Worlds In Collition

Chapter Five

EAST AND WEST

Our planet rotates from west to east. Has it always done so? In this rotation from west to east, the sun is seen to rise in the east and set in the west. Was the east the primeval and only place of the sunrise?

There is testimony from all parts of the world that the side which is now turned toward the evening once faced the morning.

In the second book of his history, Herodotus relates his conversations with Egyptian priests on his visit to Egypt some time during the second half of the fifth century before the present era. Concluding the history of their people, the priests told him that the period following their first king covered three hundred and forty-one generations, and Herodotus calculated that, three generations being equal to a century, the whole period was over eleven thousand years. The priests asserted that within historical ages and since Egypt became a kingdom, "four times in this period (so they told me) the run rose contrary to his wont; twice he rose where he now sets, and twice he set where he now rises."

This passage has been the subject of exhaustive commentaries, the authors of which tried to invent every possible explanation of the phenomenon, but failed to consider the meaning which was plainly stated by the priests of Egypt, and their efforts through the centuries have remained fruitless.

[COMMENT: This mystery can now be solved. Herodotus wrote in the 400s BCE. Add to that eleven thousand years, and you arrive at a date of approximately 11,450 BCE. If the arrival of the Planet Nibiru consistently results in a shift of the Polar Axis, as it did in 1587 BCE (more accurately, as has been shown by the Book of Joshua, in 1535 BCE, or 52 years later), then previous Polar Axis Shifts would have occurred in approximately 5187 BCE, 8787 BCE and 12,387 BCE, the last date of which is less than a thousand years previous to 11,450 BCE. Thus, these priests must have been referring to the four times prior to Herodotus' visit that there had been arrivals of the Planet Nibiru. RS]

The famous chronologist of the sixteenth century, Joseph Scaliger, weighed the question whether the Sothis period, or time reckoning by years of 365 days which, when compared with the Julian calendar, accumulated an error of a full year in 1,461 years, was hinted at by this passage in Herodotus, and remarked: "Sed hoc non fuerit occasum et orientem mutare" (No reversal of sunrise and sunset takes place in a Sothis period).

[COMMENT: For a complete mathematical analysis of the Egyptian Sothis Period, please see my accompanying essay AN INTRODUCTION TO GALACTIC MATHEMATICS. RS]

Did the words of the priests to Herodotus refer to the slow change in the direction of the terrestrial axis during a period of approximately 25,800 years, which is brought about by its spinning or by the slow movement of the equinoctial points of terrestrial orbit (precession of the equinoxes)? So thought Alexander von Humboldt of "the famous passage of the second book of Herodotus which so strained the sagacity of the commentators". But this is also a violation of the meaning of the words of the priests, for during the period of spinning, orient and occident do not exchange places.

One may doubt the trustworthiness of the priests' statements, or of Egyptian tradition in general, or attack Herodotus for ignorance of the natural sciences, but there is no way to reconcile the passage with present-day natural science. It remains"a very remarkable passage of Herodotus, that has become the despair of commentators".

Pomponius Mela, a Latin author of the first century, wrote: "The Egyptians pride themselves on being the most ancient people in the world. In their authentic annals ... one may read that since they have been in existence, the course of the stars has changed directions four times, and that the sun has set twice in that part of the sky where it rises today."

It should not be deduced that Mela's only source for this statement was Herodotus. Mela refers explicitly to Egyptian written sources. He mentions the reversal in the movement of the stars as well as of the sun; if he had copied Herodotus, he would probably not have mentioned the reversal in the movement of the stars (sidera). At a time when the movement of the sun, planets, and stars was not yet regarded as the result of the movement of the earth, the change in the direction of the sun was not necessarily connected in Mela's mind with a similar change in the movement of all heavenly bodies.

If, in Mela's time, there were Egyptian historical records which referred to the rising of the sun in the west, we ought to investigate the old Egyptian literary sources extant today.

The Magical Papyrus Harris speaks of a cosmic upheaval of fire and water when "the south becomes north, and the Earth turns over".

In the Papyrus Ipuwer it is similarly stated that "the land turns round [over] as does a potter's wheel" and the "Earth turned upside down". This papyrus bewails the terrible devastation wrought by the upheaval of nature. In the Ermitage Papyrus (Leningrad, 1116b recto) also, reference is made to a catastrophe that turned the "land upside down; happens that which never (yet) had happened". It is assumed that at that time -- in the second millennium -- people were not aware of the daily rotation of the earth, and believed that the firmament with its luminaries turned around the earth; therefore, the expression, "the earth turned over", does not refer to the daily rotation of the globe.

