For the last two hundred years of Enlightenment we have been rewriting history
so that the cry of freedom is from earthly oppressors. No wonder the world
has gone wrong and the astrophysicists today cannot come to terms with the
Taurid torus. I'm really trying to say that this is just not an astrophysical
discovery that we are talking about. Everything has got to, sort of, turn
around in order to come to terms with what is being said. And this, in a
way, is rather like what Irving was describing beforehand. There is a
paradigm shift involved in recognizing that it's not just ancient history we
have got wrong-it's all history.
So, what is my point? My point is that you do not have to dabble first in
mythology and prehistory and geology, as Velikovsky did, in order to
understand the sky. You first take the modern sky accessible to science,
especially during the Space Age, and you look at its' darker debris with a
view to relating its behavior to the more accessible human history which we
can, in principle, really understand. And by this approach you discover from
the dynamics of the material in space which I'm talking about that a huge
comet must have settled in a Taurid orbit some 20,000 years ago, whose dense
meteor stream for 10,000 years almost certainly produced the last Ice Age.
(Missing Text due to change of tape)
The chance of a collision with Kronos, as with any other comet was, in fact,
remote. And mankind settled into a Golden Age. But some time at perihelion,
around 3,000 B.C., it is likely that Kronos ran very close to Venus and
split, like Shoemaker-Levy. And a trail of new, dazzling comets circulated
around the Taurid stream-evidently, for centuries. Somewhere in this array
still was the Kronos remnant; less bright, perhaps. And a new leader, Zeus
or Marduk, perhaps, much brighter, together with a new serpentine Milky Way,
the home of chaos.
By 2,000 B.C., due to an orbital precession, things got worse, for the trail
was now crossing the Earth's orbit and mayhem ensued. The Sumerian
civilization came to an end under a barrage of Tsunguskas, thunderbolts, all
over a period of a couple of centuries and we were now in a sky of foreboding.
Then passed another 2,500 years with Zeus in decline and Kronos already
barely visible, while the latter's orbit precessed until we come to the next
intersection with the Earth's orbit around 500 A.D. when mayhem again ensured.
This time the Roman civilization collapsed and the dark age was in place.
And it was Plato and the Christians, of course, with their knowledge acquired
from the Magi who had predicted this "end of the world."
In the medieval society which then emerged, it was natural that they should
first invoke the world of demons and foreboding. But eventually it seemed
that the danger was passed, and by the twelfth century the Europeans were
changing back to the Aristotelian picture of inspiration and supposed
enlightenment. The Taurid and probably the Kronos remnant, are still there,
of course.
And the next crossing of the Earth's orbit will be around 3,000 A.D. There's
no guarantee of avoiding additional bombardments before then, and, of course,
there may be another Jesus Christ.
I'm going to come to an end and possibly leave no time for questions, I'm
afraid. But I am told that I'm going to be up here again.
What, then, should Velikovskian's make of all these additions to our cosmic
environment? Well, my first point, I think, is that we do not need to move
the planets around to get catastrophes. Super Tsunguskas will do it all.
Point two-everything we say makes no challenge to conventional physics, or
astrophysics, for that matter.
And point three-everything we say, as Velikovsky would have wished, does make
a challenge to conventional history.
The new picture is one of punctuated peace. It is the picture, I would
suggest, enunciated by both Spengler and Toynbee (not the world's most
favorite historians nowadays), one in which new cultures emerged from chaos,
with a shout, to become civilizations which then stagnate or decline, slowly.
Only with a fresh cosmic crisis do they climb to new heights or collapse
altogether, providing us with a new paradigm shift.
The picture I am describing is, again, rather like the one that Irving Wolfe
was describing previously. I would like to follow Irving Wolfe here, and
suggest th
http://www.kronia.com/symposium/clube.txt