VELIKOVSKYandThe Representation of TimeAuthor : Zenon Kelper - Editor : Robert Fritzius |
In this series you can also find:
Akhnaton, Moses,
Oedipus, Triple Hermes,
Freud, Lacan, Velikovsky,
Osman, Theaux.
P R E F A C E
If
you know nothing about Velikovsky (the
psychiatrist/psychoanalyst who identifies Oedipus as Akhnaton),
you may go first to a short biography
. In this page I shall first comment on a book by C.J. Ransom
, titled The Age
of Velikovsky - good material on Velikovsky's resistance and recoil
from his own insight, that will help to explore the symptoms of repression
and disclosure which haunts mankind's memory. The other component
of this page will be its first edition that I loaded on the web by Nov 1996,
currently updated.
Eventually the page end with a Summary with which the reader may
begin.
.
Z. Kelper Feb 15, 1998
Immanual Velikovsky
WHIRL OF DISCLOSURE
in Human Knowledge
Something a
short bio
()
does not say is that... "In the summer of 1939, Dr.
Velikovsky
came to the United States to complete research for a book. The intended book
was about Freud's dreams and three characters of interest to Freud: Moses,
Oedipus and Akhnaton. The book was nearly completed when other research led
to discoveries that would change the course of his life."
This is an excerpt
from the first page of C.J.Ransom's book. The same book ends with an 'Historical
Supplement' which begins as follows: "In 1960 Velikovsky
published Oedipus and Akhnaton which was based on research
that was done when he first came to the United States."
What happened
with Velikovsky between 1939 and 1960 ? And what became of Moses in his first
triple interest?
The discoveries
which had changed the course of Velikovsky's life were in the field
of astronomy. As referred in the bio
below, he 'discovered' that a comet... during
one of two encounters with the Earth, stopped the latter's rotation for a
period of time (this event would have happened approx
in Akhnaton's reign according to present Egyptology), and had,
in the 8th century BC, shifted the orbit of Mars before settling into its
present orbit as the planet Venus.
This was
enough to distract his attention from his first insight,
and delayed, for 20 years, the publication of his idea about Oedipus. Such
a phenomenon is very well known in Psychoanalysis, when the shocking release
of what is repressed first causes a resistance which tends to bury it again.
The present web site shows this mechanism at work with Freud
, Osman
, Lacan
, Bernal
, who yielded to
resistance. It builds a symptom, a delusion which realizes a compromise -
as for instance in Velikovsky's case : his idea of a double close encounter
between Earth and Venus-to-come helped him to translate the entire Egyptology
dating scale for several centuries at once, in so bringing Akhnaton close
to Solomon (by 9 B.C.) - and therefore preventing
him , in any manner, to be close to Moses.
It is
remarkable, however, that in Oedipus and
Akhnaton, Velikovsky could not help claiming homage to Freud's
insight regarding Akhnaton-Moses - and in so doing, showed that
love is stronger than symptom ...!
Hatred is also
quite strong ,and pervades the communities of established knowledge. The
silence of organized psychoanalysts is significant. They remain cautiously
unaware , as demonstrated when Chairmen and Professors from Oxford, and many
other Universities, write such things as the following:
"However much one may cavil on this detail or that,
Velikovsky has succeeded in identifying Oedipus as the Greek reflex of the
historical Akhnaton." The History of Psychoanalysis shows the support
they gave to those amongst them who broke the silence
. For several decades, the Oedipus
Complex has been well preserved by the Freudian organization - Next,
I'll make a similar observation about Historians, in regard to Hermes
Trismegistus
.
Let's hope that the betrayal of these two instances (University and Freudian institutions) in regard to their assignment to free knowledge and release repression, will eventually be useful for civilization's consciousness on Earth - And let's admire again the beautiful little book of C.J.Ransom: First page: Velikovsky is ready to write about Moses, Oedipus and Akhnaton - then 240 pages about his 20 years' brawl with Astronomers - and 10 pages to conclude that he was at least right about the identity of Oedipus-Akhnaton.
It appears that the pace and circuit for truth is beginning to be understood by the masses. In this case, what is clearly signified is the responsibility of the intelligentsia in regard to the stupidity of the crowd. It is a vicious circle which paralyzes the intellectuals. While everything is quiet, let's try to understand the structure of Velikovsky back and forth.
1st Web Edition Nov 96 - Revisited Feb 98
VELIKOVSKY
About Velikovsky, I would like to suggest something - which has been quite powerful to the psychiatrist R.D.Laing. I'll attempt to define Velikovsky's domains and limits:
* * * * * *
Velikovsky's general work covers the reading of archeological artifacts which he connected with natural facts (events). Basically, he interpreted some ancient texts (written between 3,000 and 800 B.C. - red square in graph sub) as depicting astronomical or cosmic events (yellow triangle in graph sub) that would have happened at the very same time they were written.
