CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE


SPECTRES

To recount the visual experiences of ancient humans in regard to natural phenomena would be a work of thousands of pages of agonies, joys, and revelations. However, the reader is probably aware of their nature through voluntary and inescapable exposure to fairy tales and horror movies. The earth sciences will profit more from a discussion of some relationships between natural events and the spectres that accompany them. I shall avoid speaking of the eyes when used functionally, as, for example, to assess damage or to organize a new life. Rather I shall concentrate upon the visual effect in itself, and what it conveys about natural events.

Uniformitarians usually abandon their position on change when it comes to what ancient voices convey about natural events. That is, in order to hold on to their belief in a natural world that changes by gradual evolution rather than by quantavolution, they say that humans have changed their "exaggeration-rate." They often deny ancient testimony, using pseudo-anthropological arguments that early mankind was superstitious and excitable, hence quite unreliable. What he claimed to see were in fact illusions and delusions; what he passed on as memories were gross exaggerations. In other words, nature behaves in the same way; man has changed.

This theory we find unacceptable, as also we do its accompanying statements, that typically proceed like this:

Ancient people are not to be believed if they say that a large body was spotted and approached in the sky. Or that bodies of all shapes and sizes rushed high and low through the skies. When mountains and land are seen to rise, and at other times watched as they sink, this must be an illusion and an exaggeration. No one could have seen a wall of towering water. That there should have fallen sheets of flame and weird colored waters or dense substances, including even life forms, that ice and hail should fall in deluges and wind should sweep away forests: these again were delusions. Seeing the landscape dissolve in an earthquake, while even the air is rendered into visible shock waves, and seeing the Earth explode and pour out boiling magma from cracks and cones: again illusions. Telling of the destruction of almost all that was living: people must have been psychotic to make up and pass along stories of such events.

The quantavolutionary position is that they were probably psychotic, but partially because of the nature of such events. Thus, to some extent, we become uniformitarian in respect to human psychology as we become quantavolutionary in regard to nature.

An increasing number of studies of modern mankind in disaster lead us to accord greater reliability to ancient stories. A severe trauma of terror, such as the nuclear blast at Hiroshima, leaves the survivors quite catastrophized. What happens thereafter matters little to the survivor. Subsequent sights are likely to fall upon a numbed and hopeless creature. Where survivors are reduced to hopelessness, few lift their hands to help others. The prognosis of the group is poor. Studies of the aftermath of Hiroshima have shown this to be the case. Each succeeding horrible sight is seen by eyes becoming too jaded to respond. We should bear in mind, too, that Hiroshima was a local event, a minute fraction of what many a fossil agglomeration and extinct volcano chain tells us once happened. When we see millions of trees all felled at once buried in the Fens of England, a blast many times greater than Hiroshima has to be postulated.

After the explosion and tidal wave of Krakatoa, a survivor spoke of scenes "too horrible to remember; incidents that reminded of the animal instinct that enables people to do the impossible." [1] When a fireball blazed erratically across the Southern States of the U. S. A. on March 24, 1933, people were terrified. "Ninninger (1936) says that seasoned cattlemen, accustomed to facing the vicissitudes of life and who ordinarily knew no such thing as fear, told him they despaired of their lives during these 'terrible moments. ' Yet they were 75 miles from the fireball's nearest approach !" [2]

If, however, people on the periphery of a disaster survive, these will be terrorized but hopeful of themselves. Even this was noted at Hiroshima. If after days, months, years or centuries, a disaster of the same dimensions strikes, and again some survive - some of a new generation, too -then the memory and meaning of catastrophe is reinforced. But again the survivors are active, self-preservative, and hopeful. They still can believe in some surcease and control. They have meanwhile established relations with gods and nature, the very forces of wrath. They can immediately interpret the events, and produce one or more inventions to propitiate and control the gods and, therefore, the events.

