In the beginning of this century a Croatian* engineer, emigrant to America, Nikola Tesla, measured the electrical charge of the planet Earth and found it of a very high potential. He made his observation during thunder storms.

My instruments were affected stronger by discharges taking place at great distances than by those near by. This puzzled me very much. . . . No doubt whatever remained: I was observing stationary waves. As the source of the disturbances [thuderstorm] moved away, the receiving circuit came successively upon their nodes and loops. Impossible as it seemed, this planet, despite its vast extent, behaved like a conductor of limited dimensions. The tremendous significance of this fact in the transmission of energy by my system had already become quite clear to me. Not only was it practicable to send telegraphic messages to any distance without wires, as I recognized long ago, but also to impress upon the entire globe the faint modulations of the human voice, far more still, to transmit power, in unlimited amounts, to any terrestrial distance and almost without loss.1

Nikola Tesla was a pioneer in many fields of electrical theory and technology. He was the first to utilize alternating current, conceiving an effective system for its generation, transmission, and utilization. Edison appealed to the public, warning that the alterating current of Tesla would cause great harm to its users, being dangerous, and that only direct current can be harmlessly used. Tesla referred to Edison as an inventor, to himself as a discoverer. Today everyone knows that alternating current, with the help of the polyphase induction motor, can be converted into mechanical energy more effectively and economically than direct current. He invented new forms of dynamos, transformers, condensers, and induction coils. He discovered the principle of the rotary magnetic field, upon which the transmission of power from the Niagara Falls and other waterfalls and dams is carried on. A regal recluse, he despised the short-seeing men of science. Many of his pioneer inventions he carried with him to his grave. But he believed in the destiny of man who, in his words, “searches, discovers and invents, designs and constructs, and covers with monuments of beauty, grandeur and awe, the star of his birth.”

This teaches us that not only have the contempories of a revolutionary idea in science repeatedly rejected the idea, but also that a rejection of such an idea even by the best qualified men in the field in the generation of the revolutionary, and often still in the following generations, has occurred not once or twice, but many times. Archimedes rejected the heliocentric system of Aristarchus; Brahe rejected the system of Copernicus; and Galileo was deaf and blind to the discoveries of Kepler, just as Edison warned against the alternating current developed by Tesla. And who was more competent to judge than Archimedes, in his time, Brahe in his, Galileo in his, and Edison in his?

References

Electrical World and Engineer May 5, 1904; see also Century, June 1900. Quoted from J. J. O’Neill, The Prodigal Genius: Life of Nikola Tesla, 1944, p. 181.

*[Tesla was in fact a Serb who was born in the Croatian village of Smiljane in the Lika region, which at the time was part of Austrian monarchy. His father was an orthodox priest. ~ Eds.]

One of the major deductions from the study of ancient civilizations was the recognition that the planetary and cometary bodies are charged objects and the solar system itself is regulated not solely by the law of gravitation; that electromagnetic interactions must exist and where following the inverse square law must be unrecognizable in their effects on the calculations of celestial mechanics – charge can, so to say, be hidden in or masked by the mass. Thus the problem of Pluto influencing Uranus and Neptune more than its mass can account for is a case of a substantial charge on a small planet. But where the less pronounced electromagnetic inverse cube relations take place, like in Mercury’s precession of its perihelion, divergences from the celestial computations are registered as anomalies. Mercury moves through a general magnetic field of the Sun that influences it more strongly than it influences the remoter planets besides the influence on it and on them of the magnetic solar spots and solar wind.

In catastrophic conditions, with two celestial bodies approaching one another closely, the electromagnetic interactions may become most pronounced – the cometary protoplanet Venus produced a display of discharges between its head and its trailing part when the orbital movement of the protoplanet was disrupted by the close approach to the Earth; in the latter, eddy currents were generated with the effects due to such phenomenon (see Worlds in Collision, “Epilogue” ). Interplanetary discharges took place when Mars and Earth came into close contact (Worlds in Collision, “Synodus” ). The projected volumes dealing with catastrophes preceding those that took place at the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt carry the titles “Saturn and the Flood” and “Jupiter of the Thunderbolt”.

The planet-god Jupiter (Zeus, Ormuzd, Shiva, Marduk) was pictured with a thunderbolt because of the spectacles witnessed by the inhabitants of the Earth – like a discharge that was directed toward Venus when it approached its parental body (Worlds in Collision, “Blazing Star”), or when the Earth itself might have been the target, as the content of the volume “Jupiter of the Thunderbolt” will reveal.

The understanding that the solar system is not neutral in its components but possibly neutral as a whole led me to the conclusion that the charge of the Sun may be equal to the combined charge of the planetary bodies and that quite possibly in Jupiter is assembled the major portion of it; thus, being ca. 1000 times smaller than the Sun it is charged to a very substantial potential.

Its potential could have been greater in the past; certainly planetary bodies exchanging discharges neutralized themselves to some degree; Mars, for instance, must have been much more charged in the past before the events of the first half of the first millennium before the present era. The charge of the planet, I thought, may even be decisive in the position the planet occupies in the planetary system. I even considered theoretically a system in which gravitation is completely supplanted by electromagnetic effects with the charged planets traveling in the magnetic field of the Sun, itself being a charged body that by its rotation creates the magnetic field permeating the solar system; I also contemplated the existence of magnetic shells that would be the determinative of the planetary distances (Bode’s Law).

Since 1941, I insisted that electromagnetic interrelations in the solar system cannot be ignored – this was the theme of my long debate, in writing and oral, with Einstein – from August 1952 to his death in April of 1955. At some point in our debate (in a letter written in June 1954) I offered to stake our debate on whether Jupiter sends out radio noises (of non-thermal nature, as I already claimed in my Forum Lecture of 14 October, 1954), to which he reacted skeptically, yet was greatly surprised when nine days before his death I brought to him the news (New York Times of April 6, 1955) that such radio noises were accidentally detected.

