CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Polite language exclaims, "Pandemonium ensued..." In ruder language, "All hell broke loose..." In either case all (pan-) demons (daemon-) are in action (ium). "Pan" was a god as well as the word for "all." He was the son of Hermes (Mercury) according to one story. He was a noisy disturber of the peace, a collector of disorderly crowds, an orgiastic god of revelers. He was by no means a symbol of sounds alone but of general tumult. Great noises are all-absorbing and entrancing, as the rock-music discotheques aim to prove. Pandemonium is not only the sounds and their effects in themselves but also the meanings that their auditors place upon them. In the end, the catastrophic pandemonium evolves into music.
A pandemonium is how high-energy sounds to people as it bursts upon the human world. A spectre is how high-energy is seen by people as it occurs. Smell and taste are affected also in the processes studied by the earth sciences. A natural catastrophe, especially, is a holistic event: every human sense, and every part of the habitat, is affected.
Pandemonium is the capital of Hell in Milton's Paradise Lost. Elsewhere, Plato offhandedly mentions a catastrophe that he does not name and says that the survivors came down from the mountains with their ears ringing. Hesiod, in his Theogony, speaks of Mother Earth (Gaea) groaning under the pressures of Ouranos in primordial times. Here are reasons for treating of sounds in earth sciences: their natural origins and their effects on the biosphere. Observers of high energy forces without exception dwell upon their sounds. When we learn more of them, we shall know more about the earth sciences. There will be a place for a few acoustical geologists among volcanologists, seismologists, meteorologists, and paleontologists. When a bad local flood occurs, as it did at Wilkes-Barre (Pa.) in the spring of 1973, the physical processes are mediated by television through their sights and sounds; there occur physical destruction, economic dislocation and distress -all of them mediated through the eyes and ears. Admissions to nearby mental hospitals went up sharply; also the use of hard drugs, and the suicide rate.
In the great Alaska earthquake of 1964, the destruction, death, terror, sounds and sights all together made their lasting impact on people. Psychiatric symptoms such as depression, withdrawal, guilt feelings, and irrational blaming of people were common reactions. The churches came alive with repenters and worshippers.
Modern cases permit us to empathize with the ancients. Exaggerate them a thousandfold and one gains an impression of the ancient experience. We read in the log of a ship's captain at sea near the exploding Krakatoa: "So violent are the explosions that the eardrums of over half my crew have been shattered... I am convinced that the Day of Judgement has come." [1] The climactic blast was heard 3000 miles away. A crazed survivor ashore insisted that "the Arch Fiend stood everywhere, implacable, unpitying, offering help to none, listening to no imploration."
We are told that when the volcano at Cosequina, Nicaragua, erupted on January 30, 1835, the explosion was heard in Jamaica, 850 miles away. The blast was so terrible that at one village "300 of those who lived in a state of concubinage were married at once."
Tornados have their own repertoire.
A tornado, like thunder, is heard many miles away. As it approaches, there is a peculiar whistling sound that rapidly changes to an intense roar, reaching a deafening crescendo as it strikes. The screeching of the whirling winds is then so loud that the noises caused by the fall of wrecked buildings, the crashing of trees, and the destruction of other objects is seldom heard. The bellowing of a million mad bulls; the roar of ten thousand freight trains; like that of a million cannons; the buzzing of a million bees (when the tornado is high in the air), and, more recently, the roar of jet airplanes -these are some of the phrases used by those who have experienced a tornado [2] .
And so to meteors: Frank Lane writes of the meteoric shower of February 9, 1913 that was first seen at Saskatchewan, Canada, and last seen off the Brazilian coast, 6000 miles away. "As they passed southeast over Ontario they grew more brilliant and great explosions were heard. Detonations and earth tremors were caused along the path of the procession to distances of 20 to 70 miles on either side." In 1958, L. LaPaz wrote, "To listen to the sound effects produced by a large meteorite fall is a unique and awe-inspiring experience. Neither a hedge-hopping jet nor a keyholing rocket gives rise to the sky-filling reverberations set up by a falling meteorite." [3] Neither a nuclear blast, with its single report, one might add.
The rumbling, grinding, screaming sounds of earthquakes are well-known. Velikovsky quotes the plaint of the Egyptian scribe of Papyrus Ipuwer at the time of Exodus:
Years of noise... There is no end to noise... Oh, that the Earth would cease from noise, and tumult (uproar) be no more.
