Immanuel Velikovsky
Immanuel Velikovsky was a Russian-American psychoanalyst, writer, and catastrophist. He is the author of several books offering pseudohistorical interpretations of ancient history, including the U.S. bestseller Worlds in Collision published in 1950. Velikovsky's work is frequently cited as a canonical example of pseudoscience and has been used as an example of the demarcation problem.
His books use comparative mythology and ancient literary sources to argue that Earth suffered catastrophic close contacts with other planets in ancient history. In positioning Velikovsky among catastrophists including Hans Bellamy, Ignatius Donnelly, and, the British astronomers Victor Clube and Bill Napier noted "... Velikovsky is not so much the first of the new catastrophists ...; he is the last in a line of traditional catastrophists going back to mediaeval times and probably earlier." Velikovsky argued that electromagnetic effects play an important role in celestial mechanics. He also proposed a revised chronology for ancient Egypt, Greece, Israel, and other cultures of the ancient Near East. The revised chronology aimed at explaining the so-called "dark age" of the eastern Mediterranean and reconciling biblical accounts with widely accepted archaeology and Egyptian chronology.
In general, Velikovsky's ideas have been ignored or vigorously rejected by the academic community. Nonetheless, his books often sold well and gained enthusiastic support in lay circles, often fuelled by claims of unfair treatment of Velikovsky by orthodox academia. The controversy surrounding his work and its reception is often referred to as "the Velikovsky affair".
Childhood and early education
Immanuel Velikovsky was born in 1895 to a prosperous Jewish family in Vitebsk, Russian Empire. The son of Shimon Velikovsky and Beila Grodensky, he learned several languages as a child and was sent away to study at the Medvednikov Gymnasium in Moscow, where he performed well in Russian language and mathematics. He graduated with a gold medal in 1913. Velikovsky then traveled in Europe and visited Palestine before briefly studying medicine at Montpellier in France and taking premedical courses at the University of Edinburgh. He returned to Russia before the outbreak of World War I, enrolled in the University of Moscow, and received a medical degree in 1921.Editorial work and marriage
Upon taking his medical degree, Velikovsky left Russia for Berlin. With the financial support of his father, Velikovsky edited and published two volumes of scientific papers translated into Hebrew. The volumes were titled Scripta Universitatis Atque Bibliothecae Hierosolymitanarum. He enlisted Albert Einstein to prepare the volume dealing with mathematics and physics.In 1923, Velikovsky married Elisheva Kramer, a violinist and later sculptor.
Career as a psychiatrist
Velikovsky lived in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine from 1924 to 1939, practising medicine in the fields of general practice, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis which he had studied under Sigmund Freud's pupil Wilhelm Stekel in Vienna. During this time, he had about a dozen papers published in medical and psychoanalytic journals. He was also published in Freud's Imago, including a precocious analysis of Freud's own dreams.Emigration to the US and a career as an author
In 1939, with the prospect of war looming, Velikovsky travelled with his family to New York City, intending to spend a sabbatical year researching for his book Oedipus and Akhenaton. The book was inspired by Freud's Moses and Monotheism and explored the possibility that Pharaoh Akhenaton was the legendary Oedipus. Freud had argued that Akhenaton, the supposedly monotheistic Egyptian pharaoh, was the source of the religious principles that Moses taught to the people of Israel in the desert. Freud's claim was based in part on the resemblance of Psalm 104 in the Bible to the Great Hymn to the Aten, an Egyptian hymn discovered on the wall of the tomb of Akhenaten's courtier, Ay, in Akhenaten's city of Akhetaten. To disprove Freud's claim and to prove the Exodus as such, Velikovsky sought evidence for the Exodus in Egyptian documents. One such document was the Ipuwer Papyrus, which he felt reported events similar to several of the Biblical plagues. Since conventional Egyptology dated the Ipuwer Papyrus much earlier than either the Biblical date for the Exodus or the Exodus date accepted by many of those who accepted the conventional chronology of Egypt, Velikovsky had to revise the conventional chronology.Within weeks of his arrival in the United States, World War II began. Launching on a tangent from his original book project, Velikovsky began to develop the radical catastrophist cosmology and revised chronology for which he would become notorious. For the remainder of the Second World War, now as a permanent resident of New York City, he continued to research and write about his ideas, searching for a means to disseminate them to academia and the public. He privately published two small Scripta Academica pamphlets in 1945. He mailed copies of the latter to academic libraries and scientists, including Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley in 1947.
In 1950, after eight publishing houses rejected the Worlds in Collision manuscript, it was finally published by Macmillan, which had a large presence in the academic textbook market. Even before its appearance, the book was enveloped by furious controversy, when Harper's Magazine published a highly positive feature on it, as did Reader's Digest, with what would today be called a creationist slant. This came to the attention of Shapley, who opposed the publication of the work, having been made familiar with Velikovsky's claims through the pamphlet Velikovsky had given him. Shapley threatened to organise a textbook boycott of Macmillan for its publication of Worlds in Collision, and within two months the book was transferred to Doubleday. It was by then a bestseller in the United States. In 1952, Doubleday published the first installment in Velikovsky's revised chronology, Ages in Chaos, followed by the Earth in Upheaval in 1955. In November 1952, Velikovsky moved from Manhattan to Princeton, New Jersey.