It has been long known that Jupiter possesses an angular momentum that is superior to the angular momentum of the Sun, even of the Sun with the rest of the planets combined. This appeared to me not without a definite role of charges accumulated in Jupiter.

Jupiter was believed to be a cold planet – since the l9th century it was thought to be covered by a frozen mantle of ices over ten thousand miles thick. To me, however, from the knowledge of its activities in ancient times, it did not appear as an inert gravitational body; I thought also of Jupiter as a dark star (Worlds in Collision, p. 373); but the radio noises that I expected it to be sending out I considered as of non-thermal origin and so I also expressed myself in the mentioned Forum Lecture. But whereas I expressed myself in October 1952: “The planet is cold, yet its gases are in motion. It appears probable to me that it sends out radio noises as do the sun and the stars. I suggest that this be investigated,” in June 1954 in a letter to Einstein, I took a most definite stand: “Of course, I am a heretic, for I question the neutral state of celestial bodies. There are various tests that could be made. For instance, does Jupiter send out radio-noises or not? This can easily be found if you should wish.” This claim was also vindicated in the announcement made by Burke and Franklin on April 6 of 1955.

The relevance of the orbital periods of Jupiter and Saturn to the sunspot cycle appeared to me, if real, based on electromagnetic , interdependence. The highly charged Jupiter must create a powerful magnetosphere; it may even create magnetic shells, for distribution of its satellites, a thing not yet proven; but certainly the large satellites of Jupiter, and especially the innermost of the Jovian satellites, must be much affected by its magnetic field. Jupiter itself appeared to me to be of contrasting charges on various levels which would account for the potential difference observed in celestial battles by the ancients between the head and the trailing part of the Jovian progeny – protoplanet Venus (Worlds in Collision, “The Battle in the Sky”), the head having been expelled from Jupiter’s deeper parts, the trailing part of debris and gases from a more superficial layer.

Thus discharges on Jupiter could be dictated by potential difference. The closest of the Galilean satellites must be acting as a target independent of whether a spark discharge actually takes place or a stream of charged particles is directed toward it and to a lesser extent toward other satellites (the fifth, however is only 112,000 miles mean distance from the planet). A purely gravitational relationship between Jupiter and its satellites appeared to me unthinkable; and on this phenomenon, in my estimate, the purely gravitational system of the World must stumble, as also on the case of the behavior of the comets when approaching, then circling the Sun in their perihelia a subject much discussed by me with Einstein in my effort to convince him of the fallibility of a purely gravitational system of the solar system (and of the universe in general).

The discovery of the Jovian noises (1955), and of the terrestrial magnetosphere (1958), claimed by me also in the Forum Lecture of 1953, and of the interplanetary magnetic field centered on the Sun and rotating with it (1960), and of the solar wind or uninterrupted streams of plasma (1960), made the purely gravitational system of the World untenable. Yet among astronomers, as late as 1971, the full significance of the fact for the understanding of the structure of the universe only very slowly finds its way, as can be exemplified by a paper by Prof. Ivan King, “The Dynamics of Star Clusters”, where no mention is found of any electromagnetic participation in the mechanics of the galaxies.

The realization that Jupiter, which participated in a vigorous way in the theomachy (celestial battles), is not inert and cold led me to the conclusion that Jupiter must be also hot under its cloud cover, at some depth. This afterthought made me also claim that Jupiter is hot in a discussion with Prof. I. I. Shapiro of M.I.T., well-known authority in astrophysics, who denied such a possibility. This claim was confirmed recently by probes of the temperature underlying the surface clouds.

This leads me to the necessity to discuss some other aspects of the recent history of Jupiter, which all ancient peoples of the World elevated to the role of the supreme deity, the role it took over from Kronos-Saturn. But such a discussion I will undertake separately and at some length.

Reprinted from the The Immanuel Velikovsky Archive.

In order to bring into proper focus the significance of correct prediction in science, I offer at the start a short survey of the most celebrated cases, and it is not by chance that almost all of them come from the domain of astronomy. These cases are spectacular and, with one or two exceptions, are well known.

The story of scientific “clairvoyance” in modern astronomy starts with Johannes Kepler, a strange case and little known. When Galileo, using the telescope he had built after the model of an instrument invented by a Danish craftsman, discovered the satellites circling Jupiter, Kepler became very eager to see the satellites himself and begged in letters to have an instrument sent to Prague; Galileo did not even answer him. Next, Galileo made two more discoveries, but before publishing them in a book, he assured himself of priority by composing cryptograms, not an uncommon procedure in those days: statements written in Latin were deliberately reduced to the letters of which the sentences were composed, or, if the author of the cryptogram so wished, the letters were re-assembled to make a different sentence. The second way was chosen by Galileo when he thought he had discovered that Saturn is “a triple” planet, having observed appendices on both sides of Saturn, but not having discerned that they were but a ring around the planet, a discovery reserved for Christian Huygens in 1659, half a century later. Kepler tried to read the cryptogram of letters recombined into a non-revealing sentence, but did not succeed. He offered as his solution: “Salute, fiery twin, offspring of Mars” (“Salve, umbistineum geminatum Martia proles” ). Of this, Arthur Koestler in The Sleepwalkers (1959) wrote (p. 377): “He [Kepler] accordingly believed that Galileo had discovered two moons around Mars.” But Galileo did not discover them and they remained undiscovered for more than two hundred fifty years. Strangely, Koestler passes over the incident without expressing wonder at Kepler’s seeming prescience.

