A Technical Note

I have been asked by the compliers of the Velikovsky archive to briefly describe the present condition of Velikovsky’s unpublished manuscript entitled In the Beginning. As Velikovsky explains, parts of this volume were already complete in the 1940s and originally formed part of Worlds in Collision. The present manuscript also incorporates material written for a volume entitled The Test of Time, which dealt with the new information on the planets coming from the space probes, and contained frequent allusions to the earlier catastrophes; this work will probably never see publication. Other material included in this manuscript comes from Velikovsky’s lectures and other scattered writings. During the time that I worked for Velikovsky (1976-1978) one of my tasks was to complete the cataloguing of his library notes, mostly from the 1940s. The headings of the catalogue generally corresponded to the section headings in Worlds in Collision and In the Beginning. The completion of In the Beginning was a cooperative effort between Velikovsky and myself. After Velikovsky’s passing, when I returned to Princeton to work on his archive, I systematically moved the parts contributed by me into the notes apparatus and this is how this material appears in the unpublished manuscript.

Jan Sammer

In this edition Jan Sammer’s annotations are distinguished from Velikovsky’s text by being placed in square brackets and displayed in red letters. For the reader’s interest we reproduce here the title page of Velikovsky’s manuscript.