For most of the 1950s and early 1960s, Velikovsky was persona non grata on college and university campuses. After this period, he began to receive more requests to speak. He lectured, frequently to record crowds, at universities across North America. In 1972, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a one-hour television special featuring Velikovsky and his work, and this was followed by a thirty-minute documentary by the BBC in 1973.
During the remainder of the 1970s, Velikovsky devoted a great deal of his time and energy to rebutting his critics in academia, and he continued to tour North America and Europe to deliver lectures on his ideas. By that time, the elderly Velikovsky had diabetes and intermittent depression, which his daughter said may have been exacerbated by the scientific community's continuing rejection of his work. He died in 1979.
Posthumous administration of literary estate
For many years, Velikovsky's estate was controlled by his two daughters, Shulamit Velikovsky Kogan, and Ruth Ruhama Velikovsky Sharon, who generally resisted the publication of any further material. A volume of Velikovsky's discussions and correspondence with Albert Einstein appeared in Hebrew in Israel, translated and edited by his daughter Shulamit Velikovsky Kogan. In the late 1990s, a large portion of Velikovsky's unpublished book manuscripts, essays and correspondence became available at the Velikovsky Archive website. In 2005, Velikovsky's daughter Ruth Sharon presented his entire archive to Princeton University Library.Ideas
In the 1920s and 1930s, Velikovsky published his concepts in medical and psychoanalytic journals. He is best known, however, for research performed in the 1940s when living in New York City. His main ideas in this area were summarized in an affidavit of November 1942, and two privately published Scripta Academica pamphlets, Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History and Cosmos without Gravitation.Rather than have his ideas dismissed wholesale because of potential flaws in any one area, Velikovsky then chose to publish them as a series of book volumes, aimed at a lay audience, dealing separately with his proposals on ancient history, and with areas more relevant to the physical sciences. Velikovsky was a passionate Zionist, and this did steer the focus of his work, although its scope was considerably more far-reaching than this. The entire body of work could be said to stem from an attempt to solve the following problem: that to Velikovsky there appeared to be insufficient correlation in the written or archaeological records between Biblical history and what was known of the history of the area, in particular, Egypt.
Velikovsky searched for common mention of events within literary records, and in the Ipuwer Papyrus he believed he had found a contemporary Egyptian account of the Plagues of Egypt. Moreover, he interpreted both accounts as descriptions of a great natural catastrophe. Velikovsky attempted to investigate the physical cause of these events, and extrapolated backwards and forwards in history from this point, cross-comparing written and mythical records from cultures on every inhabited continent, using them to attempt synchronisms of the historical records, yielding what he believed to be further periodic natural catastrophes that can be global in scale.
He arrived at a body of radical inter-disciplinary ideas, which might be summarised as:
- Planet Earth has suffered natural catastrophes on a global scale, both before and during humankind's recorded history.
- There is evidence for these catastrophes in the geological record and archeological record. The extinction of many species had occurred catastrophically, not by gradual Darwinian means.
- The catastrophes that occurred within the memory of humankind are recorded in the myths, legends and written history of all ancient cultures and civilisations. Velikovsky pointed to alleged concordances in the accounts of many cultures, and proposed that they referred to the same real events. For instance, the memory of a flood is recorded in the Hebrew Bible, in the Greek legend of Deucalion, and in the Manu legend of India. Velikovsky put forward the psychoanalytic idea of "Cultural Amnesia" as a mechanism whereby these literal records came to be regarded as mere myths and legends.
- The causes of these natural catastrophes were close encounters between the Earth and other bodies within the Solar System — not least what are now the planets Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, and Mars, these bodies having moved upon different orbits within human memory.
- To explain the fact that these changes to the configuration of the Solar System violate several well-understood laws of physics, Velikovsky invented a role for electromagnetic forces in counteracting gravity and orbital mechanics.
- A tentative suggestion that Earth had once been a satellite of a "proto-Saturn" body, before its current solar orbit.
- That the Deluge had been caused by proto-Saturn's entering a nova state, and ejecting much of its mass into space.
- A suggestion that the planet Mercury was involved in the Tower of Babel catastrophe.
- Jupiter had been the prime mover in the catastrophe that saw the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
- Periodic close contacts with a "cometary Venus" had caused the Exodus events and Joshua's subsequent "sun standing still" incident.
- Periodic close contacts with Mars had caused havoc in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE.
- Worlds in Collision discussed the literary and mythical records of the "Venus" and "Mars" catastrophes
- Portions of his Revised Chronology were published as Ages in Chaos, Peoples of the Sea and Rameses II and His Time
- Earth in Upheaval dealt with geological evidence for global natural catastrophes.
Of all the strands of his work, Velikovsky published least on his belief that electromagnetism plays a role in orbital mechanics. Although he appears to have retreated from the propositions in his 1946 monograph Cosmos without Gravitation, no such retreat is apparent in Stargazers and Gravediggers. Cosmos without Gravitation, which Velikovsky placed in university libraries and sent to scientists, is a probable catalyst for the hostile response of astronomers and physicists to his later claims about astronomy. However, other Velikovskian enthusiasts such as Ralph Juergens, Earl Milton, Wal Thornhill, and Donald E. Scott have claimed that stars are powered not by internal nuclear fusion, but by galactic-scale electrical discharge currents. Such ideas do not find support in the conventional literature and are rejected as pseudoscience by the scientific community.