Nor do these descriptions in the papyri of Leiden and Leningrad leave room for a figurative explanation of the sentence, especially if we consider the text of the Papyrus Harris -- the turning over of the earth is accompanied by the interchange of the south and north poles.

Harakhte is the Egyptian name for the western sun. As there is but one sun in the sky, it is supposed that Harakhte means the sun at its setting. But why should the sun at its setting be regarded as a deity different from the morning sun? The identity of the rising and setting sun is seen by everyone. The inscriptions do not leave any room for misunderstanding: "Harakhte, he riseth in the west."

The texts found in the pyramids say that the luminary "ceased to live in the occident, and shines, a new one, in the orient".

After the reversal of direction, whenever it may have occurred, the words "west" and "sunrise" were no longer synonyms, and it was necessary to clarify references by adding: "the west which is at the sun-setting". It was not mere tautology, as the translator of this text thought.

Inasmuch as the hieroglyphics were deciphered in the nineteenth century, it would be only reasonable to expect that since then the commentaries on Herodotus and Mela would have been written after consulting the Egyptian texts.

In the tomb of Senmut, the architect of Queen Hatshepsut, a panel on the ceiling shows the celestial sphere with the signs of the zodiac and other constellations in "a reversed orientation" of the southern sky.

The end of the Middle Kingdom antedated the time of Queen Hatshepsut by several centuries. The astronomical ceiling presenting a reversed orientation must have been a venerated chart, made obsolete a number of centuries earlier.

"A characteristic feature of the Senmut ceiling is the astronomically objectionable orientation of the southern panel." The center of this panel is occupied by the Orion-Sirius group, in which Orion appears west of Sirius instead of east. "The orientation of the southern panel is such that the person in the tomb looking at it has to lift his head and face north, not south." "With the reversed orientation of the south panel, Orion, the most conspicuous constellation of southern sky, appeared to be moving eastward, i.e., in the wrong direction."

The real meaning of "the irrational orientation of the southern panel" and the "reversed position of Orion" appears to be this: the southern panel shows the sky of Egypt as it was before the celestial sphere interchanged north and south, east and west. The northern panel shows the sky of Egypt as it was on some night of the year in the time of Senmut.

Was there no autochthonous tradition in Greece about the reversals of the revolution of the sun and stars?

Plato wrote in his dialogue, "The Statesman" (POLITICUS): "I mean the change in the rising and setting of the sun and the other heavenly bodies, how in those times they used to set in the quarter where they now rise, and used to rise where they now set ... the god at the time of the quarrel, you recall, changed all that to the present system as a testimony in favor of Atreus." Then he proceeded: "At certain periods the universe has its present circular motion, and at other periods it revolves in the reverse direction. ... Of all the changes which take place in the heavens, this reversal is the greatest and most complete."

Plato continued his dialogue, using the above passage as the introduction to a fantastic philosophical essay on the reversal of time. This minimizes the value of the quoted passage despite the categorical form of his statement.

The reversal of the movement of the sun in the sky was not a peaceful event; it was an act of wrath and destruction. Plato wrote in POLITICUS: "There is at that time great destruction of animals in general, and only a small part of the human race survives."

The reversal of the movement of the sun was referred to by many Greek authors before and after Plato. According to a short fragment of a historical drama by Sophocles (ATREUS), the sun rises in the east only since its course was reversed.

"Zeus ... changed the course of the sun, causing it to rise in the east and not in the west."

Euripides wrote in ELECTRA: "Then in his anger arose Zeus, turning the stars' feet back on the fire-fretted way; yea, and the sun's car splendour-burning, and the misty eyes of the morning grey. And the flash of his chariot-wheels back-flying flushed crimson the face of the fading day. ... The sun ... turned backward ... with the scourge of his wrath in affliction repaying mortals."

Many authors in later centuries realized that the story of Atreus described some event in nature. But it could not have been an eclipse. Strabo was mistaken when he tried to rationalize the story by saying that Atreus was an early astronomer who "discovered that the sun revolves in a direction opposite to the movement of the heavens". During the night the stars move from east to west two minutes faster than the sun which moves in the same direction during the day.

[Every night stars rise four minutes earlier: the earth rotates 366.25 times in a year in relation to the stars, but 365.25 times in relation to the sun.]

Even in poetical language such a phenomenon would not have been described as follows: "And the sun-car's winged speed from the ghastly strife turned back, changing his westering track through the heavens unto where blush-burning dawn rose," as Euripides wrote in another work of his.

[ORESTES, II. 1001ff.]