As I have shown in Worlds in Collision (“The Steeds of Mars” ) the poets Homer and Virgil knew of the trabants of Mars, visualized as his steeds, named Deimos (Terror) and Phobos (Rout). Kepler referred to the satellites of Mars as being “burning” or “flaming” , the same way the ancients had referred to the steeds of Mars.

Ancient lore preserved traditions from the time when Mars, Ares of the Greeks, was followed and preceded by swiftly circling satellites with their blazing manes. “When Mars was very close to the earth, its two trabants were visible. They rushed in front of and around Mars; in the disturbances that took place, they probably snatched some of Mars’ atmosphere, dispersed as it was, and appeared with gleaming manes” (Worlds in Collision, p. 230).

Next, Galileo made the discovery that Venus shows phases, as the Moon does. This time he secured his secret by locking it in a cryptogram of a mere collection of letters – so many A’s, so many B’s, and so on. Kepler again tried to read the cryptogram and came up with the sentence: “Macula rufa in Jove est gyratur mathem etc.” which in translation reads: “There is a red spot in Jupiter which rotates mathematically.”

The wondrous thing is: how could Kepler have known of the red spot in Jupiter, then not yet discovered? It was discovered by J. D. Cassini in the 1660’s, after the time of Kepler and Galileo. Kepler’s assumption that Galileo had discovered a red spot in Jupiter amazes and defies every statistical chance of being a mere guess. But the possibility is not excluded that Kepler found the information in some Arab author or some other source, possibly of Babylonian or Chinese origin. Kepler did not disclose what the basis of his reference to the red spot of Jupiter was – he could not have arrived at it either by logic and deduction or by sheer guesswork. A scientific prediction must follow from a theory as a logical consequence. Kepler had no theory on that. It is asserted that the Chinese observed solar spots many centuries before Galileo did with his telescope. Observing solar spots, the ancients could have conceivably observed the Jovian red spot, too. Jesuit scholars traveled in the early 17th century to China to study Chinese achievements in astronomy.

Kepler was well versed in ancient writings, also knowledgeable in medieval Arab authors; for instance, he quoted Arzachel to support the view that in ancient times Babylon must have been situated two and a half degrees more to the north, and this on the basis of the data on the duration of the longest and shortest days in the year as registered in ancient Babylon.1

Jonathan Swift, in his Gulliver’s Travels (1726) tells of the astronomers of the imaginary land of the Laputans who asserted they had discovered that the planet Mars has “two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the center of the primary planet exactly three of [its] diameters, and the outermost Five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one-and-a-half; so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of their distance from the center of Mars, which evidently shows them to be governed by the same law of gravitation that influences the other heavenly bodies.”

About this passage a literature of no mean number of authors grew in the years after 1877, when Asaph Hall, a New England carpenter turned astronomer, discovered the two trabants of Mars. They are between five and ten miles in diameter. They revolve on orbits close to their primary and in very short times: actually the inner one, Phobos, makes more than three revolutions in the time it takes Mars to complete one rotation on its axis; and were there intelligent beings on Mars they would need to count two different months according to the number of satellites (this is no special case – Jupiter has twelve moons and Saturn ten), and also observe one moon ending its month three times in one Martian day. It is a singular case in the solar system among the natural satellites that a moon completes one revolution before its primary finishes one rotation.

Swift ascribed to the Laputans some amazing knowledge – actually he himself displayed, it is claimed, an unusual gift of foreknowledge. The chorus of wonderment can be heard in the evaluation of C. P. Olivier in his article “Mars” written for the Encyclopedia Americana (1943):

“When it is noted how very close Swift came to the truth, not only in merely predicting two small moons but also the salient features of their orbits, there seems little doubt that this is the most astounding ’prophecy’ of the past thousand years as to whose full authenticity there is not a shadow of doubt.”

The passage in Kepler is little known – Olivier, like other writers on the subject of Swift’s divination, was unaware of it, and the case of Swift’s prophecy appears astounding: the number of satellites, their close distances to the body of the planet, and their swift revolutions are stated in a book printed one hundred and fifty years to the year before the discovery of Asaph Hall.

Let us examine the case. Swift, being an ecclesiastical dignitary and a scholar, not just a satirist, could have learned of Kepler’s passage about two satellites of Mars; he could also have learned of them in Homer and Virgil where they are described in poetic language (actually, Asaph Hall named the discovered satellites by the very names the flaming trabants of Mars were known by from Homer and Virgil); and it is also not inconceivable that Swift learned of them in some old manuscript dating from the Middle Ages and relating some ancient knowledge from Arabian, or Persian, or Hindu, or Chinese sources. To this day an enormous number of medieval manuscripts have not seen publication and in the days of Newton (Swift published Gulliver’s Travels in the year Newton was to die), as we know from Newton’s own studies in ancient lore, for every published tome there was a multiplicity of unpublished classical, medieval, and Renaissance texts.

That Swift knew Kepler’s laws, he himself gave testimony, and this in the very passage that concerns us: “. . . so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of their distance from the center of Mars” is the Third Law of Kepler.

