Attos' Magazine

Volume #113, April / 2010

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Immanuel Velikovsky

Worlds In Collision

By Immanuel Velikovsky

Pallas Athene

IN EVERY COUNTRY of the ancient world we can trace cosmological myths of the birth of the planet Venus. If we look for the god or goddess who represents the planet Venus, we must inquire which among the gods or goddesses did not exist from the beginning, but was born into the family. The mythologies of all peoples concern themselves with the birth only of Venus, not with that of Jupiter, Mars, or Saturn. Jupiter is described as heir to Saturn, but his birth is not a mythological subject. Horus of the Egyptians and Vishnu, born of Shiva, of the Hindus, were such newborn deities. Horus battled in the sky with the monster-serpent Seth; so did Vishnu. In Greece the goddess who suddenly appeared in the sky was Pallas Athene. She sprang from the head of Zeus-Jupiter. In another legend she was the daughter of a monster, Pallas-Typhon, who attacked her and whom she battled and killed.

The slaying of the monster by a planet-god is the way in which the peoples perceived the convulsion of the pillar of smoke when the earth and the comet Venus disturbed each other in their orbits, and the head of the comet and its tau leaped against each other in violent electrical discharges.

The birth of the planet Athene is sung in the Homeric hymn dedicated to her, “the glorious goddess, virgin, Tritogeneia.” When she was born, the vault of the sky -the great Olympus- ”began to reel horribly,” “earth round about cried fearfully,” “the sea was moved and tossed with dark waves, while foam burst forth suddenly,” and the Sun stopped for “a long while.” The Greek text speaks of “purple waves” and of “the sea [that] rises up like a wall,” and the sun stopping in its course.

Aristocles said that Zeus hid the unborn Athene in a cloud and then split it open with lightning, which is the mythological way to describe the appearance of a celestial body from the pillar of cloud.

Athene, or Latin Minerva, is called Tritogeneia (or Tritonia) after the lake Triton. This lake disappeared in a catastrophe in Africa when it broke into the ocean, leaving the desert of Sahara behind it, a catastrophe connected with the birth of Athene.

Diodorus, referring to undisclosed older authorities, says that Lake Triton in Africa “disappeared from sight in the course of an earthquake, when those parts of it which lay toward the ocean were torn asunder.” This account implies that a great lake or marsh in Africa, separated from the Atlantic Ocean by a mountainous barrier, disappeared when the barrier was broken or lowered in a catastrophe. Ovid says that Libya became a desert in consequence of Phaëthon’s conflagration.

In the Iliad it is said that Pallas Athene “darted down to earth a gleaming star” with sparks springing from it; it darted as a star “sent by Jupiter to be a portent for sea men or for a wide host of warriors, a gleaming Star.” Athene’s counterpart in the Assyro-Babylonian pantheon is Astarte (Ishtar) who shatters mountains, “bright torch of heaven” at whose appearance “heaven and earth quake,” who causes darkness and appears in a hurricane. Like Astarte (Ashteroth-Karnaim), Athene was pictured with horns. “Athena, daughter of Zeus . . . upon her head she set the helmet with two horns,” said Homer. Pallas Athene is identified with Astarte (Ishtar) or the planet Venus of the Babylonians. Anaitis of the Iranians, too, is identified as Pallas Athene and as the planet Venus.

Plutarch identifled Minerva of the Romans or Athene of the Greeks with Isis of the Egyptians, and Pliny identified the planet Venus with Isis.

It is necessary to recall this here because it is generally supposed that the Greeks had no deity of importance who personified the planet Venus and that, on the other hand, they “did not find even a star in which to place” Athene. Modern books on the mythology of the Greeks repeat today what Cicero wrote: “Venus, called in Greek Phosphorus and in Latin Lucifer when it preceded the sun, but when it follows it Hesperos.” Phosphorus does not play any role on Olympus. But folowing Cicero in his description of the planets, we read also of “the planet called Saturn’s, the Greek name of which is Phaenon,” though we know a more common name, Cronus, by which the Greeks called the planet Saturn. Cicero gives the Greek names of other planets which are not the common ones. It is therefore entirely wrong to think that Phosphorus and Hesperos are the chief or only names of the planet Venus in Greek. Athene, in whose honor the city of Athens was named, was the planet Venus. Next to Zeus she was the most honored deity of the Greeks. The name Athene in Greek according to Manetho, “is indication of self-originated movement.” He wrote of the name Athene as meaning, “I came from myself.” Cicero, speaking of Venus, explained the origin of the name thus: “Venus was so named by our countrymen as the goddess who ‘comes’ [venire] to all things.” The name Vishnu signifies “pervader,” from the Sanskrit vish, to “enter” or “pervade.”

The birth of Athene was assigned to the middle of the second millennium. Augustine wrote: “Minerva [Athene] is reported to have appeared . . . in the times of Ogyges.” This statement is found in The City of God, the book containing the quotation from Varro that the planet Venus changed its course and form in the time of Ogyges. Augustine also synchronized Joshua with the time of Minerva’s activities.

The cover of carbonigenous clouds in which the earth was enveloped by the comet is the “robe ambrosial” wrought by Athene for Hera (Earth ). The source of ambrosia was closely connected with Athene. The origin of Athene as a comet is implied in her epithet Pallas which, as is commonly known, is synonymous with Typhon; Typhon, as Pliny said, was a comet.

The bull and the cow, the goat and the serpent, were animals dedicated to Athene. “The goat being usually tabooed but chosen as an exceptional victim for her,” the animal was annually sacrificed on the Acropolis of Athens. With the Israelites the goat was the victim for Azazel, or Lucifer.

In the Babylonian calendar “the nineteenth day of all months is marked ‘day of wrath’ of goddess Gula (Ishtar). No work was done. Weeping and lamentation fihled the land. . . . Any explanation of dies irae of Babylonia must be sought in some myth concerning the nineteenth of the first month. Why should the nineteenth day after the moon of the spring equinox be a day of wrath? . . . It corresponds to the quinquatrus of the Roman farmer’s calendar, the nineteenth of March, five days after the full moon. Ovid says that Minerva was born on that day, she being the Pallas Athene of the Greeks.” The nineteenth of March was Minerva’s day.

The first appearance of Athene-Minerva took place on the day the Israelites crossed the Red Sea. The night between the thirteenth and the fourteenth days of the first month after the vernal equinox was the night of the great earthshock; six days later, on the last day of Passover week, according to the Hebrew tradition, the waters were heaped up like mountains and the fugitives crossed on the dry bed of the sea.

The birth of Pallas Athene or her first visit to earth was the cause of a cosmic disturbance, and the memory of that catastrophe was “a day of wrath in all the calendars of ancient Chaldea.”

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