Attos' Magazine

Volume #110, March/2010

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Immanuel Velikovsky

Worlds In Collision

By Immanuel Velikovsky

The Four-Planet System

By asserting that the planet Venus was born in the first half of the second millennium, I assume also that in the third millennium only four planets could have been seen, and that in astronomical charts of this early period the planet Venus cannot be found.

In an ancient Hindu table of planets, attributed to the year -3102, Venus alone among the visible planets is absent. The Brahmans of the early period did not know the five-planet system, and only in a later (“middle”) period did the Brahmans speak of five planets.

Babylonian astronomy, too, had a four-planet system. In ancient prayers the planets Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Mercury are invoked; the planet Venus is missing; and one speaks of “the four-planet system of the ancient astronomers of Babylonia.” These four-planet systems and the inability of the ancient Hindus and Babylonians to see Venus in the sky, even though it is more conspicuous than the other planets, are puzzling unless Venus was not among the planets.

On a later date “the planet Venus receives the appellative: ‘The great star that joins the great stars.’ The great stars are, of course, the four planets Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn . . . and Venus joins them as the fifth planet.”

Apollonius Rhodius refers to a time “when not all the orbs were yet in the heavens.”

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