New SkyThe Immanuel Velikovsky Archive
[Quoted by Immanuel Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision, 1950].
44. In the so-called Manuscript Quiche it is also narrated that there was 'little light on the surface of the earth .. the faces of the sun and the moon were covered with clouds.'" [Worlds in Collision, p.140]
45. In the Ermitage Papyrus in Leningrad (previously mentioned) there are lamentations about a terrible catastrophe, when heaven and earth turned upside down ("I show thee the land upside down: it happed that which never had happened'). After this catastrophe, darkness covered the earth: 'The sun is veiled and shines not in the sight of men. None can live when the sun is veiled by clouds. ..None knoweth that midday is there; the shadow is not discerned .. Not dazzled is the sight when he [the sun] is beheld; he is in the sky like the moon.'" [Worlds in Collision, p.140]
46. In the Papyrus Anastasi IV the years of misery are described, and it is said" 'The sun, it hath come to pass that it riseth not.'" [Worlds in Collision, p.140]
47. In the Kalevala, the Finnish epos which 'dates back to an enormous antiquity,' the time the sun and moon disappeared from the sky, and dreaded shadows covered it, is described in these words: 'Even birds grew sick and perished, men and maidens, faint and famished, perished in the cold and darkness, from the absence of sunshine.. from the absence of moonlight...But the wise men of the Northland could not know the dawn of morning, for the moon shines not in season nor appears the sun at midday, from their stations in the sky-vault.' [Worlds in Collision, p.143]
48. The Greeks as well as the Carians and other peoples on the shores of the Aegean Sea told of a time when the sun was driven off its course and disappeared for an entire day,..." [Worlds in Collision, p.153]
49. The disturbance in the movement of the sun was followed by a period as long as a day, when the sun did not appear at all. Ovid continues: 'If we are to believe the report, one whole day went without the sun. But the burning world gave light.'" [Worlds in Collision, p.155]
50. Plato recorded the story heard two generations before from Solon, the wise ruler of Athens. '..the story, as it is told, has the fashion of a legend, but the truth of it lies in the occurrence of a shifting of the bodies in the heavens which move around the earth, and a destruction of the things on the earth by a fierce fire, which recurs at long intervals.' [Worlds in Collision, p.155-6]
51. "Thyestes and his brother Atreus were .. Argive Tyrants. Living in the eighth century, they must have witnessed the cosmic catastrophes of the days of Isaiah. Greek tradition persists that a cosmic catastrophe occurred in the time of these tyrants: the sun changed its course and the night came before its proper time." [Worlds in Collision, p.223]
52. Seneca describes the change of position of each constellation-the Ram, the Bull, the Twins, the Lion, the Virgin, the Scales, the Scorpion, the Goat, and the Wain (the Great Bear) 'And the Wain, which was never bathed in the sea, shall be plunged beneath the all-engulfing waves.'
53. A commentator who wondered about this description of the position of the Great Bear wrote: There was no mythological reason why the Wain-otherwise known as the Great Bear-should not be bathed in the Ocean.' But Seneca said precisely this strange thing: the Great Bear-or one of its stars-never set beneath the horizon, and thus the polar star was among its stars during the age that came to an end in the time of the Argive tyrants. Seneca also says explicitly that the poles were torn up in this cataclysm" [Worlds in Collision, p.225 ]
54. In the tale of the southern Ute Indians, the cottontail is the animal that is connected with the disruption of the movement of the sun." ... "There is one instance more in the Indian story of the sun being impeded on its path and the ensuing world conflagation. Before the catastrophe, 'the sun used to go round close to the ground.' the purpose of the attack on the sun was to make 'the sun shine a little longer: the days were too short.' After the catastrophe 'the days became longer.'" [Worlds in Collision, p.315]
55. According to Seneca the Great Bear had been the polar constellation. After a cosmic upheaval shifted the sky, a star of the Little Bear became the polar star. Hindu astronomical tablets composed by the Brahmans in the first half of the millennium before the present era shows a uniform deviation from the expected position of the stars at the time the observations were made (the precession of the equinoxes being taken into consideration). Modern scholars wondered at this, in their opinion inexplicable error. In view of the geometrical methods employed by Hindu astronomy and its detailed method of calculation, a mistake in observation equal to even a fraction of a degree would be difficult to account for. In Jaiminiya-Upanisad-Brahmana it is written that the center of the sky, or the point around which the firmament revolves, is the Great Bear. This is the same statement we found in Thyestes of the Seneca. [Worlds in Collision, p.317]