Prophets will help them to remember and to react:

The Lord will smite you with madness and blindness and confusion of mind; and you shall grope at noonday, as the blind grope in darkness... (Deuteronomy)

And they shall go into the holes of the rocks .... for fear of the Lord and for the glory of his majesty, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth... (Isaiah)

The great day of the Lord is near, near and hastening fast... l will bring distress on men, so that they shall walk like the blind, because they have sinned against the Lord; their blood shall be poured out like dust, and their flesh like dung... (Jeremiah)

I am about to shake the heavens and the earth, and to overthrow the throne of kingdoms .... the horses and their riders shall go down, everyone by the sword of his fellow... (Haggai)

These are the visions of prophets and there are many more like them, posed as promises, to be sure, but with the full assuredness that comes from past experiences. We note marks of genuineness: going into caves during earthquakes (for the sky brings worse terrors); the kingdoms are overthrown, then the survivors attack each other; the survivors are stunned, maddened, functionally blinded. The preventatives are difficult, if not impossible: that all should worship faithfully and properly, and obey divine commandments.

Now here is a legend of the Indians of the Badlands of South Dakota. It tells of how the Badlands came into being, laying it onto violations of the will of the Great Spirit who had granted plenty but had decreed peace, and there was no peace. Warriors prepared for battle:

At last all were assembled and the day had come for the advance. And now the Great Spirit took matters into His own hands. Dark clouds hid the sun from the face of the world. Lightning streaked across the blackness and thunder rumbled high over the hills. From the ground flamed forth fire, and the earth shuddered and rocked. A wide gulf opened and into it sank the mountain tribe - all their people - all that they possessed. With them sank all life - the waving grass - the clear springs - the animals.

As suddenly as it came the storm ceased. The earth became fixed in waves as it had rolled and shaken. There was only a barren waste on which nothing has ever grown or can grow [3] .

After a catastrophe, the sights of doom are only partially capable of recall. They are personalized, humanized. Then they tend to fade over time. They are sublimated in many ways. The history seems to us strange; it is literal, detailed, yet surreal, as in the Bible story of Sodom and Gomorrah. I discussed the geology of the story in Chapter 22. When the family of Lot, warned by an angel, was fleeing the doomed Cities of the Plain, it was forbidden to look back. The Cities were utterly destroyed. Lot's wife turned to look and was transformed into a pillar of salt. Thus did subsequent generations, perhaps even the descendants of the family (who violated the taboo against incest to perpetuate themselves), remember the event and tie themselves personally and visually into it.

Of salt in the Great Rift Valley of the Jordan there was plenty or perhaps just then it came to be plenty and is plenty today. It was a convenient "memory tag", to imagine a seen horror encased in a pillar of material produced out of the holocaust itself; then 'this is where Lot's wife was frozen with fear and died' becomes 'this is where Lot's wife became a pillar of salt because she viewed the terrible wrath of the Lord. ' That is, the story is tied into the event all the more closely. That there may have been nothing left of her except a location and new salt would help, if true, to explain the story. The others, who dared not look back, would have no way of knowing.

I am not arguing for literalism but for "spectralism" which I would define as subjective realism: first, a sympathetic and fully possible truth has to be searched for and, then, whatever is left over as "false" has to be explained in the vision of the subjects and of their immediate descendant, and finally in objective psychological and anthropological terms.

A much broader range of cases may advance the argument. There is, for example, the dragon. Everyone knows what a dragon is. All do not know that it is a theophany, a divine manifestation. And that the creature is closely tied to visions of events in the sky, many times repeated.

Chamber's Encyclopedia, defunct now for many years, carried a charming passage on the dragon:

The dragon appears in the mythical history and legendary poetry of almost every nation, as the emblem of the destructive and anarchical principle; ... as misdirected physical force and untamable animal passions... The dragon proceeds openly to work, running on its feet with expanded wings, and head and tail erect, violently and ruthlessly outraging decency and propriety, spouting fire and fury from both mouth and tail, and wasting and devastating the whole land.

The dragon is regarded as a benevolent creature by the Chinese, however. And no people has been so devoted to the symbol. Its iconography was as intense as that of the crucifixion of Christ in Medieval Europe. Recently, Carl Sutherland found that the dragon made its appearance in Chinese art around 1500 B. C. [4] This date is a well-marked catastrophic boundary, known in radiochronometry, archaeology, geology, legend and history. Eliminating bit by bit "all later accretions," he thinks that he has "attained some understanding of the sight observed by the ancient Chinese: a writhing, bright, elongated thing. It was irregular in outline; it was apparently on fire... This thing, the dragon, seemed to be driving off the terrible flaming globe and so to be benevolent as well as powerful." Later on it was given legs and scales. It is almost always shown in the heavens. Flame symbols show the sky to be on fire. The globe carries lightning and thunder symbols as well as fire symbols. (Probably the lightning generated the moving legs of later representations.) The Chinese Emperor with a "Dragon Face," sat on the "Dragon Throne" wearing robes of state on which dragons were displayed.