But even if we assume that Swift knew nothing apart from the laws of Kepler to make his guess, how rare would be such a guess of the existence of two Martian satellites and of their short orbits and periods? As to their number, in 1726 there were known to exist: five satellites of Saturn, four of Jupiter, one of Earth, and none of Venus. Guessing, one could reasonably say: none, one, two, three, four, or five. The chance of hitting on the right Figure was one in six, or the chance of any one side of a die’s coming up in a throw. The smallness of the guessed satellites would necessarily follow from their not having been discovered in the age of Newton. Their proximity to the parent planet and their short periods of revolution were but one guess, not two, by anybody who knew of the work of Newton and Kepler. The nearness of the satellites to the primary could have been assumed on the basis of what was known about the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, lo, one of the Galilean (or Medicean) satellites of Jupiter, revolves around the giant planet in I day 18.5 hours (the satellite closest to Jupiter was discovered in 1892 by Barnard and is known as the “fifth satellite” in order of discovery; it revolves around Jupiter, a planet ten thousand times the size of Mars, in 1 1.9 hours). The three satellites of Saturn discovered by Cassini before the days of Swift – Tethys, Dione and Rhea – revolve respectively in I day 21.3 hours, 2 days 17 hours, and 4 days 12.4 hours. (Mimas and Enceladus, discovered by Herschelin 1789, revolve in 22. 6 hours and I day 8.9 hours.) The far removed satellites of Jupiter were not yet discovered in the days of Newton and Swift.

It remains to compare the figures of Swift with those of Hall: there was no true agreement between what the former wrote in his novel and what the latter found through his telescope. For Deimos, Swift’s figure, expressed in miles from the surface of Mars, is 18,900 miles; actually it is 12,500 miles; Swift gave its revolution time as 21.5 hours – actually it is 30.3 hours. For Phobos, Swift’s figures are 10,500 miles from the surface and 10 hours revolution period, whereas the true Figures are 3,700 miles and 7.65 hours. Remarkable remains the fact that for the inner satellite Swift assumed a period of revolution, though not what it is, but shorter than the Martian period of rotation, which is true. However, Swift did not know the rotational period of Mars and therefore he was not aware of the uniqueness of his figure. If he were to calculate as an astronomer should, he would either have decreased the distance separating the inner satellite from Mars – a distance for which he gave thrice its true value – or increased its revolution period to comply with the Keplerian laws by assuming the specific weight of Mars as comparable with that of Earth. But Swift had no ambitions toward scientific inquiry in his satirical novel.

Reference

1. The reference is found in the collected works of Kepler (Astronomica opera omnia, ed. C. Frisch, vol. VI, p. 557) published in 1866.

Reprinted from the The Immanuel Velikovsky Archive.

The age that man later called the Age of Kronos (Saturn) was remembered with nostalgia as an age of bliss. References to the Age of Kronos in the ancient lore are very numerous.(1)

Hesiod tells of

A golden race of mortal men who lived in the time of Kronos when he was reigning in heaven. And they lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil: miserable age rested not on them . . . The fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things. . . .(2)

Similarly writes Ovid in the sixth book of his Metamorphoses:

In the beginning was the Golden Age, when men of their own accord, without threat of punishment, without laws, maintained good faith and did what was right. . . . The earth itself, without compulsion, untouched by the hoe, unfurrowed by any share, produced all things spontaneously. . . . It was a season of everlasting spring.(3)

Rabbinical sources recount that men lived under very favorable conditions before the Deluge, and that these contributed to their sinfulness: “They knew neither toil nor care and as a consequence of their extraordinary prosperity they grew insolent.” (4)

The dominance of Saturn at some remote period in the history of the life of the peoples on Earth was of such pronounced and all-pervading character that the question arises whether the adventures of the planet going through many exploits could by itself be the full cause of the worship of the planet and the naming of the Golden Age “the Age of Kronos” (Saturn). Saturn exploded and caused the Earth to go through the greatest of its historical catastrophes, and this was completely sufficient to make of Saturn the supreme deity; but it appears that the Age of Saturn is a name for the epoch before the Deluge; after the Deluge Saturn, dismembered, almost ceased to exist as a planetary body and when at length it was reconstituted it was fettered by rings, and was far from being the dominant celestial body that would behoove it as the supreme deity of the epoch. The “Age of Kronos” is so glorious an age that it is hardly thinkable to connect it with the period after the Deluge. The wailing for Adonis, Tammuz of the Babylonians, or Osiris of the Egyptians, deplored the end of its dominance, not the beginning of it.

Then why was Saturn the supreme deity by whose name the great and glorious age before the Deluge was named? Because it removed Uranus from its role of chief deity, and to the onlookers on Earth, emasculated him? If the distances between the Earth and Saturn and Uranus were then what they are now, then such occurrences could scarcely be observable: Uranus is only faintly visible in the night sky over Mesopotamia in a most translucent night. Saturn is clearly visible but is not, for an unaided eye, a spectacle in the sky; it was more voluminous and more luminous before the Deluge, but if it moved on an orbit not too different from the present one, and the Earth were moving approximately in the same quarters where it moves today, then the surprise still persists as to how a body on a 30-years-long orbit could make the inhabitants of the Earth on its one-year-long orbit, regard it the supreme of all celestial bodies in the sky.

The appellative “sun” employed for Saturn could be explained by its unusual brightness when it exploded as a nova for a short time, actually for seven days, before the beginning of the Deluge on Earth. Assuming the length of the day in those times to have been not too dissimilar from its present value, the velocity of the moving masses being on the order of 100 kilometers a second or 8,600,000 kilometers in a 24-hour period, and the Earth and Saturn being on the closest points on their reciprocal orbits, or in conjuction (which is another surmise), in seven days a distance of ca. 60 million kilometers would be covered. On present orbits the distance between Saturn and Earth varies from 1,279 million kilometers at superior conjunction to 1,578 million kilometers at opposition; the lesser of these distances is ca. 21 times greater than that above calculated. This means also that unless the velocity of the ejected water was an order of magnitude greater than 100 km per second, the distance between Saturn and Earth must have been substantially smaller than it is at present.