Seneca knew more than his older contemporary Strabo. In his drama THYESTES, he gave a powerful description of what happened when the sun turned backward in the morning sky, which reveals much profound knowledge of natural phenomena. When the sun reversed its course and blotted out the day in mid-Olympus (noon), and the sinking sun beheld Aurora, the people, smitten with fear, asked: "Have we of all mankind been deemed deserving that heaven, its poles uptorn, should overwhelm us? In our time has the last day come?"

[COMMENT: The above quote from Seneca contains a hidden meaning. If "mid-Olympus" refers to the noontime position of the Sun directly overhead, then "Olympus" must have meant "the sky" as well as a mythical mountain of the gods. If Mount Olympus is merely a Greek designation for The Cosmic Tree Hyperborea, then "Mount Olympus" would indicate a "sky mountain" of some sort, such as the legendary "Mount Of The North Pole". RS]

The early Greek philosophers, and especially Pythagoras, would have known about the reversal of the revolution of the sky, if it actually occurred, but as Pythagoras and his school kept their knowledge secret, we must depend upon the authors who wrote about the Pythagoreans. Aristotle says that the Pythagoreans differed between the right- and left-hand motion of the sky ("the side from which the stars rise" is heaven's right, "and where they set ... its left"), and in Plato we find: "A direction from left to right -- and that will be from west to east." The present sun moves in the opposite direction.

In the language of a symbolic and philosophical astronomy, probably of Pythagorean origin, Plato describes in TIMAEUS the effects of a collision of the earth "overtaken by a tempest of winds" with "alien fire from without, or a solid lump of earth", or waters of "the immense flood which foamed in and streamed out": the terrestrial globe engages in all motions, "forwards and backwards, and again to right and to left, and upwards and downwards, wandering every way in all the six directions".

[COMMENT: SIX DIRECTIONS! Six North-South Polar Alignment Possibilities, along the Polar Pivotal Belts. See also the accompanying essay on THE POLAR PIVOTAL AXIS. RS]

As the result of such a collision, described in a not easily understandable text which represents the earth as possessing a soul, there was a "violent shaking of the revolutions of the Soul", "a total blocking of the course of the same", "shaking of the course of the other", which "produced all manner of twistings, and caused in their circles fractures and disruptures of every possible kind, with the result that, as they [the earth and the 'perpetually flowing stream'?] barely held together one with another, they moved indeed but more irrationally, being at one time reversed, at another oblique, and again upside down". In Plato's terminology, "revolution of the same" is from east to west, and "revolution of the other" is from west to east. In THE STATESMAN, Plato put this symbolic language into very simple terms, speaking of the reversal of the quarters in which the sun rises and sets.

[COMMENT: These are the sorts of choice nuggets of information that fire the mind. For those who are familiar with Dario Salas' "Archon Y", that Archon who made the "bad deal" with Moses at the time of the Exodus, and thus -- automatically! -- was a "player" in the events surrounding 1587 BCE, here we find Plato discussing the "Soul" of the Earth; and Dario Salas said that "Archon Y" attacked the "other Archon" who was already in charge of the "Soul" of the Earth, in the very heart of the planet, the "entity" who had outgrown the capabilities of a mere human brain and needed a "planetary brain" and thus reincarnated in our Earth. Archon Y fought this resident Archon to a tie, so to speak, the classic battle of Evil against Good. Now they supposedly jointly inhabit, control, incarnate within our Planet; hence, all the conflicts and wars and injustices that have bedeviled Sapiens for almost four millennia can be explained as a result of this on-going battle for conquest of Earth's Soul. Dr. Velikovsky, who was certainly not familiar with Dario Salas because Dr. Velikovsky died before Dario Salas wrote any books, can be excused for saying that this passage from Plato was "a not easily understandable text which represents the earth as possessing a soul". This idea is not exclusive to either Plato or Dario Salas, however. That Archon Y (who is undoubtedly YAHWEH, the Jewish/Christian God of "Evil", the Nibiruan Crown-Prince Enlil) battled the resident Archon (whose identity is not specified by Dario Salas) is reminiscent of the earlier passage above that "The Lord" of the Jews battled "Rahab", the "invader" or "usurper" at the moment in time when all of the other celestial events and catastrophes were occurring.]