Apparently, those texts and artifacts were indicating injections of planets into the solar system, causing the shifting of orbits and cosmic catastrophies which would have thus happened between 3,000 and 800 B.C.. This thesis, although famous for a while, has been opposed and ridiculed by classical scientists who argued that such cataclysms would have laid much more conspicuous tracks than simple texts; eventually, Velikovsky was banished from the academic community.
Besides this dispute, a limited observation must be added about Velikovsky's studies. He described Oedipus and Akhnaton as separate and independent from the rest of his work. It concerns some artifacts/writings from 400 B.C. (red square in graph sub), the content of which was usually considered as mythological inventions; Velikovsky showed that they were recollections of earlier events, precisely about 1300 B.C., according to conventional chronology, or about 700 B.C. in his revised chronology (yellow triangle in graph sub).
In a short observation titled OEDIPUS AND AKHNATON, he explained that the story of Oedipus, written in Greece principally by Sophocles (400 B.C.), was the genuine historical record of the more ancient story of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhnaton (1250 B.C. conventionally). For a while this thesis was neglected; for, like 'the baby with the bath water', it was thrown away with the astronomical thesis; but in private circles, specialized in Academics, it was admitted that on the Oedipus-Akhnaton point, Velikovsky had probably been right.
* * * * * *
The issue of 'time misplacement' is frequent in the history of knowledge. A good example of this is Casaubon's dating which put an end to The Renaissance. It is re-enacted today with Osman's mistake, which bargains for Moses' identification in exchange for Jesus Christ's historicity . It indicates a common objection of Time relativity being at the foundation of neurosis, and demands an analysis. As it is often the case, this frequent symptom or resistance shows up with Velikovsky as a problem of memory, particularly 'framing' of memory periods, and distinction between facts/events with their representation/recollection. A formula inspired by Lacan may help to see it as a linguistic issue. For instance, Velikovsky was right when noticing that Sophocles probably wrote an historical report of an earlier event. For some reason, he did not make the same discrimination regarding the astronmical field - in this case, he collapsed the Event and its Recollection, as if he had not noticed that Ancient Scriptures almost never describe their present time.
If we make abstraction of the advantages that Velikovsky exploited in his mistake (in the upheaval of his time distorsion, Velikovsky could bring Akhnaton as a contemporary of Solomon, King of Israel, and thus posterior to the Exodus and Moses. It may be our turn, today to make use of this blunder which nonetheless was evidently shouldered by serious arguments ), there may be another interesting lesson which comes with his dispute with his colleagues:
When Velikovsky read Babylonian, and other, tablets depicting an upheaval and a planetary shift - he thought that the catastrophy happened approximately at the time when the tablets were written. His prejudice may be understood for, if the ancient astronomical reports were historical records, Velikovsky was encountering a double problems/question. Firstly, it is probable that all kinds of troubling events (social or even geological upheavals) had taken place during the writing of the artifacts - and they would be explained as repetitions. For the recollection of an event may necessarily require both its re-enactment and its writings. Fact - t.0 > > > Rep - t.1 ... Rep - t.2 ... Rep - t.n (Letter/Writing) In this, a certain depth in memory opens. Written recollections would constitute and partake within a so-called History (which would span a human's identification of his life). The unique nature of time would include a series, and/or a similar event happenings- and within such plurality, repetitions may be of various kinds (metonymes and metaphores, which would only be accessible in a plural analysis). One calls the whole a paradigm, that includes its own representation, and can be identified only through a Code .
This leads to a more problematical second question. If Velikovsky has discovered a memoir instead of a live report, it would mean that by 2,000 B.C. (more or less) mankind proved it had a memory of events which happened 20,000, maybe 200,000, or perhaps 2 million years ago, or even more. This is clearly shocking; for this would mean that during the time of the earliest animals, up to the contemporary 'high-tech' species, a memory could have been kept in a written series - our notion of history and/or mankind could be thus revisited.
The examination of Velikovsky's OEDIPUS AND AKHNATON confirms, indeed, this logic - for Velikovsky's resistant disclosure of Akhnaton-Oedipus repressed a 'Moses dimension' ; and the latter is known for being especially involved in the delivery of 'Tables of the Law' manifested in an Alphabet.
Velikovsky,
who went through psychoanalysis in Vienna as a student of Freud, was well
aware of the stakes of the Oedipus Complex theory, and he knew very well
Freud's interpretation of Moses' history. When he paid homage to Freud in
the last chapter of his _Oedipus and Akhnaton_ he knew that he was calling
for the one who had repressed the biological/historical identity of
Oedipus. We may also notice that Linguistics, of the Scientific Ages, also emphazises less the promethean gift of the alphabet - and its subsequent gratitude as it was expressed in religious hermeneutics - than the simple fact that the letter is used by the people. This will complete the general understanding that Velikovsky's debate presents the memory riddle that mankind encounters when it faces its representativity.