I have rather arbitrarily selected the figure of 100 kilometers a second for the motion of the exploded material; today the escape velocity, or the speed required for a projectile on the surface of Saturn to leave the gravitational attraction of the planet is but 35 kilometers a second. For Jupiter the escape velocity is 59 kilometers a second. Assuming that Saturn was of a mass equal to that of Jupiter, the same figure would apply to it too. With 100 kilometers a second we have almost double the velocity of escape. The arbitrariness of the assumption of such velocity for our calculations is obvious. But if the set of figures is not too far from what they actually were, the conclusion would be that the distance of the Earth from Saturn was but a twentieth part of what it is now; this would permit us to speculate whether the Earth could at some early period have been a satellite of Saturn. The distance 60 million km is commensurate with the distance of Mercury from the Sun, or 58 million km; Jupiter’s satellites revolve at distances up to 24 million km from the primary. Theoretically Saturn could have satellites as large as the Earth: the Moon is only one-fortieth of the Earth in volume, whereas Saturn is 760 times larger than our planet.(5)

If such was ever the case, the “Age of Saturn” and the very unusual conditions under which mankind lived in it, and Saturn’s worship prior to the Deluge, would gain in meaning. The appellative “sun” used for Saturn would be understood as resulting not only from the great light it emitted for a short period when a nova, but also from its long-standing role of a primary for the revolving Earth.

If there is truth in the surmise, and nothing more it is than a surmise, that the Earth was once a satellite of Saturn, the latter must have revolved closer to the sun in order that the Earth should receive heat from it – Saturn exudes little heat(6) – and if the age of Kronos was a golden age, then it is also proper to assume that the conditions on the satellite Earth were not unfavorable for life. The geological record documents extreme climates for the past of the Earth – times when corals grew in the Arctic, and times when the Earth, partly even on the equator, was fettered by ice. Such climates require definitely abnormal conditions that could be created only by varying positions of our planet as an astronomical body. Therefore surmises as made in this section are not in conflict with geological and paleo-climatological records – yet it is not what could have taken place, but what took place, or the historical record, that is the proper goal for inquest. In the absence of direct indications we may only deal with the problem of the Earth as a satellite of Saturn as with a hypothetical construction, requiring further elucidation.

It is assumed by modern astronomy that the ninth planet, Pluto, was once a satellite of Neptune, which, having collided with Triton, another satellite of the planet, was thrown out of the ring and became an independent planet; the satellite Triton, however, as a consequence of the collision, reversed the direction of its revolution and became a retrograde satellite.(7) Another instance of a postulated conversion of a planetary satellite into an independent planet is discussed by Van Flandern and Harrington in their paper “A Dynamical Investigation of the Conjecture that Mercury is an Escaped Satellite of Venus,” Icarus 28 (1976), pp. 435-440.]. Thus the principle of a conversion of a satellite into a planet in its own right is not a phenomenon that is discussed here for the first time.

The Golden Age of Saturn or Kronos came to its end with the supreme god of that period, the planet Saturn, was broken up. The Age of Kronos was not the earliest age of which man retained some, however dim, memories – but farther into the past the dimness amounts almost to darkness.(8)

We recognize in the change in Jupiter’s motion the cause of great catastrophes in the solar system which affected also the Earth in the age of the patriarchs, or at the close of the Old Kingdom. In that period Jupiter became the supreme deity, having removed Saturn from its orbit. Classical historians, speaking of the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, told of “fire from the sky.” Tacitus narrated that the catastrophe of Sodom and Gomorrah was caused by a thunderbolt – the plain was “consumed by lightning” – and he added: “Personally I am quite prepared to grant that once-famous cities may have been burnt by fire from heaven.” (1) Also Josephus asserted that the cities had been “consumed by thunderbolts.” (2) Philo wrote that “lightnings poured out of heaven,” (3) destroying the cities.

Since the time of Abraham was the period of Jupiter’s domination that followed Saturn’s and preceded that of Venus, we are led to the surmise that the thunderbolts which destroyed the plain with its cities originated from Jupiter, or from a magnetosphere or ionosphere overcharged by the nearby presence of the giant planet. Even today discharges leap between Jupiter and Io, one of its satellites. The charging of the Earth’s atmosphere in the presence of Jupiter’s huge magnetosphere prepared the way for a discharge: a planetary bolt struck the ground in the Valley of Sittim.

For a long time I thought that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and other cities of the Plain resulted from an interplanetary discharge caused by Jupiter: classical historians speaking of this event told of “fire from the sky.” The period was that of Jupiter’s era of domination that followed that of Saturn and preceded that of Venus; and reference to the king and high priest Malki-zedek (“My King is Zedek,” Zedek being the usual name of the planet Jupiter), in the days of the patriarch Abraham and of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, seem to support my interpretation of the agent of the catastrophe. This very catastrophe caused the origin of the Dead Sea and also of the entire African Rift that extends from north of the River Jordan all the way through two thirds of the length of Africa. But, reading in 1960 of a reference to Professor Agrest, a Russian astronomer who thought that an atomic explosion had taken place, I saw some alluring points in it. If, as Prof. Agrest seems to assume, the three angels were extraterrestrial beings that followed Abraham from Mamre to Sodom and placed a time device in Sodom, the warning to Lot and his family to leave the place and not to turn their faces to the city they soon would flee, finds some parallels in the atomic age.

The observers of the first atomic explosion at Alamogordo, New Mexico were told, as was Lot and his family, not to look at the fission, but the wife of Lot looked; she may have been blinded – in the legend she turned into a pillar of salt.

At Alamogordo the observers were impressed, actually overwhelmed, by the tremendous light effect, even with their eyes closed. Next rose a pillar of smoke as if from a furnace (Genesis XIX: 28): Abraham “looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and towards all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of the furnace.”