The ancient Greek poet Euripides speaks in Hippolytis of tidal waves near Corinth:
An angry sound, slow swelling Like god-made thunder underground A wave unearthly crested in the sky; Till Sciron's Cape first vanished from my eye, Then sank the Isthmus hidden, then the rock of Epidaurus. Then it broke, one shock and roar of gasping sea and spray flung far, and shoreward swept.
In assessing what such sounds do to humans, it is well to recall that the age of firecrackers, firearms, cannon, dynamite, and nuclear blasts is young. The first detonation of dynamite occurred in 1881 [4] . Primeval sounds were entirely of nature, apart from the pathetic imitations of sounds made by humans. If the paradigm of this book is correct about Pangea, the pre-quantavolutionary, pre-human period of late times, the world was peaceful and orderly, with overcast skies and little celestial or terrestrial turbulence. Man's ears were not made for explosions any more than his eyes were made to stare at the sun. A tiger's roar, an elephant's trumpeting, squeaks, whines, growls, yells, the splashing of waters, the snapping of twigs, the slumping of old trees -this in our theory was the pre-holocene acoustical environment.
However, and it is argued so in Chaos and Creation and Homo Schizo I, awful noise descended upon the first humans, as they were being born. Great noise was from the first heard as a manifestation of the gods, a theophany. When meteoroids broke through the skies, when cataclysms began, then came a pandemonium that terrified humankind, that drove people mad, that deafened them, and that catastrophized human nature and culture, together with their ecology.
Stephens reports that accidents, absenteeism and other factors indicating degradation of human performance can be correlated with infrasonic waves arriving from storms 2000 miles away [5] . Infrasonic waves cause nausea, disequilibrium, disorientation, blurring of vision and lassitude. All of these have been described as accompanying earthquakes, ball lightning and volcanism [6] .
Some thunderous and strange sounds accompanying the passage of meteorites are attributable to the friction and collapsing vacuum of passage, but others have been theorized as products of the conversion of kinetic energy into electromagnetic radiation. Romig and Lamar have studied this problem. The high velocity of such waves would explain why some meteoric sounds are heard during and even before the visual sighting of meteors [7] . C. S. L. Keay has recently summarized from New South Wales many reliable reports of a large fireball in the atmosphere, tens of kilometers high, whose sounds reached the ears instantly with hisses, hums, swishes and crackling. [8]
Frederic Jueneman has speculated, on the basis of apparent acoustically provoked mutations in a London bomb crater from World War II, that catastrophic acoustics may have been an active mutator in ancient times [9] . The sensitivities of plants and animals to sounds has been widely surveyed by P. Tompkins and C. Bird [10] .
The splendors of auroral displays vary with the behavior of the Sun and the Earth's magnetosphere, among other factors. They stretch from 90 to 400 kilometers high, and on occasion seem to dip down to the very plane of the viewers. They, like all other fascinating phenomena of nature have been held responsible for the allegedly mad legendary accounts of catastrophes. Thus the ancient Teutons might recite their sagas of a world on fire, but uniformitarians, unimpressed, would see in these only the auroras that the northern peoples were lucky enough to view. This is a topic for another time and another author: spectres of colors, rays, and lurid skies were plentiful in cosmic disasters, exceeding the auroras. Every disaster has its color scheme and geometric figures.
It has its sounds as well, and the aurora can join other natural forces even today in suggesting the pandemonium of catastrophe. An account by Hans Jelstrup, a Norwegian astronomer, in 1927, exemplifies the auroral visual and auditory experience [11] :
When, with my assistant, at 19h 15m Greenwich Civil Time, I went out of the observatory to observe the aurora, the latter seemed to be at its maximum: yellow-green and fan-shaped, it undulated above, from zenith downwards - and at the same time both of us noticed a very curious faint whistling sound distinctly undulatory, which seemed to follow exactly the vibrations of the aurora.
They later proceeded to record the impulses on an instrument and found "the vertical component was greater than 100 microvolt / meter."