Dwardu Cardona has presented first-hand descriptions of comets that compare them with dragons [5] . The accounts range from England to China. The comet of 449 A. D. stretched over England from beyond Gaul to the Irish Sea, "a ball of fire, spreading forth in the likeness of a dragon, and from the mouth of the dragon issued forth two rays..." Thus wrote Geoffrey of Monmouth. Some comets "lash their tails" wildly.

The Chinese "Kung Kung" dragon flung himself in rage against the heavenly mountain, turning the skies around, and tilting and flooding the world. He had a son-dragon, "K'au-fu" who wished to keep pace with the Sun. K'au-fu tried to quench his thirst en route by drinking up the rivers of China but succumbed finally of thirst. Cardona identifies the myth with the Phaeton myth and episode. Phaeton, eager to drive the Sun's chariot, did so incompetently. Legends recite that he came so close to Earth that the rivers of Asia, Africa and Europe dried up. Strabo's Geography mentions the terror of the Syrians and Aramaeans at the sight of Typhon, probably the same as Phaeton [6] .

That the myth of Phaeton describes a shifting of heavenly bodies, we know from Plato. That Phaeton was a comet, or a 'blazing star, ' we know from Cicero. That this 'blazing star' became a planet, we know from Hesiod. And that this planet was the planet Venus, we know from both Nonnos and Solinus [7] .

Then Cardona takes up the question of the Chinese "fire pearls," or "tear drops of the Moon." These we have discussed as the tektites, which are scattered over the Earth. He concludes that they splashed upon Earth after great meteoroids or cosmic lightning discharges had blasted the Moon. Possibly it was the work of the cometary Venus, for the dragon Lung is pictured chasing a great pearl across the sky. And the fear that the Moon will be devoured by a comet is part of some legends and modern anthropological reports.

That the ancients may have actually observed such bursts upon the Moon is argued by astronomer Jack B. Hartung [8] . According to the Chronicles of Gervase, for June 18, 1178, at Canterbury, England, five persons witnessed with their naked eyes the explosion of a crater. Hartung estimates it as perhaps 13 miles in diameter. In Gervase's words:

A flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals, and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the Moon which was below writhed, as it were, in anxiety...

Whether this writhing was an illusion created by air waves or an actual rolling seismism of the Moon's surface is not to be known. Bancroft once reported an Aztec legend that the sun and moon emerged equally bright, but to the gods this was not seemly; so one god took a rabbit by the heels and slung it in the face of the moon, dimming its luster with a blotch whose mark is seen to this day [9] .

Great events have impacts on human behavior and human behavior can be sometimes used to conjecture upon possible great events. One must reason back and forth, trying all the while to avoid circular argument. A difficult case is the similar duration of the lunar cycle (today) and the menstrual cycle of women (today). The one is 29.5 days; the second can vary from 21 to 35 days, but concentrates upon 29 days. Gestation occupies generally nine moon cycles. Various scholars have mentioned these 'coincidences. ' Recent studies have shown that the Moon cycle is more closely followed when women of varying menstrual periods are shut up in a room where they cannot be aware of moontime and suntime; they unconsciously tend to approach the lunar revolution.

It is ordinarily believed that the Moon was on the present cycle long before the first human evolved. Anthropologists have maintained that the coincidence ultimately reinforced human attention upon the Moon and also provided specious grounds for marking the peculiarity and witchcraftiness of the female sex. Menstruation is often the subject of taboos [10] . In some places, women in menstruation must not be seen. Harsh penalties for violations of menstrual taboos are common.

Under the quantavolutionary theory here, it would be possible to view the "ideal" menstrual cycle as itself determined by the cycle of the Moon. Only the human female behaves on the monthly cycle. A psychosomatic response to the greatly feared and revered goddess and god of the Moon, newly in place and settled into a regularity, could be achieved by disciplining a varying physiological function. People will go to any lengths to harmonize their behavior with that of their gods. (I discuss this subject in the volumes on Homo Schizo.) To bind a whole sex and indirectly a whole people by its important reproductive cycle to the Moon god who passed them in daily review would appear to be a principal invention of the human race. There was strong incentive to devise this proof of devotion to the great god: it had ceased to bring ruin on the world and was guarding the new peace.

