Immanuel Velikovsky

Immanuel Velikovsky
Born	(1895-06-10)June 10, 1895 Vitebsk, Russian Empire (now Belarus)
Died	November 17, 1979(1979-11-17) (aged 84) Princeton, New Jersey, United States
Residence	United States
Nationality	Russian-born American (Jewish)
Known for	Worlds in Collision, Catastrophism, Revised Chronology, Electric Universe
Scientific career
Fields	Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, Comparative Mythology, Catastrophism

Immanuel Velikovsky (Russian: Иммануил Великовский; Vitebsk, 10 June 1895 – Princeton, 17 November 1979) was a Russian-born American independent scholar, physician and psychoanalyst, best known as the author of a series of controversial books reinterpreting the events of ancient history — above all the 1950 bestseller Worlds in Collision. Drawing on comparative mythology and ancient literary sources (including the Bible), Velikovsky argued that the Earth suffered catastrophic near-collisions with other planets — principally Venus and Mars — within human memory, and that electromagnetic forces play a far greater role in celestial mechanics than mainstream astronomy allows.

His ideas were vigorously rejected by the academic establishment, yet his books sold widely and inspired a generation of catastrophist and dissident researchers. The dispute over his work and the campaign to suppress it became known as "the Velikovsky affair." His emphasis on planetary catastrophe and cosmic electricity later became a foundational influence on the Electric Universe movement and on the work of researchers such as David Talbott and Wallace Thornhill.

Early Life and Education

Velikovsky was born in Vitebsk, in the Russian Empire (now Belarus), into a Jewish family. A gifted student, he traveled widely in his youth and studied at Montpellier in France and in Palestine before enrolling in medicine. He studied natural sciences at the University of Edinburgh, and took his medical degree (M.D.) at the University of Moscow in 1921. He subsequently studied psychoanalysis in Vienna under Wilhelm Stekel, an early associate of Sigmund Freud, and edited a psychiatric journal, Scripta Academica.

Career

In the early 1920s, while living in Berlin, Velikovsky conceived and organized Scripta Universitatis, a collection of scholarly papers by leading Jewish scholars intended to help establish a Hebrew university. Albert Einstein edited the mathematics-physics volume of the series. This effort contributed to the founding of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Velikovsky then settled in Mandatory Palestine, where for some fifteen years he practiced as a physician and psychoanalyst.

In 1939 Velikovsky traveled to the United States intending to research a book on the psychoanalytic figures behind Freud's Moses and Monotheism. That research drew him into a study of the biblical Exodus, which in turn led him to propose that the plagues and upheavals recorded in ancient texts were literal accounts of global natural catastrophes. What began as a historical inquiry became a decades-long reconstruction of the recent history of the solar system.

The Catastrophist Thesis

In Worlds in Collision (1950), Velikovsky argued that around the 15th century BCE the planet Venus was ejected as a comet-like body from Jupiter, made two catastrophic close passes to the Earth, and only later settled into its present near-circular orbit. These encounters, he held, produced the plagues of Egypt, the parting of the sea, and countless other events preserved in the myths and sacred literatures of cultures around the world. A later series of disturbances involving Mars, he argued, brought further catastrophes down to roughly the 7th century BCE.

Velikovsky maintained that such events could not be explained by gravitation alone and that electrical and magnetic forces operate between celestial bodies. On this basis he made a number of predictions that ran against the scientific consensus of his day — among them that Venus would be found to be extremely hot, that Jupiter would emit radio noise, and that the Earth possesses a magnetosphere — claims his supporters later cited as vindications when space-age observations followed.

The Velikovsky Affair

The reaction of the scientific community to Worlds in Collision was fierce. Before the book even appeared, astronomers organized against it, and the original publisher, Macmillan — pressured by a threatened boycott of its lucrative textbook division — transferred the still-bestselling title to Doubleday within months of publication. The episode, widely regarded as a striking case of the suppression of unorthodox ideas, was documented by Alfred de Grazia and colleagues in The Velikovsky Affair: The Warfare of Science and Scientism (1966). The controversy resurfaced in 1974 at a session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where Velikovsky's ideas were debated before a large audience with Carl Sagan among his critics.

Legacy

Although mainstream science continued to reject his specific reconstructions, Velikovsky's insistence on catastrophism, on the historical value of myth, and on the role of electromagnetism in the cosmos left a lasting mark on independent research. The journals Pensée (which ran the ten-issue series Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered, 1972–1974), Kronos, and later Aeon grew up around his work, and his influence is openly acknowledged by proponents of the Electric Universe model and the Saturn Model of David Talbott and Wallace Thornhill.

Books

• 1950 - Worlds in Collision
• 1952 - Ages in Chaos
• 1955 - Earth in Upheaval
• 1960 - Oedipus and Akhnaton
• 1977 - Peoples of the Sea
• 1978 - Ramses II and His Time
• 1982 - Mankind in Amnesia (posthumous)
• 1983 - Stargazers and Gravediggers (posthumous)

External Links

• The Velikovsky Encyclopedia
• The Immanuel Velikovsky Archive
• Immanuel Velikovsky — Wikipedia