Many years earlier, another Norwegian had polled persons from "all parts of the country" about the sounds of the aurora and received "92 affirmations against 21 negations." [12] Apparently many people provided a surprisingly large set of descriptions. They used words and phrases like: sizzling, creaking, soft whizzing, the sound of tearing silk, "hoy, hoy, hoy," a rustling stream, crackling, rolling din in the air, clashing, like a flapping flag, flapping of sails, hissing of fire, the sound of a flight of birds, the buzzing of a bee, roaring of wind, soft breeze, roaring of the sea, a distant waterfall.
What can be made of this, aside from its entertaining aspect, is that the sounds of nature are legion; that these join the centurions of electrical sounds; and that a record is to be had of all these sounds in these mild times of the Earth that can be used to identify ancient and legendary metaphors of sound. So that when dragons hiss and flaming rays dart from their nostrils, one does not simply say here is an especially exciting auroral display, but assigns to the dragon hypothetically the electrical qualities and sounds of the aurora or of bolides whose "sounds are described as hissing, swishing, whirring, buzzing and crackling" when they have the "brightness of the full moon" and reach the observer at the same time as the visual image does [13] . So, too when in Ezekiel (XLIII, 2) it is said that the voice of the Lord "was like the sound of many waters." Ancient records and legends are rich mines of electrical allusions from which not only the state of electrical phenomena can be assessed but also the electrical technology of early cultures can be surmised; this field, ignored hitherto, is being researched by J. Ziegler.
The Books of Moses carry testimony of great celestial noise that cannot be rationalized as ordinary thunder. And Noah, it is said in Jewish legend, was spoken to by a voice from the sky amidst a great commotion. This followed the failing of things upon the earth and was followed by the Deluge. The story of Job, later on, reads: "Hear ye attentively the terror of his voice, and the sound that cometh out of his mouth." Again: after the ends of the earth are lit up, "a noise shall roar, he shall thunder with the voice of his majesty, and shall not be found out when his voice shall be heard." A circum-global sound.
As the Jews passed from Egypt in the tumult of Exodus, they paused at Sinai. "I am Yahweh," heard the people during the night at the Mountain of the Lawgiving. "And all the people saw the roars, and the torches, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they trembled and stood far off." Ten blasts of the trumpet sounded out the Decalogue, legend tells us also.
Great sounds were reported from around the world: the Babylonian Gilgamish epic: "Loud did the firmament roar, and earth with echo resounded." Hesiod's Theogony: the huge Earth groaned when Zeus lashed Typhon with his bolts -"the earth resounded terribly, and the wide heaven above." Velikovsky pursues the name Yahweh elsewhere: he finds Jo, Jove (Jupiter); Yahou, Yao (Chinese emperor of the age); Ju Ju huwe, (an Indonesian invocation to heavenly bodies): Yahou, Yo (in the Hebrew Bible); Yao, Yaotl (ancient Mexico); Yahu (ejaculation of the Puget Sound Indians and other Amer-lndians when they performed the ritual of raising up the fallen sky off the earth) [14] .
It is perhaps of some significance that Cohane has found Haue, a Middle-English god-name, in the names of gods, sacred places, rivers, salutations, and objects all over the world into the hundreds of instances. "In the landscape of the Old Testament part of the world is still overflowing with Hawa place-names." [15] All sound alike despite spellings such as oa.., ua.., awa.., huwa.., oua.., wa.., and so on. Provisionally, we may entertain the idea that the sound of great natural events were incorporated in the basic vocabulary of new-born humanity. If so, the popularity of the "awah" sound is at least as ancient as the time of Moses (circa 1500 B. C.), and probably several thousands of years older, and would also then be carried on down to modern times. 'Yow," "wow," and "ow" are everyday American slang exclamations. The divine voices were also heard later on. A Babylonian hymn to Nergal (Mars) is of the first millennium B. C. and reads:
His word makes human beings sick,
It enfeebles them
His word - when he makes his way above -
Makes the country sick.
[16]
The motions, noise, and gases of a heavenly body of large dimensions seem to be indicated here. The god Mars is referred to in Babylonia as the God of Noise. There is an insistent connection of noise with the planet Mars.
The connections between heavenly sounds, sacred events, and the beginnings of music appear to be secure. From Chernikov, in the Ukraine, Soviet scholars reported finding mammoth bones converted into skull drums, shoulder blade kettle drums, and lower-jaw xylophones, at an estimated date of 20,000 years. If the instruments, all of the drum family, are correctly identified, it would mean that the settlement was fully human, with a religion. For nowhere is there any indication of musical instruments or musical sounds that are not connected with the heavenly host.
