V is for Velikovsky, Von Daniken and Others
If you drive some 250 miles north of Adelaide, you will find yourself in the Flinders Ranges, one among the many rocky desert areas that take up some two thirds of Australia. Crossing over Rawnsley’s Bluff, you enter Wilpena Pound, a 5 mile by 11 mile enclosed oval area, looking rather like a huge amphitheater. This striking rock formation has one range of hills to the north and east, and another to the south and west. They almost join, with Rawnsley’s Bluff the lowest point linking the two in the south east, and Edeowie Gorge the exit to the north west. Originally thought to be a volcanic crater, it is actually a syncline, a u-shaped basin formed by sedimentary rocks being pushed up almost vertically on either side of the central plain. It isn’t clear where the name came from. Some have suggested Wilpena is an indigenous name, meaning “place of bent fingers”; (possibly a reference to the mountains resembling the shape of a gently cupped hand, or the freezing cold of the ranges in winter). However, the traditional owners of the land, the Adnyamathanha people, call it ‘Ikara’, which means a ‘meeting place”.
Like many of the areas of Australia, there is a story about Ikara from the ‘Dreamtime’, the time well before the Europeans came. Here’s a summary of Kingfisher Dreaming:
Yurlu, the Kingfisher, decided to go south for a ceremony … As Yurlu was travelling, there were also two big Akurras (Dreamtime Serpents) … The two serpents also went on southwards and entered the Pound through Edeowie Gorge and camped at a large waterhole. That night some people in the Pound were holding a ceremony. When they looked into the sky at the stars to see if it was time to start, the stars they saw were actually the eyes of the two Akurras. The male Akurra told his mate to go to the south-west, while he went north-east to surround the people. When Yurlu reached Mount Abrupt he stopped and looked into the Pound. He could hear the sound of the ceremony. He threw a firestick into the air; it turned into the red star, Mars. While this was going on, the two Akurras came up on each side of the ceremonial ground and ate up all the people except two initiates and Yurlu. St Mary Peak is the head of the male Akurra and Beatrice Hill is the head of the female serpent, both watching the flight of the initiates. Their bodies form the two sides of the Pound.[i]
In addition to the snakes there today (!), I know this rocky, arid and sparse land does contain some of the earliest fossils found anywhere in the world, many of which indigenous tribespeople must have studied. “This is one of the few places in the world that preserves evidence of the first complex life on this planet. The Flinders Ranges is the internationally recognised type section between the geological periods when there isn’t complex life and when first complex life evolves.” [ii] The Ediacaran fossils provide geologically important evidence of those first animals.
If we go further north into the heart of Australia near Alice Springs, the land is pitted with about a dozen strange depressions. This is the site of the Henbury meteorite field, dating to around 4,700 years ago when a large, iron-filled meteorite slammed into Earth’s atmosphere and broke apart, scattering fragments. As with Ikara, there are Dreamtime accounts of this site, too: the place was where a fire “debil-debil” (devil) had come out of the sky and killed everything. Later the story became even closer to home as one guide has explained: “He said that his people wouldn’t camp within two miles of the depressions, get closer than half a mile or collect the water that filled some. A fire devil would fill them with iron should they dare. The guide knew this, he said, because his grandfather had seen the fire devil come from the sun.” [iii] This legend long precedes today’s view that these hollows were formed by a meteorite strike.
Dreamtime stories bind aboriginals to places through the sacred, an essential part of their respect and connection to an environment where empty land dominates, with few plants and even fewer animals. Respect for the land has been an overwhelming part of indigenous sense-making, and it’s not surprising that references to memorable images and events are embedded in their sacred stories. The same is true for us. If we turn to an example from one of our sacred texts, there’s the biblical story of Noah and the great flood, part of the Abrahamic canon. It’s an account, or a legend, which almost certainly has prebiblical origins, as it appears in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh from 5,000 years ago: “there is an account of the great sage Utnapishtim, who is warned of an imminent flood to be unleashed by wrathful gods. He builds a vast circular-shaped boat, reinforced with tar and pitch, that carries his relatives, grains and animals. After enduring days of storms, Utnapishtim, like Noah in Genesis, releases a bird in search of dry land.” [iv] Was there a flood? Various archaeologists suggest there was a huge deluge some 6,000-8,000 years ago that hit an area from the Black Sea down all the way down into the ‘fertile crescent’. Just like the case for indigenous Australians stories, legends and reality are often interwoven.