If the time of the event is asked to be determined, I would strongly question the implication that extraterrestrial visitors came to Earth as late as the end of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, for this is the time to which the age of the Patriarch Abraham belongs – and on this I would expand somewhere else.

Yet we are left with my original idea that goes back to the early forties – that the agent of the destruction was a bolt from Jupiter, or from the magnetosphere or ionosphere, overcharged by the nearby presence of the giant planet.

The Book of Genesis portrays the age of the patriarchs as a time of great upheavals in nature in which the geology of the Jordan Valley underwent some drastic changes. The focus of these events was in the place now occupied by the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea, according to the Genesis account, was not yet in existence in the days of Abraham. In its place there was a fertile plain, known as the plain of Sittim, with five populous cities: Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Zoar. When Lot arrived in the region he “lifted up his eyes, and beheld all the plain of Jordan, that it was well-watered everywhere . . . even as the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt.” (1)

The nineteenth chapter of the Book of Genesis tells of a catastrophe in which these cities were overwhelmed, overturned, and swallowed by the earth:

The sun was risen upon the earth when . . . the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. . . .

And Abraham got up early in the morning to the place where he stood before the Lord; And he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.(2)

The description of this upheaval has always aroused wonder: “There is clearly something unnatural or extraordinary that is recorded,” one commentator wrote.(3)

The great rift of the Jordan and the Dead Sea bear witness to a tremendous upheaval. “With the end of the Tertiary period, in an event of extreme violence . . . the entire Syrian land, from its south end to its north end, was torn apart and the ground in between sank into the depths.” So wrote Professor M. Blanckenhorn, the explorer of the region of the Dead Sea.(4) In his later work he advanced the age of the rift to the pluvial, or the beginning of the first glacial age. The origin of the Dead Sea occurred “in a great mountain movement, with collapse and dislocation, that took place at the beginning of the pluvial, in the first glacial period. . . . In these titanic events conditions were created for the existence of an inner sea.” (5)

A period of dryness followed the first glacial, or pluvial period. In a new pluvial period, the second glacial epoch, the lake reached its greatest dimensions: the Dead Sea spread to the northern side of the present Sea of Galilee, engulfing it together with the Jordan Valley between. At the time, as fossil snails show, the water was not yet saline.

The rift in which the Lake of Galilee, the Jordan, and the Dead Sea lie is the deepest depression on any continent. The surface of the Dead Sea is close to 400 meters below the level of the Mediterranean, and its deepest bottom is some 320 meters lower still. The shore falls steeply from the Judean mountains on the west; on the eastern side of the rift rise the Moabite mountains. The walls of the chasm show sharp broken strata that remained horizontal, which proves that the breaking down was instantaneous.(6) The force which caused this slide movement must have been stupendous. The ground of the rift around the Dead Sea is covered with coagulated lava masses, taking the form of an immense herd of giant elephants with rough skin. These lava eruptions from fissures are ascribed to the second interglacial period.(7) To the south end of the Dead Sea towers a big cliff of salt called Jebel Usdum (Mount of Sodom). “It is absolutely impossible that the salt sediment of a sea should precipitate in such a form.” (8) “Only the rupture of the ground could create this site, singular in the entire world.” (9)

The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah took place in historical times, according to my scheme in a catastrophe which caused also the end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt. The geologists refer the upheaval which tore Syria in two to the end of the Tertiary period – long before human history began.

Now the question is legitimate: how old is the Dead Sea?

It must have been at the very beginning of my occupation with the problems later developed in my books and in not yet published manuscripts, that I came upon the question of the origin of salts in seas and oceans. The common salt is a substantial ingredient of the oceanic content, or, said differently, the water of the oceans and seas contains a substantial solution of NaCl, or sodium chloride. Even though our blood and tissues abound in sodium chloride, man and animals are not adapted to drink salty water, and life on land could develop only thanks to the evaporation of the water from the surface of seas and oceans, or to distillation – the evaporating water is free from salts. Falling as rain or snow or dew, it feeds underground sources and also glaciers, and through them the brooks and rivers and lakes, and is delivered to our use usually through concrete tubes and metal pipes.

Of the salts of the seas sodium chloride is by far the most abundant. The provenance of it is, however, a riddle. It was, and still is, assumed that the salts in the oceans originated mainly through importation from land, having been dissolved from rocks by flowing rivulets and rivers, themselves fed by underground sources, and the same process working on the rocks of the seabed. Terrestrial formations are rich in sodium, and in eons of time, it is assumed, the sodium washed out of the rocks supplied its content to the oceans; the seas evaporate and the concentration of these salts grows. But the rocks are by far not so rich in chlorine, and hence the problem – from where did chlorine come to contribute its abundance to oceanic water? There is chlorine in source water, but usually not in significant amounts. The proportion of salts in the rivers is very different from their proportion in the seas. River water has many carbonates (80 percent of the salts), fewer sulphates (13 percent) and still fewer chlorides (7 percent). Sea water has many chlorides (89 percent), fewer sulphates (10 percent) and only a few carbonates (0.2 percent). The comparison of these figures makes it clear that rivers cannot be made responsible for most of the salts of the seas. Therefore it is also obvious that there is no proper way of calculating the age of the Earth by comparing the amount of salts in the seas with the annual discharge by the rivers; the most that can be done in this respect is to calculate the rich amount of carbonates in the rivers in their relation to the relatively poor concentration to these salts in the seas; but then there will be no explanation for the rich concentration of chlorides in the seas in comparison with their poor concentration in the rivers.

A part of the salts could be traced to the washing of lands and the floor of the seas; chlorine is known also to be discharged by volcanoes, but to account for the chlorine locked in the seas, volcanic eruptions, whether on land or under the surface of the seas, needed to have taken place on an unimaginable scale – actually, it was figured out, on an impossible scale. Thus it was acknowledged that the provenance of chlorine in the salts of the seas is a problem unsolved.