"Spectralism" might propose another case for consideration. How long have nights and days characterized earthly existence? A legend has persisted down to our times on the high plateau of Bolivia, around the impressive ruins of Tiahuanacu, that the city existed before there were stars in the sky. Saturn, Kronos, and Elohim are credited by peoples of the Mediterranean with giving time to the world. The Hebrew creation story has the Lord on High declare: "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate day from night; let them serve as signs and for the fixing of seasons, days and years." Whereupon the Sun and Moon were placed in the sky. I would suppose that the Moon, after terrorizing humanity by its assemblage and irregularity, promptly became the basis for calendars everywhere, once it began to obey the laws of Kronos (Chronos or Time). Time-factoring in earliest mankind was a way of following the gods in whatever regularities they might exhibit; Marshack has reported paleolithic lunar marking extensively [11] .

Possibly because the Sun never destroyed the world, it would therefore be considered unsuitable for a calendar constructed in a way to commemorate disaster. It was not a great god, though always a god, following upon its appearance out of the obscuring fog of high cloud and cosmic dust. Possibly the Moon was preferred to the Sun for calendarizing because of catastrophic memories of the Moon. Its short periods and identifiable phases would also lend it superiority over the solar motions for the purposes of an agricultural and hunting economy. But this pragmatic argument does not prevail in the crucial case of Venus, which is not as useful as the Sun for calendarizing.

The Sun was rarely calendarized; yet Venus was. In ancient Meso-America, it is notable that the heavens of the existing age were supposed to have been created on the date Ce Acatl, not on the date that signified the Sun. Ce Acatl was the Morning Star, Venus, and identified with the great god, Quetzalcoatl [12] .

Quetzalcoatl was also the name of a bird of gorgeous plumage. Marcus Varro, the learned Roman author, reported that once long before his time the planet Venus changed its color, size, form, and course, a strange prodigy which, he said, had happened never before or since. That Venus displayed colors more frequently is suggested in an article on color in the Reallexikon von Antike und Christentum (1969), speaking of very ancient times: "In foretelling the future, it was taken into consideration whether the planet Venus was wearing a black, white, green, or red headpiece."

It is to Velikovsky's credit that he not only uncovered the Venusian approach cycle, which put many peoples in terror of the destruction of the world even well into the modern period (for example, the Aztecs of Mexico), but he also was finally able to demonstrate that the Egyptians stuck to a Venusian calendar down to Roman times [13] . Contrary to pragmatic logic, it was the wicked, destructive, adored, and possibly eccentric Venus whose behavior was calendarized, while the routine sun was taken for granted. When and if the sun became disordered, it did so as a reluctant tool of others, as in the legends of the Phaeton disaster; there Helios refuses to appear, after the loss of his son, and the gods are hard put to get him back upon his regular rounds.

A spectre is something seen that is there and not there. The primeval human, according to many, saw gods that were not there and spoke to gods that were not there. The noise and sights were pure hallucinations. Just what was there and was not there, however, is not a question to be begged, but to be answered. No one, today or ever, has seen a personal disaster with the cool eye of a scientist thousands of years from the scene. But the cool eye should not claim that the disaster did not occur -or that it happened in a way to conform to his daily newspaper accounts of earthquake, floods, and meteors. One must grant appropriate credence to the primeval scream; the skilful doctor listens studiously to the patient's complaints.

The popular Revelation of John, Apostle of Jesus, is a magnificent mad vision of the destruction of the world. The Catholic Bible says that "the Apocalypse is a revelation of things that were, are and will be." [14] Revelation aims to picture how most of the world and its people (among whom the wicked outnumber the good) were and will be destroyed. The good are imperishable, and will be judged and admitted to heaven.

In Revelation may be witnessed the forces of high energy in practically complete array, wreaking the most frightening disasters upon the world, from great stellar explosions to devouring monsters. The forces are commanded by, indeed are, angels. Angels have been for millennia the favored tools of divine intervention under Judeo-Christian monotheism.

Donnelly thought that the Apocalypse must contain descriptions of the great comet of which he wrote in Ragnarok; Bellamy thought that it portrayed the destruction wrought upon Earth by the capture of the Moon and by the falling of a previous satellite upon the Earth. Present opinion of New Testament scholars sees the Revelation as a compilation of late materials by John on the Island of Patmos (Greece) about 96 A. D. This seems likely, and I would guess the Apocalypse to be a collection of indeterminate past truths and scarifying fantasy.