Many people regard myths as old and fanciful, and any correspondence to reality is seen as happenstance. To think so is to misunderstand myths: they’re not mere fictions but explanations, theories about why this is the way our world is, drawing on what can be seen, and what is presumed to be but unseen, from debil-debils to big bangs and string theory. However, when a modern writer combines strange observations with imaginative explanations, we often decide the work is science fiction, or, worse, the claims of a charlatan or crackpot. On that basis, we can happily set aside anything to do with astrology, astral conversations, mediums and tarot card readings, but they remain a fertile ground for best sellers. For example, many claim to find links between the signs of the zodiac, dates of birth, and peoples’ later achievements and interests, but although there are a few very weak correlations, they are easily explained by other factors.
Some of these accounts become famous for a while. A classic example comes from the work of Immanuel Velikovsky. A writer, his scientific training began in Moscow, later in Berlin, and Edinburgh, and he even worked with Albert Einstein for three years at the forerunner of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is usually described as an independent scholar, and undertook training as a psychoanalyst. His most famous book was Worlds in Collision. [v]
In some ways Velikovsky was a modern myth teller. He pulled together examples and material from a bewildering variety of sources to illustrate and confirm his underlying story, and what a story that was. His books contain an amazing array of bizarre ideas, most relying on events supposedly occurring over the past 8,000 years, whether revealed in religious texts or ‘historical’ accounts. I don’t want to spoil the fun of reading, but his claims are improbably exciting. Back in 1950 he was writing about the catastrophic extinction of many species rather than by gradual Darwinian means, catastrophes that he saw recorded in the myths, legends and the written history of ancient cultures and civilisations. Velikovsky pointed to similar accounts in many cultures, and proposed that they referred to the same real events. To use my earlier example, he records how the flood in the Hebrew Bible can also be ‘found’ in a Greek legend, and in an Indian saga. True to his training, Velikovsky used his psychoanalytic concept of “Cultural Amnesia” as the process to explain why these literal records came to be regarded as mere myths or fictions.
His book gets really thrilling when he moves on to explain natural catastrophes as the result of close encounters between the Earth and other planets in our solar system, including Saturn, Mars, Jupiter, and Venus. He argued they had moved in different orbits from those we see today, and did so within human memory. To do this, he gave a key role to electro-magnetic forces as a way to get around classical orbital mechanics. An amusing crackpot? [vi] Having said that, rather than deciding to ignore them, we could examine some of Velikovsky’s ideas in the same way we look at myths, just as we might examine indigenous Australian dreamtime stories. Anthropologists analyse myths to reveal their underlying logic and importance, both through the structure of the myths (one of the techniques use in structural anthropology), but also as guide to how the people concerned made sense of their environment.
As a scientist, Velikovsky was fascinated by the anomalies of our solar system, and was trying to explain them. Briefly, the ‘standard story’ of the formation of the planets is they were formed from a disc shaped cloud of dust and gas. The planets emerged through ‘accretion’, beginning as dust grains in orbit around the still forming sun, and gradually increased through collisions. A well-established theory, but this ‘nebular hypothesis’ doesn’t work well with two planets, Uranus and Neptune, which appear too large for where they are seen There’s another puzzle in the small size of Mercury. Velikovsky managed to explain all this with a theory about planets having moved in different orbits previously, but, improbably, changing them a very short time span.