Paleontological research makes it rather apparent that marine animals in some early age were more closely related to fresh-water fauna; in other words, the salinity of the oceans increased markedly at some age in the past.

The most obvious and permanent effect of a deluge of extraterrestrial origin on the Earth would be the increase in its water volume and of the place occupied by the seas. Presently four-fifths of the Earth are covered with water. A stupendous addition of water to the Earth should have decreased, not increased its salinity, if the water came down in a pure state. But if the Earth was showered by torrents of hydrogen and water some other ingredients of the Saturnian atmosphere could also have swept across the Earth’s orbit.

In the Buddhist book on “The World Cycles,” the Visuddhi-Magga, where the catastrophes that terminated the world ages are described, it is said:

But when a world cycle perishes by water . . . there arises a cycle-destroying great cloud of salt water. At first it rains with a very fine rain which gradually increases to great torrents which fill one hundred thousand times ten million worlds, and then the mountain peaks of the earth become flooded with saltish water, and hidden from view. And the water is buoyed up on all sides by the wind, and rises upward from the earth until it engulfs the heavens.(1)

Volcanoes which were active during the cataclysm of the Deluge and during other cosmic upheavals vomited sulphur, chlorine, and carbonates, and contributed to the composition of the salts of the oceans. Carbonates fell on Earth in large quantities in some of the upheavals, certainly in the one which took place in the middle of the second millennium before the present era, at the very end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, an upheaval described in detail in Worlds in Collision. But a major portion of the chlorine in which the oceans are so rich must have come from an extraterrestrial source.(2)

My explanation of the origin of a large portion of the salts of the seas suggests that Saturn is rich not only in water but also in chlorine, either in the form of sodium chloride or in some other combination, or even atomic free. The last solution, of atomic free chlorine, appeared chemically and biologically somewhat difficult to contemplate, because chlorine is a very active element, seeking ties with other elements; biologically because it would be damaging to any plant life, yet there are other indications which point to the possibility of plant life on Saturn.

Isaiah in describing the days to come, when great changes in nature will take place, says that the earth will give its increase in abundance, and “the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of the seven days. . . .” (1)

One could think that “the light of the seven days” refers to the seven days of creation – however, the actual explanation appears to me to be different: the expression “the light of the seven days” refers, in my view, to the seven days preceding the Flood that are referred to in the verse: “For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth. . . . And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the Flood were upon the earth.” (Genesis 7: 4, 10) It is not explained in the text – after seven days of what? But the rabbinical tradition relates that for seven days before the Deluge “the people heard a great commotion in the heaven,” that signified “the end of the age.”

The Talmudic tradition that often reaches much farther into the past than better known sources, like the books of the Scriptures, reveals in this instance a memory not suspected at the reading of the seventh chapter of Genesis. But in view of what we have brought out until now, and what we intend to illuminate on the following pages, the blinding light preceding the Deluge by seven days is an interesting and important detail. The world was in a dazzling light, sevenfold stronger than the light of the sun; the light was so strong and so brilliant day and night alike, that the sun was entirely overpowered by it; and in the days of Isaiah, thousands of years later, the memory of the light of the seven days was vivid in tradition, so that the prophet could refer to it in desiring to describe the solar light of the messianic age.(2)

Numerous Sanscrit texts assert that seven or even twelve suns shone just before the Deluge. “Being ignited, all of a sudden, the entire terrestrial sphere blazed forth.” Twelve suns shone with “dazzling radiance” and consumed the world. (The Skanda Purana in Shastri, The Flood Legend in Sanscrit Literature, p. 86). Cf. similar accounts in the Matsya Purana, ch. ii, the Padma Purana, ch. xxxvi, the Vishnu Purana, ch. iii, the Kalika Purana, ch. xxv, and in the Mahabharata, chapter “Matsyopakhyana.”

The light of the seven days was not of solar origin. Of what origin was it? Was it caused by brightly illuminated clouds of ionized hydrogen, or protons, hurled throughout the solar system and poured on earth? In the latter case they could have arrived from the present distance of Saturn in about a week, considering that the proton particles – ionized hydrogen – arrive from the sun in the space of twenty-five hours.(3) This is the time which elapses from a flare-up on the sun (protuberance) to the display of the polar lights – the aurora borealis.

The light of the seven days served the population of the world as a warning of some extraordinary events.(4)

The scriptural deluge is regarded by historians and critical exegetes as a legendary product. “The legend of a universal deluge is in itself a myth and cannot be anything else.” (1) It is “most nakedly and unreservedly mythological.”

The tradition of a universal deluge is told by all ancient civilizations, and also by races that never reached the ability to express themselves in the written symbols of a language. It is found all over the world, on all continents, on the islands of the Pacific and Atlantic, everywhere. Usually it is explained as a local experience carried from race to race by word of mouth. The work of collating such material has repeatedly been done, and it would only fatigue the reader were I to repeat these stories as told in all parts of the world, even in places never visited by missionaries.(2)

The rest of the collected traditions are also not identical in detail, and are sometimes very different in their setting from the Noah story, but all agree that the earth was covered to the mountain tops by the water of the deluge coming from above, and that only a few human beings escaped death in the flood. The stories are often accompanied by details about a simultaneous cleavage of the earth.(3)

In pre-Columbian America the story of a universal flood was very persistent; the first world-age was called Atonatiuh, or the age that was brought to its end by a universal deluge. This is written and illustrated in the ancient codices of the Mexicans and was narrated to the Spaniards who came to the New Continent.(4) The natives of Australia, Polynesia, and Tasmania, discovered in the seventeenth century, related almost identical traditions.(5)

Clay tablets with inscriptions concerning the early ages and the deluge were found in Mesopotamia. Their similarity to the biblical account, and to the story of the Chaldean priest Berosus(6) who lived in the Hellenistic age, caused a great sensation at the end of the last century and the beginning of the current one. On this sensational discovery was based the sensational pamphlet Babel und Bibel by Friedrich Delitsch (1902) who tried to show in it that the Hebrews had simply borrowed this story, along with many others, from the Babylonian store of legends.