When the Wonguri tribe of Australia conducts today its holy dream time ceremonies, the assemblage beat sticks together; the dancers keep rhythm; and the stories of earliest times are recounted, of the time the Moon left their land forever and the morning star accompanied her. Ancient Greek myth tells of the infant Zeus; he was being hidden from his father Kronos who would swallow him; his nurses, the Curetes, drowned his cries with drums, cymbals, and dancers.
Drumming and whistling may be the oldest emulated sounds. The bull-roarer is an ancient and world-wide instrument, a primitive noise-maker that whips the air into a sound like a falling body. It thunders and whistles. Perhaps whistling also developed with a pipe or fife. The horn, whence the trumpet, might follow; it is a piercing and blasting instrument. The arched string instrument -harp, lyre -must have joined the sacred group quickly. All together they reproduce the music of the spheres and of the gods.
In earliest China the drums were used to communicate with heaven. The drum comes from K'uei, a green oxlike creature who came out of the sea shining like the sun and moon and making a noise like thunder. He was captured by Huang-ti who made him into a drumskin. But the same K'uei is also the master of music who alone can bring harmony between the six pipes and the seven modes. Without this harmony heaven and earth would lack their essential music. K'uei was also master of the forge, of dance, and of regulating floods [17] .
The sickle with which Kronos (Saturn) castrated Ouranos (Uranus) was also the harpe (lyre) of Demeter who had taught the Titans to reap. The strings of the lyre were ultimately five or seven, corresponding to the number of spheres counted as planets. Vail thought that the arch of the harp and sickle came from the opening of the boreal hole of the north when the regime of canopy skies began first to break down; the arch was the sickle; it was also the arch of the lyre, and the strings to be plucked were the beams of light playing down upon the earth.
Here, as in many other cases, an issue is whether the sacred image came before the invention or the invention was made and compared with a later celestial image. As usual I incline towards the position that the sacred example preceded the profane.
The correspondence between the number of planets and the number of strings on the lyre is an instance in point. It is only one of many. The number of observed planets obviously determines the number of strings on the instrument, not vice versa. An old Chinese text says that "the calendar and the pitch pipes have such a close fit, that you could not slip a hair between them." [18] This seems an odd expression until one realizes that the sacred calendar is replete with a synchronous musical calendar -from Easter music to Christmas music, for example. The pipes are pitched to heavenly sounds and numbers; the calendar is an arrangement of heavenly events.
The Pythagorean philosophy of ancient Greek culture generated the theory of music and the theory of numbers out of the behavior of the heavens. The "harmony of the spheres" of which the ancients spoke was probably first the sounds of heaven of the "better" sort, to which humans might adjust, and which, to them, presaged a tranquil stability, and then later, inferentially, the visual reliable order of the heavenly bodies as noted and welcomed by philosophical astronomers.
Robert Temple has been able to locate a fundamental connection between geodesy in Egypt and Greece. The Greeks and Assyro-Babylonians had the heptatonic or seven-toned diatonic scale of today. The Egyptians possessed a musical octave of seven degrees (that is, an eight-tone scale, such as the West has today). The same seven degrees was the geodetic principle followed in the topographical surveying of Egypt. For the Egyptians, 1 ° North was at Behdet and 8 ° was at the southernmost limits, by the Great Cataract of the Nile. Further, Temple, with suggestions by L. Stecchini, established an octave of centers for oracles: running up the lines of latitude and musical scale at equal intervals, thus: Barce, Triton, Paphos, Omphalos (Crete), Kythera (or Thera perhaps), Delos, Delphi and Dodona [19] .
Robert Graves has reported an octaval version of the name of Yahweh, Jehuovao. The sacred name can then be pronounced and chanted as a set of vowels running the gamut of a musical scale. We are reminded of the connections between Egyptian and Hebrew culture, when Demetrius wrote: "In Egypt the priests sing hymns to gods by uttering the seven vowels in succession, the sound of which produces as strong a musical impression on their hearers as if flute or lyre were used." The seven vowels were uttered in succession as the divine unspeakable name [20] .