[ALSO, what exactly would be the "right" and "left" sides of the sky? From the above we are told that west is the left side and east, the right. If one were standing and looking due-north at Polaris/Hyperborea, west would be to one's left and east would be to one's right; but if one's back were to Hyperborea (Heaven), as if one were looking down from "up there", then west would be to the right and east, to the left. And note this sentence above : In Plato's terminology, "revolution of the same" is from east to west, and "revolution of the other" is from west to east. If "same" refers to the regular Sun that we see today, and if OTHER refers to the tethered Planet Nibiru, The Night Sun, The Demon Sun, then it could be inferred that although our planet rotates from west to east (left to right), Nibiru might rotate from east to west (right to left)! The ancient peoples could have simply noted its direction one way or the other by looking at it in the northern sky and watching it turn on its axis, in a motion opposite to the one here at ground-level, regardless of which Polar Axis this planet might be rotating around during any particular "world age". RS]

I shall return later to some other Greek references to the sun setting in the east.

Caius Julius Solinus, a Latin author of the third century of the present era, wrote of the people living on the southern borders of Egypt:

"The inhabitants of this country say that they have it from their ancestors that the sun now sets where it formerly rose."

The traditions of peoples agree in synchronizing the changes in the movement of the sun with great catastrophes which terminated world ages. The changes in the movement of the sun in each successive age make the use by many peoples of the term "sun" for "age" understandable.

"The Chinese say that it is only since a new order of things has come about that the stars move from east to west."

"The signs of the Chinese zodiac have the strange peculiarity of proceeding in a retrograde direction, that is, against the course of the sun."

In the Syrian city Ugarit (Ras Shamra) was found a poem dedicated to the planet-goddess Anat, who "massacred the population of the Levant" and who "exchanged the two dawns and the position of the stars".

The hieroglyphics of the Mexicans describe four movements of the sun, NAHUI OLLIN TONATIUH. "The Indian authors translate OLLIN by 'motions of the sun'. When they find the number NAHUI added, they render NAHUI OLLIN by the words 'sun (tonatiuh) in his four motions'." These "four motions" refer "to four prehistoric suns" or "world ages", with shifting cardinal points.

[COMMENT: Note the similarity here between the early Mexicans and the ancient Egyptians, as mentioned above, who told Herodotus that "four times" the Sun had changed its motion in their recorded history since the founding of Egypt. RS]

The sun that moves toward the east, contrary to the present sun, is called by the Indians Teotl Lixco. The people of Mexico symbolized the changing direction of the sun's movement as a heavenly ball game, accompanied by upheavals and earthquakes on the earth.

The reversal of east and west, if combined with the reversal of north and south, would turn the constellations of the north into constellations of the south, and show them in reversed order, as in the chart of the southern sky on the ceiling of Senmut's tomb. The stars of the north would become stars of the south; this is what seems to be described by the Mexicans as the "driving away of the four hundred southern stars".

The Eskimos of Greenland told missionaries that in an ancient time the earth turned over and the people who lived then became antipodes.

Hebrew sources on the present problem are numerous. In Tractate Sanhedrin of the Talmud it is said: "Seven days before the deluge, the Holy One changed the primeval order and the sun rose in the west and set in the east."

[COMMENT: In the event of a Polar Axis Shift along the Polar Pivotal Belts, with each shift to "the six directions", the former frozen Poles would melt as the new Poles were freezing over. If all Polar Ice were to melt, all land up to an altitude of 250 feet (about 80 meters) would be flooded. Thus, after seven days in the heat of a non-polar environment, it is quite conceivable that by that point the former Poles would have melted significantly enough to cause enormous coastal deluges, or periodic "destructions by water". RS]

TEVEL is the Hebrew name for the world in which the sun rose in the west. ARABOT is the name of the sky where the rising point was in the west.

Hai Gaon, the rabbinical authority who flourished between 939 and 1038, in his RESPONSES refers to the cosmic changes in which the sun rose in the west and set in the east.

The Koran speaks of the Lord "of two easts and of two wests", a sentence which presented much difficulty to the exegetes. Averrhoes, the Arab philosopher of the twelfth century, wrote about the eastward and westward movements of the sun.

References to the reversal of the movement of the sun that have been gathered here do not refer to one and the same time: the Deluge, the end of the Middle Kingdom, the days of the Argive tyrants, were separated by many centuries. The tradition heard by Herodotus in Egypt speaks of four reversals. Later in this book and again in the book that will deal with earlier catastrophes, I shall return to this subject. At this point, I leave historical and literary evidence on the reversal of earth's cardinal points for the testimony of the natural sciences on the reversal of the magnetic poles of the earth.