But if here and there the story of the flood could be said to have been borrowed by the scriptural writer from the Babylonians, and by some natives from the missionaries, in other cases no such explanation could be offered. The indigenous character of the stories in many regions of the world makes the borrowing theory seem very fragile.

Geologists see vestiges of diluvial rains all over the world; folklorists hear the story of a universal flood wherever folklore is collected; historians read of a universal flood in American manuscripts, in Babylonian clay tablets and in the annals of practically all cultured peoples. But the climatologists make it very clear that even should the entire water content of the atmosphere pour down as rain, the resulting flood could not have covered even the lowland slopes, far less the peaks of the mountains, as all accounts insist that this deluge did.

References

The period when the Earth was Moonless is probably the most remote recollection of mankind. Democritus and Anaxagoras taught that there was a time when the Earth was without the Moon.(1) Aristotle wrote that Arcadia in Greece, before being inhabited by the Hellenes, had a population of Pelasgians, and that these aborigines occupied the land already before there was a moon in the sky above the Earth; for this reason they were called Proselenes.(2)

Apollonius of Rhodes mentioned the time “when not all the orbs were yet in the heavens, before the Danai and Deukalion races came into existence, and only the Arcadians lived, of whom it is said that they dwelt on mountains and fed on acorns, before there was a moon.” (3)

Plutarch wrote in The Roman Questions: “There were Arcadians of Evander’s following, the so-called pre-Lunar people.”(4) Similarly wrote Ovid: “The Arcadians are said to have possessed their land before the birth of Jove, and the folk is older than the Moon.” (5) Hippolytus refers to a legend that “Arcadia brought forth Pelasgus, of greater antiquity than the moon.”(6) Lucian in his Astrology says that “the Arcadians affirm in their folly that they are older than the moon.”(7)

Censorinus also alludes to the time in the past when there was no moon in the sky.(8)

Some allusions to the time before there was a Moon may be found also in the Scriptures. In Job 25:5 the grandeur of the Lord who “Makes peace in the heights” is praised and the time is mentioned “before [there was] a moon and it did not shine.” Also in Psalm 72:5 it is said: “Thou wast feared since [the time of] the sun and before [the time of] the moon, a generation of generations.” A “generation of generations” means a very long time. Of course, it is of no use to counter this psalm with the myth of the first chapter of Genesis, a tale brought down from exotic and later sources.

The memory of a world without a moon lives in oral tradition among the Indians. The Indians of the Bogota highlands in the eastern Cordilleras of Colombia relate some of their tribal reminiscences to the time before there was a moon. “In the earliest times, when the moon was not yet in the heavens,” say the tribesmen of Chibchas.(9)

There are currently three theories of the origin of the moon:

1) The Moon originated at the same time as the Earth, being formed substantially from the same material, aggregating and solidifying.

2) The Moon was formed not in the vicinity of the Earth, but in a different part of the solar system, and was later captured by the Earth.

3) The Moon was originally a portion of the terrestrial crust and was torn out, leaving behind the bed of the Pacific.

All three theories claim the presence of the Moon on an orbit around the Earth for billions of years. Mythology may supply each of these views with some support (Genesis I for the first view; the birth of Aphrodite from the sea for the third view; Aphrodite’s origin in the disruption of Uranus, and also the violence of Sin – the Babylonian Moon – seems to support the second view).

Since mankind on both sides of the Atlantic preserved the memory of a time when the Earth was without the Moon, the first hypothesis, namely, of the Moon originating simultaneously with the Earth and in its vicinity, is to be excluded, leaving the other two hypotheses to compete between themselves.

We have seen that the traditions of diverse peoples offer corroborative testimony to the effect that in a very early age, but still in the memory of mankind, no moon accompanied the Earth.(10) Since human beings already peopled the Earth, it is improbable that the Moon sprang from it: there must have existed a solid lithosphere, not a liquid earth. Thus while I do not claim to know the origin of the Moon, I find it more probable that the Moon was captured by the Earth. Such an event would have occurred as a catastrophe.(11) If the Moon’s formation took place away from the Earth,(12) its composition may be quite different.

There is no evidence to suggest whether the Moon was a planet, a satellite of another planet, or a comet at the time of its capture by the Earth. Whatever atmosphere it may have had(13) was pulled away by the Earth, by other contacting bodies, or dissipated in some other way.

Since the time the Moon began to accompany the Earth, it underwent the influence of contacts with comets and planets that passed near the Earth in subsequent ages. The mass of the Moon being less than that of the Earth, the Moon must have suffered greater disturbances in cosmic contacts. During these contacts the Moon was not carried away: this is due to the fact that no body more powerful than the Earth came sufficiently close to the Moon to take it away from the Earth for good; but in the contacts that took place the Moon was removed repeatedly from one orbit to another.

The variations in the position of the Moon can be read in the variations in the length of the month. The length of the month repeatedly changed in subseqent catastrophic events – and for this there exists a large amount of supporting evidence. In these later occurrences the Moon played a passive role, and Zeus in the Iliad advised it (Aphrodite) to stay out of the battle in which Athene and Ares (Venus and Mars) were the main contestants.

References