Attos' Magazine

Volume #112, March/2010

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Immanuel Velikovsky

Worlds In Collision

By Immanuel Velikovsky

The Comet Venus

During the centuries when Venus was a comet, it had a tail.

The early traditions of the peoples of Mexico, written down in preColumbian days, relate that Venus smoked. “The star that smoked, la estrella que humeava, was Sitlae choloha, which the Spaniards call Venus.”

“Now, I ask,” says Alexander Humboldt, “what optical illusion could give Venus the appearance of a star throwing out smoke?”

Sahagun, the sixteenth century Spanish authority on Mexico, wrote that the Mexicans called a comet “a star that smoked.” It may thus be concluded that since the Mexicans called Venus “a star that smoked,” they considered it a comet.

It is also said in the Vedas that the star Venus looks like fire with smoke. Apparently, the star had a tail, dark in the daytime and luminous at night. In very concrete form this luminous tail, which Venus had in earlier centuries, is mentioned in the Talmud, in the Tractate Shabbat: “Fire is hanging down from the planet Venus.”

This phenomenon was described by the Chaldeans. The planet Venus “was said to have a beard.” This same technical expression (“beard”) is used in modem astronomy in the description of comets.

These parallels in observations made in the valley of the Ganges, on the shores of the Euphrates, and on the coast of the Mexican Gulf prove their objectivity. The question must then be put, not in the form, What was the illusion of the ancient Toltecs and Mayas? but, What was the phenomenon and what was its cause? A train, large enough to be visible from the earth and giving the impression of smoke and fire, hung from the planet Venus.

Venus, with its glowing train, was a very brilliant body; it is therefore not strange that the Chaldeans described it as a “bright torch of heaven,” also as a “diamond that illuminates like the sun,” and compared its light with the light of the rising sun. At present, the light of Venus is less than one millionth of the light of the sun. “A stupendous prodigy in the sky,” the Chaldeans called it.

The Hebrews similarly described the planet: “The brilliant light of Venus blazes from one end of the cosmos to the other end.”

The Chinese astronomical text from Soochow refers to the past when “Venus was visible in full daylight and, while moving across the sky, rivaled the sun in brightness.”

As late as the seventh century, Assurbanipal wrote about Venus (Ishtar) “who is clothed with fire and bears aloft a crown of awful splendor.” The Egyptians under Seti thus described Venus (Sekhmet): “A circling star which scatters its flame in fire . . . a flame of fire in her tempest.”

Possessing a tail and moving on a not yet circular orbit, Venus was more of a comet than a planet, and was called a “smoking star” or a comet by the Mexicans. They also called it by the name of Tzontemocque, or “the mane.” The Arabs called Ishtar (Venus) by the name Zebbaj or “one with hair,” as did the Babylonians.

“Sometimes there are hairs attached to the planets,” wrote Pliny; an old description of Venus must have served as a basis for his assertion. But hair or coma is a characteristic of comets, and in fact “comet” is derived from the Greek word for “hair.” The Peruvian name “Chaska” (wavy-haired) is still the name for Venus, though at present the Morning Star is definitely a planet and has no tail attached to it.

The coma of Venus changed its form with the position of the planet. When the planet Venus approaches the earth now, it is only partly illuminated, a portion of the disc being in shadow; it has phases like the moon. At this time, being closer to the earth, it is most brilliant.

When Venus had a coma, the horns of its crescent must have been extended by the illuminated portions of the coma. It thus had two long appendages and looked like a bull’s head.

Sanchoniathon says that Astarte (Venus) had a bull’s head. The planet was even called Ashteroth-Karnaim, or Astarte of the Horns, a name given to a city in Canaan in honor of this deity. The golden calf worshiped by Aaron and the people at the foot of Sinai was the image of the star. Rabbinical authorities say that “the devotion of Israel to this worship of the bull is in part explained by the circumstance that, while passing through the Red Sea, they beheld the celestial Throne, and most distinctly of the four creatures about the Throne, they saw the ox.” The likeness of a calf was placed by Jeroboam in Dan, the great temple of the Northern Kingdom.

Tistrya of the Zend-Avesta, the star that attacks the planets, “the bright and glorious Tistrya mingles his shape with light moving in the shape of a golden-homed bull.”

The Egyptians similarly pictured the planet and worshiped it in the effigy of a bull. The cult of a bull sprang up also in Mycenaean Greece. A golden cow head with a star on its brow was found in Mycenae, on the Creek mainland.

The people of faraway Samoa, primitive tribes that depend on oral tradition as they have no art of writing, repeat to this day: “The planet Venus became wild and horns grew out of her head.”

Examples and references could be multiplied ad libitum.

The astronomical texts of the Babylonians describe the horns of the planet Venus. Sometimes one of the two horns became more prominent. Because the astronomical works of antiquity have so much to say about the horns of Venus, modern scholars have asked themselves whether the Babylonians could have seen the phases of Venus, which cannot now be distinguished with the naked eye; Galileo saw them for the first time in modern history when he used his telescope.

The long horns of Venus could have been seen without the aid of a telescopic lens. The horns were the illuminated portions of the coma of Venus, which stretched toward the earth. These horns could also have extended toward the sun as Venus approached the solar orb, since comets were repeatedly observed with projections in the direction of the sun, while the tails of the comets are regularly directed away from the sun.

When Venus approached close to one of the planets, its horns grew longer: this is the phenomenon the astrologers of Babylon observed and described when Venus neared Mars.

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