Musical sound, and also noise, can be broken down into pitch, rhythm, timbre and volume. The first instruments specialized in rhythms, for instance, and had variations of pitch, timbre and volume. The pipe or flute specialized in pitching different tones and a whistling timbre. Using such elements in combinations, music could be built up. But it would not have been possible without the basic psychological changes that were taking place in people. Control of themselves and the gods was the paramount motivation behind the people who originated music and all other aspects of culture.
The humans had a compulsion to repeat their first experiences, which were naturally terrible; this is explained fully in my work, Homo Schizo I. The repetition of rhythms is the repetition of the sounds of the gods at work upon the world. The orgiastic side of music - the furious beatings, poundings, amplitudes, blasts, whirling dances and frenzied lyrics -is an imitation of the behavior of the gods in the days of creation. The orgiasm is the basis of the plot of song and chant; it gives the melody line, the beginning, middle and ending.
Repetition and orgiasm shape the four elements of music, and lend form both to the instrument and to the unique composition prescribed for it. The very design of an instrument is intended to supply a limited span of capabilities to the musical elements. Not only does the music itself follow patterns under strict general rules, but the instrument is a mechanical contrivance to see that the rules are obeyed.
To all of this is added from the start the sublimation that the music affords. Tests of endurance, involving the basic, and destructive, elements of earth, air, water, and especially fire, sometimes are incorporated into the dance and music. Battles of the gods, too, may be emulated. The gods are being controlled at the same time as they are being celebrated and honored; the audience is being controlled as it celebrates and honors the gods.
"Heavenly sounds" are a contradiction; they are actually the suppressed and sublimated sounds from heaven that destroyed the world. In The Holy Dreamtime of the Australian Womburi is a Holy Dreamtime of all other peoples -for all peoples have them. Sacred myth, song, dance, and music provide an escape from horror by saying and doing all that was said and done in those days in a way that remembers in order to forget.
Contemporary music that is avant-garde has the subconscious ambition, certainly doomed to fail, of confronting the terrible days of catastrophe directly. It brushes aside the sublimation, and the compulsive repetitiveness of music. It destroys expectation, and unleashes the gods. It destroys form by atonalism and arhythmism. It randomizes the four elements. Whatever happens in a sound-producing setting - "a happening" - is "music." The computer is used to reduce dependency upon skills, pitch, volume, rhythms, and timbre. It creates the mixture that is the "true reality". All this is often done without full realization. It is nevertheless a largely honest attempt to return to the primeval chaos in which humanity was born.
I have known geologists to taste stones and drippings, to smell in crevices, to feel the texture of rocks, to tap a fracture and listen, and of course to hold up a specimen to view by every angle of light. Hence it is not a radical departure from the earth sciences if we carry our inquiry into broader realms of sound and light. Our intent is not to create a marriage of sciences and humanities: that is good in its own right and if it is a by-product of this interest, so much the better. Our motive is to understand and possibly to reconstruct natural history. Whereupon it happens that, once the idea of the constancy of natural events through long eras of time is put aside, and another model of inquiry is advanced, we must take advantage of the treasury afforded by human history. The dumb rocks can tell their stories in part through human lips. All the motions that are forbidden the dead past are resumed through the sights visited upon early human eyes. The sounds and sights of events that witnesses and their descendents describe are clues about an Earth that is less static and more dynamic than the earth sciences have heretofore portrayed.
Notes (Chapter Twenty-eight: Pandemonium)
2. Frank Lane, The Elements Rage, loc. cit., 1958,
4. IV Ency. Britannica (1974), 955.
5. R. W. B. Stephens, 7 Ultrasonic (Jan. 1969), 30-5.
6. See Corliss, op. cit., CrSD-045, GI-232 from Monthly Weather R (Feb. 1895), 57.
7. 28 Sky and Telescope (Oct. 1964), 215.
8. C. S. L. Keay, "The 1978 New South Wales Fireball," 285 Nature (1980), 464-6.
10. The Secret Life of Plants (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).
11. Reported in Carl Störner, The Polar Aurora (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 137.
12. S. Tromholt, 32 Nature (24 Sept. 1885). 499-500.
14. Examples here are from Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision.
15. J. P. Cohane, The Key (NY: Crown, 1969).
16. Velikovsky., Worlds in Collision, 263.