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Open letter to science editors
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VELIKOVSKIAN
Vol. I, No. 1
Indeterminacy: Temporary,
Permanent, or Indefinite?
Roger W. Wescott
April 26, 1987
An Invited Response to the Exchange of Letters between
David Talbott and Milton
B. Zysman January 12, February 18 and April 4, 1987
In his letter of January
12, David Talbott urges that catastrophists "reach a stronger consensus on
the key symbols and themes" of myth. Whether dealing with mythic tradition
or with other sources of evidence, most members of the Canadian Society of
Interdisciplinary Studies (CSIS) and most KRONOS readers, I think,
assume that protohistoric disruptions of global scale were exogenous
catastrophes--that is, disasters of extraterrestrial origin. While I share
this belief, I am impressed by the fact that the most complete compendium of
catastrophist mythology that I have yet seen, Brendan Stannard's Origins of
Israel,[1]
takes an endogenist position, attributing ancient man's collective distress
to recurrent seismicity of wholly terrestrial origin.
Such considerations lead
me to the conclusion that stronger consensus on the interpretation of
mythic imagery would constitute premature intellectual cloture and shackle,
rather than liberate, our thinking.
Talbott's Saturnian
iconography and mythography seem to rest on two assumptions, neither of
which I share unreservedly. The first of these is that most, if not all, of
mankind's perennial imagery reflects pre-catastrophic Saturn and its
surroundings. The second is that, apart from Saturn's primal, or polar
configuration, mythic imagery becomes, in his words, a "madhouse of absurd
and contradictory themes."
Ever since Greek
philosophers first initiated critical examination of Homeric and Hesiodic
myth, some mythologists have characterized myths in general as mad. And,
during the past century of mythological theorizing, naturists have been
contradicted by psychoanalysts who in turn have been contradicted by structuralists, until the entire debate has come to be viewed by many
external observers as a scholarly Theater of the Absurd.
As I see it,
recurrence rather than persistence is the leitmotif of mythic imagery,
because trauma rather than tranquility is the generator of myth. In
these terms, the primal configuration will recur only to the extent that
a later and more transient configuration duplicates or resembles it: The
circle will represent the primal celestial body as reincarnated by the
Sun, our Moon, or any Earth-approaching planet; the cosmic serpent
will represent the world-axis in its wobbly or disintegrative phase
when that image is reawakened by proto-Venus or some other cometary
body; and so on.
In other words, all
mythic images, as I interpret them, are superimposed images. Because
of this superimposition, they are necessarily blurred images. This fact
(quite apart from his penchant for mystification rather than
clarification) may help explain the extraordinary vagueness of Jung's
archetypes.
Since we now know
that Jovian planets other than Saturn have rings, I find it quite easy
to believe that Earth itself once had a canopy (as Isaac Vail called it)
or a mirror-dome (as Milton B. Zysman now calls it). Moreover, I assume
that this reflective band changed shape with each rearrangement of
Earth's planetary surroundings, and may, at various times, have
constituted a disc, a torus, a girdle, or a shell, each of which
produced a different image of the sky.
Returning to
Talbott's reconstruction, my greatest difficulty lies in accepting his
identification of his super-planet (or mini-star) as Saturn. As Zysman,
Alfred De Grazia, and Earl Milton ask, What about Uranus? Or, for that
matter, what about Neptune? I am not caviling about Saturn as such, but
rather raising the vexed paleo-astronomical problem of planetary
identity. This identity problem, of course, has a semantic aspect,
since there is a lexical paradox in the fact that, while identity
means sameness, we more often use it to denote distinctiveness or
difference. But it also has a substantive aspect, since any general
disturbance in the solar system might be expected to produce drastic
changes in the apparent size, color, luminosity, velocity, or orbit of
any or every planet. Under such circumstances, it would become a
problem for even the most careful and detached observers to decide which
unfamiliar-looking objects in the sky should be equated with which (if
any) of the familiar objects they remembered from before the
disturbance. I believe we may safely assume that, after such a
disturbance, even the most experienced star-gazers would feel distraught
and disoriented and could make identifications more on an emotive than
on a calculative basis.
Non-linguists may
entertain the understandable hope that information about ancient
planetary nomenclature and their etymologies will eliminate most of the
verbal ambiguities that now plague our efforts to identify ancient
celestial objects. Unfortunately, however, this hope is, at best, only
partially justified. There were, for example, three verbal bases
meaning shine in the Proto-Indo-European language (which,
according to Allan Bomhard, were shared with Afro-Asiatic languages,
including Egyptian and Semitic).[2]
These were bha-, dei-eu-, and leuk-. From the first of these
came the Greek Phaeton and Phanes (the Orphic name of the primal body
which Talbott would probably identify with Saturn). From the second
came the English Tue- (an Anglo-Saxon war-god), the Latin Diana, and the
Greek Zeus. And from the third came the Latin Luna and Lucetius (a
by-name of Jupiter), the Gaulish Leucetios (a by-name of Mars), the Old
Persian raucah-, heaven and, in Sanskrit, loka-, or world.
Each of these bases produced names with disparate references: In the
last case, as many as five distinct entities may have been designated.
Apart from these
nomenclatural ambiguities, there are, needless to say, other cases of divine
names that seem to lack planetary or celestial reference. Among them are
such familiar Olympian names as Hera and Apollo. If they designate bodies
that were either shattered (yielding planetesimals) or ejected from the
solar system during a period of interplanetary disturbance, there is little
chance of our ever achieving an identification of any sort.
My conclusion is that
both Talbott and Zysman have done us a service by collecting as much
evidence as possible for the polar configuration and the mirrordome,
respectively. I hope that they will continue collecting it and presenting
it as graphically and engagingly as ever, but think that most catastrophists
would be ill-advised to leap onto either pragmatic bandwagon at this stage
in the development of cosmogonic thought.
[1].
Brendan Stannard, The Origins of Israel and Mankind: A Unified
Cosmogonic Theory, 882 pages (Lancaster, England: Carib
Publishing Co., 1983).
[2].
Allan R. Bomhard, Toward Proto-Nostratic: A New Approach to the
Comparison of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Afroasiatic, 356
pages (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1984).
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