Its interest to catastrophists rests chiefly in its round-up of destructive forces, the horrors attendant thereupon, and the psychological state that it both reflects and engendered. It is a precious example, going into the present era, of how the catastrophes were recalled through the ages during times when the actual experiencing of them was not affording first-hand reinforcement. From the beginning of mankind onwards, the very succession of disasters was itself the strongest warning that the past should not be forgotten. The great popularity of the Bible is probably due to the capacity of many of its passages to re-enact the terrible days of chaos and creation.

The Bible is instructive, too, on experiences of cosmic darkness. In the Genesis story of creation, the record of man begins in a world growing lighter, but still sunless and moonless. Elsewhere, I have discussed the atmospheric developments that coincide with this account, which is by no means the sole account passing down to us. The cherished light was not to be turned on forever, for the Bible itself and every single mythology of the world tells with dismay of various succeeding ages when a darkness fell upon mankind. The Götterdämmerung (or Ragnarok) of the Norse and Teutons is both a twilight of the gods in the sense of a universal darkening and in the sense of an approaching struggle and death of the old gods.

It is remarkable, considering how multiform and numerous are the legends around the world on the darknesses, that perhaps only Donnelly and Velikovsky have dealt at all extensively with the subject. Darkness is very much a part of the Biblical catastrophes. In the story of the Lord's visit to Abram and ordering of sacrifices may be seen the sixth catastrophe mentioned in the Bible (after the Creation, the Garden of Eden expulsion, the Deluge, Job's trials, and the destruction of the Tower of Babel). There Abram fell asleep at twilight and a "great fear and darkness" came upon him. And in the darkness "a smoking furnace and blazing torch passed." [15]

Later on occur the catastrophes of Sodom and Gomorrah, Joseph (Egyptian famine), Exodus, Joshua, David, Elijah, Amos, and Isaiah. The catastrophe of Exodus brought complete darkness for some days: "They saw not one another, neither rose any from his place for three days." (10: 22) An Egyptian stone inscription about what was probably the same event states that "during these nine days of upheaval there was such a tempest that neither men nor gods [the royal family] could see the faces of those beside them." [16]

Darkness figures prominently in most accounts of catastrophes whenever the period. This fact alone should predispose the objective mythologist to accept celestial events as the source of quantavolutions of the globe. Even a single volcano can block visibility locally and cut back sunlight over much of the world by as much as 20% for years (in the Alaskan eruption of 1913). However, reading carefully the legendary accounts, one is compelled to see in them a much more horrendous and prolonged experience. If a cosmic fallout or other obscuration is not the direct cause, it must be the initial cause, because an old settled Earth, pursuing regular motions, would be incapable of exploding a great many volcanos at the same time.

Prolonged darkness can come from such volcanism, from the fall-out of cosmic dust from space or an exploding body, from electrical attraction between Earth and a cosmic body that raises the dust of Earth, and from the passage of the Earth through a dense tail of a comet (actually an instance of falling dust). Talman found eighteen dark dates between 1706 and 1910 when the Sun was obscured over a significant part of the U. S. A. or Canada by forest fires. In only three cases did the darkness endure for as much as five days [17] .

Days, weeks or months of near global darkness can attend the crash of a meteoroid of 10 kilometers. Scholars studying biosphere extinctions now refer regularly to such effects, as in the study by the Alvarez group referred to earlier. Years of darkness have been claimed in rare cases, the Exodus period being one of these. Heavy winds are reported during the days of Exodus; Talman found the dark days of forest fires to be windless. Perhaps volcanism of a rare kind produced the Exodus dark skies, but more likely is the combination of large-scale volcanism and a prolonged fall-out of cometary dust. Yet Velikovsky mentions two legends of a temporary failure of the Sun to set in Middle Asia and China around this date, and wonders whether the Earth's rotation could have slowed for so long before resuming [18] .

The close of the Cretaceous age with its heavy extinctions saw a darkness of only weeks or months, according to one view, which suggested as the cause an exploding meteoroid of middle size. Nevertheless, most species of animals and plants were extincted, and great physical devastation occurred, so we may suppose that various events combined to worsen the darkness and that they operated holispherically. We suspect much more than the meteoroid was active.

