Attos' Magazine

Volume #117, April / 2010

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Immanuel Velikovsky

Worlds In Collision

By Immanuel Velikovsky

Baal Zevuv (Beelzebub)

The beautiful Morning Star was related to Ahriman, Seth, Lucifer, name equivalents of Satan. It was also Baal of the Canaanites and of the Northern Kingdom of the Ten Tribes, the god hated by the biblical prophets, also Beelzebub or Baal Zevuv, or Baal of the fly.

In the Pahlavi text of the Iranian book, the Bundahis, describing the catastrophes caused by celestial bodies, it is written that at the close of one of the world ages “the evil spirit [Ahriman] went toward the luminaries.” “He stood upon one-third of the inside of the sky, and he sprang, like a snake, out of the sky down to the earth.” It was the day of the vernal equinox. “He rushed in at noon,” and “the sky was shattered and frightened.” “Like a fly, he rushed out upon the whole creation, and he injured the world and made it dark at midday as though it were in dark night. And noxious creatures were diffused by him over the earth, biting and venomous, such as the snake, scorpion, frog, and lizard, so that not so much as the point of a needle remained free from noxious creatures.”

Then the Bundahis proceeds: “The planets, with many demons [comets, dashed against the celestial sphere, and they mixed the constellations; and the whole creation was as disfigured as though fire disfigured every place and smoke arose over it.”

A similar plague of vermin is described in the Scriptures, in Exodus, Chapters 8 to 10, and also in Psalm 78 where it is told that there were sent “divers sorts of flies among them [the people of Egypt], which devoured them; and frogs, which destroyed them.” Their labor was given to the caterpillar and the locust. “The dust of the land became lice throughout all the land of Egypt.” “And there came a grievous swarm of flies . . . into all the land of Egypt.” The second, third, fourth, and eighth plagues were caused by vermin. The plague of eruv, “swarms of flies” of the King James Version, is translated in the Septuagint, “a stinging fly,” and Philo calls it “the dog-fly,” a ferocious insect; it is also called “gnat” by the rabbis. Psalm 105 narrates that darkness was sent upon the country and “locusts came, and caterpillars, and that without number, and did eat up all the herbs.” “Their land brought forth frogs in abundance, in the chambers of their kings,” and “there came divers sorts of flies, and lice in all their coasts.”

The Amalekites left Arabia because of “ants of the smallest kind” and wandered toward Canaan and Egypt at the same time that the Israelites went from Egypt toward the desert and Canaan.

In the Chinese annals describing the time of Yahou, from which I quoted previously, it is said that when the Sun did not set for ten days and the forests of China were destroyed by fire, multitudes of loathsome vermin were bred in the entire land.

During their wanderings in the desert, the Israelites were plagued by serpents. A generation later, hornets preceded the Israelites under Joshua, plaguing the land of Canaan and driving entire nations from their domiciles.

The inhabitants of the islands in the South Seas relate that when the clouds lay only a few feet from the ground and “the sky was so close to the earth that men could not walk,” “myriads of dragonflies with their wings severed the clouds confining the heavens to the earth.”

After the close of the Middle Kingdom, the Egyptian standard bore the emblem of a fly.

When Venus sprang out of Jupiter as a comet and flew very close to the earth, it became entangled in the embrace of the earth. The internal heat developed by the earth and the scorching gases of the comet were in themselves sufficient to make the vermin of the earth propagate at a very feverish rate. Some of the plagues, like the plague of the frogs (“the land brought forth frogs”) or of the locusts, must be ascribed to such causes. Anyone who has experienced a khamsin (sirocco), an electrically charged wind blowing from the desert, knows how, during the few days that the wind blows, the ground around the villages begins to teem with vermin.

The question arises here whether or not the comet Venus infested the earth with vermin which it may have carried in its trailing atmosphere in the form of larvae together with stones and gases. It is significant that all around the world peoples have associated the planet Venus with flies.

In Ekron, in the land of the Philistines, there was erected a magnificent temple to Baal Zevuv, the god of the fly. In the ninth century King Ahaziah of Jezreel, after he was injured in an accident, sent his emissaries to ask advice of this god at Ekron and not of the oracle at Jerusalem. This Baal Zevuv is Beelzebub of the Gospels.

Ahriman, the god of darkness who battled with Ormuzd, the god of light, is compared in the Bundahis to a fly. Of the flies that filled the earth buried in gloom it is said: “His multitudes of flies scatter themsehves over the world that is poisoned through and through.”

Ares (Mars) in the Iliad calls Athene “dog-fly.” “The gods clashed with a mighty din, and the wide earth rang, and round about great heaven pealed as with a trurnpet.” And Ares spoke to Athene: “Wherefore now again, thou dog-fly, art making gods to clash with gods in strife?”

The people of Bororo in central Brazil call the planet Venus “the sand fly,” an appellation similar to that which Homer used for Athene. The Bantu tribes of central Africa relate that the “sand fly brought fire from the sky,” which appears to be a reference to the Promethean role of Beelzebub, the planet Venus.

The Zend-Avesta, describing the batthe of Tistrya, “the leader of the stars against the planets” (Darmesteter), refers to worm-stars that “fly between the earth and heaven,” and that supposedly signify the meteorites. Possibly it is a reference to their infesting property.

This idea of contaminating comets is found in a belief of the Mexicans described by Sahagun: “The Mexicans called the comet citlalin popoca which means a smoking star. . . . These natives called the tail of such a star citlalin tlamina, exhalation of the comet; or, literally, ‘the star shoots a dart.’ They believed that when such a dart fell on a living organism, a hare, a rabbit, or any other animal, worms suddenly formed in the wound and made the animal unfit t serve as food. It was for this reason that they took great care to cover themselves during the night so as to protect themselves from this inflaming emanation.”

The Mexicans thus thought that larvae from the emanation of comet fell on all living things. As I have already mentioned, called Venus a “smoking star.” Sahagun says also that at the rising of the Morning Star, the Mexicans used to shut the chimneys and other apertures in order to prevent mishap from penetrating into the house together with the light of the star.

The persistence with which the planet Venus is associated with a fly in the traditions of the peoples of both hemispheres, also the emblems carried by the Egyptian priests and the temple services conducted in honor of the planet-god “of the fly,” create the impression that the flies in the tail of Venus were not merely the earthly brood, swarming in heat like other vermin, but guests from another planet.

The old question, whether there is life on other planets, has been debated time and again without much progress. Atmospheric and thermal conditions are so different on other planets that it seems incredible that the same forms of life exist there as on the earth; on the other hand, it is wrong to conclude that there is no life on them at all.

Modern biologists toy with the idea that microorganisms arrive on the earth from interstellar spaces, carried by the pressure of light. Hence, the idea of the arrival of living organisms from interplanetary spaces is not new. Whether there is truth in this supposition of larval contamination of the earth is anyone’s guess. The ability of many small insects and their larvae to endure great cold and heat and to live in an atmosphere devoid of oxygen renders not entirely improbable the hypothesis that Venus (and also Jupiter, from which Venus sprang) may be populated by vermin.

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