Seventy years later, work continues on resolving these same puzzles. Current theory suggests Neptune and Uranus formed in orbits near Jupiter and Saturn where more material was available, and subsequently migrated to their current positions over hundreds of millions of years. There’s a lot more, but, as a further example, the same theory also proposes that Jupiter and Saturn had migrated inwards, before they moved to their present positions. When closer in, Jupiter absorbed much of the material that would otherwise have made Mars larger. Some 40 years after his death, Velikovsky would have smiled, although his time scale was 8,000 years, and the timing was more like 4-4.5 bn years ago! Was planetary migration just Velikovsky’s lucky guess? Possibly, but we do know he studied mathematics and physics, and his views hold a kernel of truth. The latest thinking is given in an excellent BBC series: “In a new, groundbreaking series we’ll be telling the story of the planets as never before. This drama is on a planetary scale … We’ll meet tragic Mars – once a vibrant water world yet destined by a twist of fate to become the barren, cold desert world we see today. Or tyrannical Jupiter, which the latest science suggests, wandered through the early solar system using its massive size to create havoc and destruction which could have destroyed the earth.” Why, Velikovsky couldn’t have put it better! [vii]
Too tenuous for you? Let’s look at a real crank. Erich von Däniken is the Swiss author of several books making claims about extraterrestrial influences on early human culture, including his best-selling Chariots of the Gods, published in 1968. Von Däniken didn’t look at wandering planets, but focussed on far more exciting material, such as ancient astronauts and god-like space travellers who left their landing sites marked for us to see. He knew how to capture the attention of the gullible, and his short, readable book is crammed with ‘facts’ and intriguing illustrations. I won’t waste space on what he says to say, it’s ‘good for a laugh’, and is probably still available in local libraries if you’d like to be amused. As for Von Däniken himself, he was convicted and served time for fraud. Undeterred, he later co-founded the Archaeology, Astronautics and SETI Research Association (AAS RA), and designed Mystery Park which opened in Interlaken in 2003, but collapsed three years later (the site is now the basis of the Jungfrau Park). You can’t keep a good man down: still here, his latest book, The Gods Never Left Us, came out in 2018.
Myths and charlatans pursue a common purpose; both offer ways to help us ‘understand’ the confusing and complex world around us without relying on verified science. In many cultures, some of the more compelling myths are the ‘trickster’ stories. For many westerners, the trickster is one of the cards in the tarot pack. However, tricksters appear in many North American myths, characters who are often cunning, sometimes foolish and frequently both, disrupting normal life and then usually re-establishing it in a different form. The trickster openly questions and mocks authority, breaking rules, boasting, and playing tricks on both humans and gods.
Lévi-Strauss was fascinated by the trickster in indigenous North American cultures, observing the trickster has a contradictory and unpredictable personality, and is frequently depicted as a raven or a coyote, two creatures that mediate between life and death. I can’t summarise his analysis here, but Lévi-Strauss points out that the raven and coyote eat carrion and are therefore halfway between herbivores and carnivores: like beasts of prey, they eat meat; like herbivores, they don’t catch their food. Thus, he argues, they offer an analogy to the opposition between life and death, and provide insight into the worlds of the living and the dead. [viii] I rather suspect Lévi-Strauss was something of a trickster himself, and possibly a myth maker about myths!
If myths are not just entertaining but in some ways explanatory, then some modern writers may also combine the fantastical with important truths. Over-excited by the ‘evidence’ he found in religious and historical texts, Immanuel Velikovsky was written off as a crank or worse, even though we can now look back and say he did identify important issues in analysing planetary motion. Erich von Däniken is a different kettle of fish, a straightforward huckster and a fraud.
This seems to take us to Donald Trump. Among the myriad of lies and attacks, he has been a salesman for hydroxychloroquine, a malaria treatment he has touted and used as a protection for coronavirus, despite studies demonstrating it is no more effective than conventional care and possibly dangerous. He also promoted ingesting bleach! However, like the von Dänikens of this world, he doesn’t seem to care. Not because Mr. Covfefe has unmatched intelligence, but he sees it won’t matter, either way. If this treatment proves effective, he’ll be able to crow about his brilliance; if it doesn’t, it will disappear under the waves of new claims and assertions. Such is the fate of charlatans and cranks: they are believed until their stories are dismissed or forgotten.
[i] This is abbreviated from Ian Short’s version: http://ianshort.com/wilpena-pound-dreamtime-story. Please note he acknowledges the Adnyamathanha people of the northern Flinders Ranges as the owners and custodians of the Kingfisher Dreaming and the Yurlu Ngukandanh story, and expresses his respect for their heritage and culture.
[ii] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-04/flinders-ranges-worm-ikaria-wariootia-oldest-human-ancestor/12119120
[iii] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/find-meteorites-listen-legends-australian-aborigines-180952941/
[iv] https://time.com/44631/noah-christians-flood-aronofsky/
[v] London, Gollancz, 1950. I have the Abacus Edition from 1972.
[vi] http://defendgaia.org/bobk/velidelu.html
[vii] https://www.bbcearth.com/theplanets/
[viii] Structural Anthropology, Basic Books, 1963, page 224