With
this solid coherence we can tackle an original debate, which took place during
the social upheaval of the revolutions in Western History. It opposed Champollion
(Classical Egyptology) to another Parisian linguist, Fabres d'Olivet, leader
of the Felibriges, who re-opened the Hermetic learning which had vanished
with the Renaissance two centuries before.
Against Champollion, Fabres d'Olivet saw the Hebraic letters
(given by Moses) as the Secret Egyptian Hieroglyphs. While Champollion was
showing that the Egyptian hieroglyphs were letters, d'Olivet claimed that
the letters/characters (Hebrew) were hieroglyphics and thus included within
their structure a graphical/pictural organization which gave access to a
much more profound and archaic meaning.
Two
interesting web sites may help in regard to these questions.
One
is complaning that
the other
has usurped his copyright
- but rabbis are known to have problem with Moses copyright also, and it
is even more symptomatic since this former exposes remarkably well an argument
in favor of a pre-personal and pre-language letter. The latter is also doing
a nice and useful work. They develop a compelling demonstration which describes
each and every Hebrew and Western Letters/alphabet as the projection of a
unique and universal matrix. If they are correct, it would mean that textuality
has begun with the universe. One would have there an excellent argument,
at least in regard to the long term record in Velikovsky's reading.
Our observation asks for considering a crucial phase of our knowledge. We must recall a principle, supposedly assumed by Francis Bacon at the foundations of Modern Science. Basically, the rejection - even repudiation - of certain dimensions of the quest would be required in order to keep a practical efficiency in the learning of the world. Namely, Bacon would have rejected such aspects as the Copernician Solar monocentrism, the magnetism hypothesis of Gilbert, and the Hermeticism of Bruno (who supported the return of an 'Egyptian Religion'). Yet, those ostracisms only indicated a level and a dimension of a method for teaching the masses. We reach today a frontier where restricted science must reconsider those technical limitations. Velikovsky's episode, for instance, shows this classical scientist stumbling against the mechanisms involved in memorization. He wrote as if he lived in a world where Historians would not study the laws of memory themselves ! This is not the case, since Psychoanalysis may not have been a failure.
|
To summarize.
This page has shown that Immanuel Velikovsky had a correct
intuition when he understood that after Freud, Akhnaton Mose and
Oedipus had to be considered together. |
ADDENDA
Excerpt from Encyclopedia Cybernetica
Velikovsky, Immanuel
{vay-lee-kahf'-skee}
The controversial American physician and historian Immanuel Velikovsky, b. Vitebsk, Russia, June 10 (N.S.), 1895, d. Nov. 17, 1979, argued that the configuration of the solar system was changed in historical times and that this change caused cataclysmic upheavals on Earth. Macmillan, the original publisher of Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision (1950), transferred its rights to Doubleday after only 2 months of publication when Macmillan's sizable textbook business was endangered by a threatened boycott from many scientists who disapproved of Velikovsky's methodology.
In Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky claimed that a comet, after ejection from the planet Jupiter, had, over a period of decades in the 15th century BC, during one of two encounters with the Earth, stopped the latter's rotation for a period of time, and had, in the 8th century BC, shifted the orbit of Mars after a near collision with that planet before settling into its present orbit as the planet Venus. These events and others, according to Velikovsky, caused many of the "miraculous" events described in Exodus and in Joshua 10 of the Bible and in other ancient writings and myths.
Although Velikovsky's theory led him to make certain claims, such as a relatively hot temperature for Venus, that were subsequently verified, many scientists have questioned the plausibility of the celestial events described by Velikovsky and the mechanisms that he proposed to account for them. Velikovsky's other works include Ages in Chaos (1952), Earth in Upheaval (1955), Oedipus and Akhnaton: Myth and History (1960), Peoples of the Sea (1977), and Ramses II and His Time (1978).
Bibliography: de Grazia, Alfred, ed., The Velikovsky Affair (1966); Goldsmith, Donald, ed., Scientists Confront Velikovsky (1977); Greenberg, Lewis M., et al., eds., Velikovsky and Establishment Science (1977) and Scientists Confront Scientists Who Confront Velikovsky (1978); Pensee magazine editors, Velikovsky Reconsidered (1976); Ransom, C. J., The Age of Velikovsky (1977).
++ Another informative source :
The Age of Velikovsky - author:
C.J. Ransom -
++ Another Velikovsky page - Velikovsky In
America author Duane Vorhees
-
(supports the thesis regarding the dislocation
Akhnaton-Moses).
++ Robert's Fritzius page on Oedipus and
Akhnaton
.
A very interesting article turned in favor of the
hypothesis it attempted to invalidate
(in this page, amongst other developments, the dislocation
Akhnaton-Moses is invalidated)
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