals of Wong-shiShing, in the chapter dealing with the Ten Stems (the ten stages of the earth’s primeval history), relate that “at Wu, the sixth stem . . . darkness destroys the growth of all things.”

Buddhist scholars declare that with the beginning of the sixth world age or “sun,” “the whole world becomes filled with smoke and saturated with greasiness of that smoke.” There is “no distinction of day and night.” The gloom is caused by a “cycle-destroying great cloud” of cosmic origin and dimensions.

On the Samoan islands the aborigines narrate: “Then arose smell . . . the smell became smoke, which again became clouds. . . . The sea too arose, and in a stupendous catastrophe of nature the land sank into the sea. . . . The new earth (the Samoan islands) arose out of the womb of the last earth.” In the darkness that enveloped the world, the islands of Tonga, Samoa, Rotuma, Fiji, and Uvea (Wallis Island), and Fotuna rose from the bottom of the ocean.

Ancient rhymes of the inhabitants of Hawaii refer to a prolonged darkness:

The Quiché tribe migrated to Mexico, the Israelites roamed in the desert, the Amalekites migrated toward Palestine and Egypt -an uneasy movement took place in all corners of the ruined world. The migration in Central Polynesia, shrouded in gloom, is narrated in the traditions of the aborigines of this part of the world about a chief named Te-erui who “lived long in utter darkness in Avaiki,” who migrated in a canoe named “Weary of Darkness” to find a land of light, and who, after many years of wandering, saw the sky clearing little by little and arrived at a region “where they could see each other clearly.”

In the Kalevala, the Finnish epos which “dates back to an enormous antiquity,” the time when the sun and moon disappeared from the sky, and dreaded shadows covered it, is described in these words:

An explanation which would rationalize this picture as the description of a seasonal long night in northern regions will stumble over the second part of the passage: the seasons did not return in their wonted order. The dreaded shadow covered the earth when Ukko, the highest of the Finnish deities, relinquished the support of the heavens. Hailstones of iron rained down furiously, and then the world became shrouded in a generation-long darkness.

This “twilight of the gods” of the Nordic races is but the “shadow of death” of the Scriptures. The entire generation of those who left Egypt perished in the lightless desert. Vegetation died in the catastrophe. The Iranian book of Bundahis says: “Blight was diffused over the vegetation, and it withered away immediately.” When the sky was shattered, the day became dark, and the earth teemed with noxious creatures. For a long time there was no green thing seen; seeds would not germinate in a sunless world. It took many years before the earth again brought forth vegetation; this is told in the written and oral traditions of many peoples. According to American sources, the regeneration of the world and of humankind took place under the veil of the gloomy shadows, and the time is indicated as the end of the fifteenth year of the darkness, ten years before the end of the gloom. In the scriptural narration it was probably the day when Aaron’s dried twig budded for the first time.

The eerie world, dark and groaning, was unpleasant to all the senses save the sense of smell: the world was fragrant. When the breeze blew, the clouds conveyed a sweet odor.

In the Papyrus Anastasi IV, written “in the year of misery,” in which it is said that the months are reversed, the planet-god is described as arriving “with the sweet wind before him.”

In a similar text of the Hebrews we read that the times and seasons were confused, and “a fragrance perfumed all the world,” and the perfume was brought by the pillar of smoke. The fragrance was like that of myrrh and frankincense. “Israel was surrounded by clouds,” and as soon as the clouds were set in motion, the winds “breathed myrrh and frankincense.”

The Vedas contain hymns to Agni which “glows from the sky.” Its fragrance became the fragrance of the earth.

The generation of those days, when the star conveyed its fragrance to men on the earth, is immortalized in the tradition of the Hindus. The Vedie hymn compares the fragrance of the star Agni to the scent of the lotus.

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