[COMMENT: Unfortunately, Dr. Velikovsky died before he was able to publish this much anticipated material. Bits and pieces of it filtered out during the late 1970s in the KRONOS Journal. After his death in 1979, many of his unpublished notes eventually appeared in KRONOS, but they were never collected together in any organized format. When Dr. Velikovsky died, he was tormented by the fact that he had not as yet totally completed the AGES IN CHAOS series, which lacked the promised middle volume (of five) on ASSYRIAN CONQUEST. My "Mathematical Analysis Of Ancient History" subsequently published in THE VELIKOVSKIAN Journal was an attempt to "assist" Dr. Velikovsky by demonstrating that his stubborn adherence of a second cosmic cataclysm year of 747 was inaccurate, that it should have been moved backwards to 762. He received a xerox copy of my treatise a couple of months prior to his death. If he read it, and I never heard from him about it, then he must have realized that I, at least, had figured it out -- mathematically. At any rate, one of the ideas left unpublished by Dr. Velikovsky was his postulation of The Night Sun, anchored or tethered above our North Pole. And he was aware of the book HAMLET'S MILL by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend. The fact is that he was simply old, 85 when he died, and did not have the time to complete and publish all of his enormous research. I have tried to take up where he left off. RS]

THE REVERSED POLARITY OF THE EARTH

A thunderbolt, on striking a magnet, reverses the poles of the magnet. The terrestrial globe is a huge magnet. A short circuit between it and another celestial body could result in the north and south magnetic poles of the earth exchanging places.

It is possible to detect in the geological records of the earth the orientation of the terrestrial magnetic field in past ages.

"When lava cools and freezes following a volcanic outburst, it takes up a permanent magnetization dependent upon the orientation of the Earth's magnetic field at the time. This, because of small capacity for magnetization in the Earth's magnetic field after freezing, may remain practically constant. If this assumption be correct, the direction of the originally acquired permanent magnetization can be determined by tests in the laboratory, provided that every detail of the orientation of the mass tested is carefully noted and marked when it is removed."

[J.A. Fleming, "The Earth's Magnetism and Magnetic Surveys" in TERRESTRIAL MAGNETISM AND ELECTRICITY, ed. by J.A. Fleming (1939), p. 32.]

We would expect to find a full reversal of magnetic direction. Although repeated heating of lava and rocks can change the picture, there must have remained rocks with inverted polarity. Another author writes:

"Examination of magnetization of some igneous rocks reveals that they are polarized oppositely from the prevailing present direction of the local magnetic field and many of the older rocks are less strongly magnetized than more recent ones. On the assumption that the magnetization of the rocks occurred when the magma cooled and that the rocks have held their present positions since that time, this would indicate that the polarity of the Earth has been completely reversed within recent geological times."

[A. McNish, "On Causes of the Earth's Magnetism and Its Changes" in TERRESTRIAL MAGNETISM AND ELECTRICITY, ed. by Fleming, p. 326.]

Because the physical facts seemed entirely inconsistent with every cosmological theory, the author of the above passage was cautious not to draw further conclusions from them.

The reversed polarity of lava indicates that in recent geological times the magnetic poles of the globe were reversed; when they had a very different orientation, abundant flows of lava took place.

Additional problems, and of a large scope, are: whether the position of the magnetic poles has anything to do with the direction of rotation of the globe, and whether there is an interdependence in the direction of the magnetic poles of the sun and of the planets.

THE QUARTERS OF THE WORLD DISPLACED

The traditions gathered in the section before last refer to various epochs; actually, Herodotus and Mela say that according to Egyptian annals, the reversal of the west and east recurred: the sun rose in the west, then in the east, once more in the west, and again in the east.

Was the cosmic catastrophe that terminated a world age in the days of the fall of the Middle Kingdom and of the Exodus one of these occasions, and did the earth change the direction of its rotation at that time? If we cannot assert this much, we can at least maintain that the earth did not remain on the same orbit, nor did its poles stay in their places, nor was the direction of the axis the same as before.

The position of the globe and its course were not settled when the earth first came into contact with the onrushing comet; in Plato's terms, already partly quoted, the motion of the earth was changed by "blocking of the course" and went through "shaking of the revolutions" with "disruptures of every possible kind", so that the position of the earth became "at one time reversed, at another oblique, and again upside down", and it wandered "every way in all six directions".

The Talmud and other ancient rabbinical sources tell of great disturbances in the solar movement at the time of the Exodus and the Passage of the Sea and the Lawgiving. In old Midrashim it is repeatedly narrated that four times the sun was forced out of its course in the few weeks between the day of the Exodus and the day of the Lawgiving.