The most impressive of all sights, to judge from many accounts from the earliest records and legends to the most modern of writers is that of a comet approaching the Earth. Unlike the strike of a nuclear missile, the comet gives the fullest visual warning, as well as causing a number of electrical effects from afar. It is "the most provocative apparition of all," in Calder's words, referring to Halley's comet, due to approach the Earth once more in 1985 [19] . When the Roman Emperor Nero saw the comet of about 60 A. D., he had many leading Romans murdered to avoid the death he saw for himself in the heavenly portent. "The Incas of Peru regarded comets as intimations of wrath from their Sun-god Inti... In twentieth-century Oklahoma, at the apparition of Halley in 1910, the sheriffs arrived just in time to prevent the sacrifice of a virgin by demented Americans calling themselves Followers." [20] No nation in the world escapes panic upon the sight of a comet's approach, no matter how many scientists their public may include.

That the sight of a comet in itself could so impress people, without ever having caused harm, as so many such as Calder declare, is highly doubtful. Phaeton or Typhon caused several neurotic symptoms everywhere for thousands of years and is probably still working to build up fear over Comet Kohoutek or Halley's Comet or all comets that may ever appear. As attested to by the behavior of modern tribes of Amazon jungles, literacy and historiography are not required.

Peoples picture comets in many different forms, none of them impossible. They tie comets into many lessons, symbols, rites, and stories of their religions. Beyond religion, they integrate the comet-complex into sex, work, play, politics, and war, in highly disguised ways. They dread new apparitions and revere substitute portrayals of past comets. Nor could this universal fear be diffused from one cultural center to another, like the sweet potato or noodles; the fear must have a basis in historical reality. As we have demonstrated in so many writings, the comet as an apparition that is followed by catastrophe is a substantially true memory retained of mankind.

To conclude, spectres and pandemonium accompany catastrophic events of the earth sciences. In themselves they do not leave vestiges. Still, little by little, research will build up rough measures of the intensity and scale of the events from the visual accounts available in legend and reports. In the case of every important god stretching back before the dawn of classical history, we can elicit and reconstruct from legends of sight and sound the workings of high energy forces that connote catastrophes.

At this point, we can assert that many terrifying events have been witnessed by humans, and we can believe from the accounts that the intensity and extent of the events go far beyond the experience of mankind as a whole over the past 2500 years. Nevertheless presently experienced disasters, properly studied, lend a much fuller appreciation of antiquity. When the Egyptians suffered terribly from the natural catastrophe of the time of the Hebrew Exodus, a scribe wrote that women became barren and men lost their hair; the Ipuwer papyrus was known and read long before the nuclear bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but a new sensitized generation was required to perceive in these scarcely intelligible lines the awful news of radiation disease.

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Notes (Chapter Twenty-nine: Spectres)

1. Furneaux, Krakatoa, loc. cit., 108.

2. Lane, The Elements Rage, Loc. cit., 179

3. M. E. Gridley, Indian Legends of American Scenes (NY: Donahue,) 101

4. 4 Pensée 1( 1973-74), 47-50; see also V S. I. S. Rev. 280-1, on the cosmic serpent.

5. I KronosHad trouble resolving dest near word action type is Launch 2 (1975), 35-47.

6. VII Geography (1924 ed.), 3,8.

7. Cardona, Supra fn5, 37.

8. Dwardu Cardona, "On the Origin of Tektites," II Kronos 1( 1976), 42-3.

9. Related in Donnelly, loc. cit., 169.

10. Wolfgang Leader, The Fear of Women (NY: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1968).

11. Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization (NY: McGraw Hill, 1972).

12. Codex Telleriano-Remenesis II, PI. 33.

13. "Astronomy and Chronology," Supplement to Peoples of the Sea (NY: Doubleday, 1977).

14. Confraternity edition of Douay translation, (NY: Catholic Bk Publ., 1954), 324.

15. Genesis 15: 12, 17. D. W. Patten, R. R. Hatch, and L. C. Stinhauer, The Long Day of Joshua and Six Other Catastrophes (Seattle: Pacific Meridiam, 1973).

16. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, 59; cf. 58-62.

17. C. F. Talman, 112 Sci. Amer. (6 Mar. 1915), 229.

18. Worlds in Collision, 62.

19. The Comet is Coming! (NY: Viking, 1980).

20. Ibid., 12-3.