The prolonged darkness (and prolonged day in the Far East) and the earthshock (i.e., the ninth and the tenth plagues) and the world conflagration were the result of one of these disturbances in the motion of the earth. A few days later, if we follow the biblical narration, immediately before the hurricane changed its direction, "the pillar of cloud went from before their faces and stood behind them"; this means that the column of fire and smoke turned about and appeared from the opposite direction. Mountainous tides uncovered the bottom of the sea; a spark sprang between two celestial bodies; and "at the turning of the morning", the tides fell in a cataclysmic avalanche.

The Midrashim speak of a disturbance in the solar movement on the day of the Passage: the sun did not proceed on its course. On that day, according to the Psalms (70:8), "the earth feared and was still". It is possible that Amos (8:8-9) is reviving the memory of this event when he mentions the "flood of Egypt", at the time "the earth was cast out of the sea, and dry land was swallowed by the sea", and "the sun was brought down at noon", although, as I show later on, Amos might have referred to a cosmic catastrophe of a more recent date.

[COMMENT: This "more recent date", of course, encompasses the events that occurred between the years 762-687 BCE when there was a second series of cosmic catastrophes. This second period of time historically describes the departure sequence of the Hyperborea Planet Nibiru after 900 years during which it was tethered to our North Pole as The North Mountain, The Celestial Ship Of The North, The Cosmic Tree. If you would wish to read about this departure event, you are urged to get a copy of WORLDS IN COLLISION. None of this next section of Dr. Velikovsky's book will be transcribed at present, since I personally am more fascinated at the moment by Nibiru's impending return than its future departure 900 years following 2012. Once the "chaos" of 2012 passes into oblivion, we shall have ample time to contemplate Nibiru's next departure for "Deep Space", to either the Oort Cloud or the Sirius System. RS]

Also, the day of the Lawgiving, when the worlds collided again, was, according to numerous rabbinical sources, a day of unusual length: the motion of the sun was disturbed.

On this occasion, and generally in the days and months following the Passage, the gloom, the heavy and charged clouds, the lightning, and the hurricanes, aside from the devastation by earthquake and flood, made observation very difficult, if not impossible. "They walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course" (Psalms 82:5) is a metaphor used by the Psalmist.

The Papyrus Ipuwer, which says that "the earth turned over like a potter's wheel" and "the earth is upside down", was written by an eyewitness of the plagues and the Exodus. The change is described also in the words of another papyrus (Harris) which I have quoted once before: "The south becomes north, and the earth turns over."

Whether there was a complete reversal of the cardinal points as a result of the cosmic catastrophe of the days of the Exodus, or only a substantial shift, is a problem not solved here. The answer was not apparent even to contemporaries, at least for a number of decades. In the gloom that endured for a generation, observations were impossible, and very difficult when the light began to break through.

The KALEVALA relates that "dreaded shades" enveloped the earth, and "the sun occasionally steps from his accustomed path". Then Ukko-Jupiter struck fire from the sun to light a new sun and a new moon, and a new world age began.

In VÖLUSPA (Poetic Edda) of the Icelanders we read: "No knowledge she [the sun] had where her home should be, the moon knew not what was his. The stars knew not where their stations were."

Then the gods set order among the heavenly bodies.

The Aztecs related: "There had been no sun in existence for many years. ... [The chiefs] began to peer through the gloom in all directions for the expected light, and to make bets as to what part of heaven he [the sun] should first appear in. Some said 'Here', and some said 'There'; but when the sun rose, they were all proved wrong, for not one of them had fixed upon the east".

Similarly, the Mayan legend tells that "it was not known from where the new sun would appear". "They looked in all directions, but they were unable to say where the sun would rise. Some thought it would take place in the north and their glances were turned in that direction. Others thought it would be in the south. Actually, their guesses included all directions because the dawn shone all around. Some, however, fixed their attention on the orient, and maintained that the sun would come from there. It was their opinion that proved to be correct."

According to the COMPENDIUM of Wong-shi-Shing (1526-1590), it was in the "age after the chaos, when heaven and earth had just separated, that is, when the great mass of cloud just lifted from the earth", that the heaven showed its face.

In the Midrashim it is said that during the wandering in the desert the Israelites did not see the face of the sun because of the clouds. They were also unable to orient themselves on their march.

The expression repeatedly used in the Books of Numbers and Joshua, "the east, to the sunrising", is not tautology, but a definition, which, by the way, testifies to the ancient origin of the literary materials that served as sources for these books; it is an expression that has its counterpart in the Egyptian "the west which is at the sun-setting".

The cosmological allegory of the Greeks has Zeus, rushing on his way to engage Typhon in combat, steal Europa (Erev, the evening land) and carry her to the west. Arabia (also Erev) kept its name, "the evening land", though it lies to the east of the centers of civilization -- Egypt, Palestine, Greece. Eusebius, one of the Fathers of the Church, assigned the Zeus-Europa episode to the time of Moses and the Deucalion Flood, and Augustine wrote that Europa was carried by the king of Crete to his island in the west, "betwixt the departure of Israel out of Egypt and the death of Joshua".

The Greeks, like other peoples, spoke of the reversal of the quarters of the earth and not merely in allegories but in literal terms.

The reversal of the earth's rotation, referred to in the written and oral sources of many peoples, suggests the relation of one of these events to the cataclysm of the day of the Exodus. Like the quoted passage from VISUDDHI-MAGGA, the Buddhist text, and the cited tradition of the Cashinaua tribe in western Brazil, the versions of the tribes and peoples of all five continents include the same elements, familiar to us from the Book of Exodus: lightning and "the bursting of heaven", which caused the earth to be turned "upside down", or "heaven and earth to change places". On the Andaman Islands the natives are afraid that a natural catastrophe will cause the world to turn over. In Greenland also the Eskimos fear that the earth will turn over.

Curiously enough, the cause of such perturbation is revealed in beliefs like that of the people of Flanders in Belgium. Thus we read: "In Menin (Flanders) the peasants say, on seeing a comet: 'The sky is going to fall; the earth is turning over!'"

[COMMENT: Compare the old European "fable", transported by emigrant settlers to America, of Chicken Little who warned that "the sky is falling, the sky is falling!" RS]

CHANGES IN THE TIMES AND THE SEASONS

Many agents collaborated to change the climate. Insolation was impaired by heavy clouds of dust, and the radiation of heat from the earth was equally hindered. Heat was generated by the earth's contact with another celestial body; the earth was removed to an orbit farther from the sun; the polar regions were displaced; oceans and seas evaporated and the vapors precipitated as snow on new polar regions and in the higher latitudes in a long Fimbul-winter and formed new ice sheets; the axis on which the earth rotated pointed in a different direction, and the order of the seasons was disturbed.

Spring follows winter and fall follows summer because the earth rotates on an axis inclined toward the plane of its revolution around the sun. Should this axis become perpendicular to that plane, there would be no seasons on the earth. Should it change its direction, the seasons would change their intensity and their order.

The Egyptian papyrus known as Papyrus Anastasi IV contains a complaint about gloom and the absence of solar light; it says also:

"The winter is come as (instead of) summer, the months are reversed the the hours are disordered."

"The breath of heaven is out of harmony. ... The four seasons do not observe their proper times," we read in the TEXTS OF TAOISM.

In the historical memoirs of Se-Ma Ta'ien, as in the annals of the Shu King which we have already quoted, it is said that Emperor Yahou sent astronomers to the Valley of Obscurity and to the Sombre Residence to observe the new movements of the sun and of the moon and the syzygies or the orbital points of the conjunctions, also "to investigate and to inform the people of the order of the seasons". It is also said that Yahou introduced a calendar reform: he brought the seasons into accord with the observations; he did the same with the months; and he "corrected the days".

Plutarch gives the following description of a derangement of seasons: "The thickened air concealed the heaven from view, and the stars were confused with a disorderly huddle of fire and moisture and violent fluxions of winds. The sun was not fixed to an unwandering and certain course, so as to distinguish orient and occident, nor did he bring back the seasons in order."

In another work of his, Plutarch ascribes these changes to Typhon, "the destructive, diseased and disorderly", who caused "abnormal seasons and temperatures".

It is characteristic that in the written traditions of the peoples of antiquity the disorder of the seasons is directly connected with the derangement in the motion of the heavenly bodies.

The oral traditions of primitive peoples in various parts of the world also retain memories of this change in the movement of the heavenly bodies, the seasons, the flow of time, during a period when darkness enveloped the world. As an example I quote the tradition of the Oraibi in Arizona. They say that the firmament hung low and the world was dark, and no sun, no moon, nor stars were seen. "The people murmured because of the darkness and the cold." Then the planet god Machito "appointed times, and seasons, and ways for the heavenly bodies".

[COMMENT: The "planet god" Machito and the following Uira-cocha both obviously refer to the newly re-tethered Hyperborea Planet Nibiru. RS]

Among the Incas the "guiding power in regulating the seasons and the courses of the heavenly bodies" was Uira-cocha. "The sun, the moon, the day, the night, spring, winter, are not ordained in vain by thee, O Uira-cocha."

The American sources, which speak of a world colored red, of a rain of fire, of world conflagration, of new rising mountains, of frightening portents in the sky, of a twenty-five-year gloom, imply also that "the order of the seasons was altered at that epoch". "The astronomers and geologists whose concern is all this ... should judge of the causes which could effect the derangement of the day and could cover the earth with tenebrosity," wrote a clergyman who spent many years in Mexico and in the libraries of the Old World which store ancient manuscripts of the Mayas and works of early Indian and Spanish authors about them. It did not occur to him that the biblical narrative of the time of the Exodus contains the same elements.

With the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, when the Israelites left that country, the old order of seasons came to an end and a new world age began. The Fourth Book of Ezra, which borrows from some earlier sources, refers to the "end of the seasons" in these words: "I sent him [Moses] and led my people out of Egypt, and brought them to Mount Sinai, and held him by me for many days. I told him many wondrous things, showed him the secrets of the times, declared to him the end of the seasons."

Because of various simultaneous changes in the movement of the earth and the moon, and because observation of the sky was hindered when it was hidden in smoke and clouds, the calendar could not be correctly computed; the changed lengths of the year, the month, and the day required prolonged, unobstructed observation. The words of the Midrashim, that Moses was unable to understand the new calendar, refer to this situation; "the secrets of the calendar" (sod ha-avour), or more precisely, "the secret of the transition" from one time-reckoning to another, was revealed to Moses, but he had difficulty in comprehending it. Moreover, it is said in rabbinical sources that in the time of Moses the course of the heavenly bodies became confounded.

The month of the Exodus, which occurred in the spring, became the first month of the year: "This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you." Thus, the strange situation was created in the Jewish calendar that the New Year is observed in the seventh month of the year: the beginning of the calendar year was moved to a point about half a year away from the New Year in the autumn.

[COMMENT: The ancient Abyssinian tradition, still practiced today and originally based upon the old Jewish method of time-keeping, still retains this New Year in the early autumn of the year. RS]

With the fall of the Middle Kingdom and the Exodus, one of the great world ages came to its end. The four quarters of the world were displaced, and neither the orbit nor the poles nor, probably, the direction of rotation remained the same. The calendar had to be adjusted anew. The astronomical values of the year and the day could not be the same before and after an upheaval in which, as the quoted Papyrus Anastasi IV says, the months were reversed and "the hours disordered".

The length of the year during the Middle Kingdom is not known from any contemporaneous document. Because in the Pyramid texts dating from the Old Kingdom there is mention of "five days", it was erroneously concluded that in that period a year of 365 days was already known. But no inscription of the Old or Middle Kingdom has been found in which mention is made of a year of 365 days or even 360 days. Neither is any reference to a year of 365 days or to "five days" found in the very numerous inscriptions of the New Kingdom prior to the dynasties of the seventh century. Thus, the inference that "the five days" of the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom signify the five days over 360 is not well founded.

There exists a direct statement found as a gloss on a manuscript of TIMAEUS that a calendar of a solar year of three hundred and sixty days was introduced by the Hyksos after the fall of the Middle Kingdom; the calendar of the Middle Kingdom apparently had fewer days.

The fact I hope to be able to establish is that from the fifteenth century to the eighth century before the present era the astronomical year was equal to 360 days; neither before the fifteenth century, nor after the eighth century was the year of this length. In a later chapter of this work extensive material will be presented to demonstrate this point.

The number of days in a year during the Middle Kingdom was less than 360; the earth then revolved on an orbit somewhat closer to the present orbit of Venus. An investigation into the length of the astronomical year during the periods of the Old and Middle Kingdoms is reserved for that part of this work which will deal with the cosmic catastrophes that occurred before the beginning of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt.

[COMMENT: As I mentioned earlier, Dr. Velikovsky died before being able to complete these portions of his theory that related to earlier cosmic catastrophes. RS]

Here I give space to an old Midrashic source which, taking issue with a contradiction in the scriptural texts, referring to the length of time the Israelites sojourned in Egypt, maintains that "God hastened the course of the planets during Israel's stay in Egypt", so that the sun completed 400 revolutions during the space of 210 regular years. These figures must not be taken as correct, since the intention was to reconcile two biblical texts, but the reference to the different motion of the planets in the period of the Israelites' stay in Egypt during the Middle Kingdom is worth mentioning.

In Midrash Rabba, it is said on the authority of Rabbi Simon that a new world order came into being with the end of the sixth world age at the revelation on Mount Sinai. "There was a weakening (metash) of the creation. Hitherto world time was counted, but henceforth we count it by a different reckoning." Midrash Rabba refers also to "the greater length of time taken by some planets".

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