Subject: (urth) has anyone read this book?

From: Lisa Schaffer-Doggett <harlekin at earthlink.net>
Date: Sun, 07 Sep 2003 01:20:08 +0000

All this site shows is the table of contents and a synopsis but I'd bet 
dollars GW has read it.  Anyone know anything about it?  My reading 
list is hopelessly backed up.

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From: Josh Geller <brunians at brunians.org>
Date: Sun, 07 Sep 2003 02:07:32 +0000

On Sat, 2003-09-06 at 18:20, Lisa Schaffer-Doggett wrote:
> http://www.catastrophism.com/cdrom/pubs/books/saturn/

> dollars GW has read it.

What evidence do you have that Wolfe has ever bought into this kind of
Velikovskite claptrap?

.

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From: Lisa Schaffer-Doggett <harlekin at earthlink.net>
Date: Sun, 07 Sep 2003 01:41:50 +0000

> What evidence do you have that Wolfe has ever bought into this kind of

Oooh, elaborate please.  I know nothing about any of this stuff.  I was 
just intrigued by the table of contents.  If it's too much bs for the 
list send it off list.

curiously
Don

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From: Josh Geller <brunians at brunians.org>
Date: Sun, 07 Sep 2003 02:25:58 +0000

> just intrigued by the table of contents.  If it's too much bs for the 

Very briefly: in "Hamlet's Mill", Santillana and Dechend describe the
technical vocabulary of myth, an ancient and extremely widespread
astronomically based terminology. A number of people have, in the past,
previously noticed bits of this terminology and come to wrong 
conclusions. Immanuel Velikovsky is the most famous of these. He 
combined his reading of ancient texts with an aggressive ignorance
of both physics and the characteristics of reality to present a
version of history that had an immense comet being emitted by Jupiter,
having several close encounters with the Earth, and eventually 
settling down to be the planet Venus.

I think Velikovsky is dead (he'd be like 100 if he wasn't), but he
has many followers, each and every one of them as colorfully and
logically insane as he was. This guy is obviously one of them; he
bears the marks.

.

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From: James Jordan <jbjordan4 at cox.net>
Date: Sun, 07 Sep 2003 20:27:53 +0000

At 08:20 PM 9/6/2003, you wrote:
>dollars GW has read it.  Anyone know anything about it?  My reading list 
>is hopelessly backed up.

         It's post-Velikhovskian hyper-Velikhovskian stuff. Astral 
catastrophism. All kinds of material explicable on other grounds is put 
together to argue that the planets were moving all around the solar system 
in the ancient world. I know the book from some studies a few years ago. It 
was pretty obscure then. I seriously doubt GW knows of it or would care.
         GW, now, IS open to historical revisionism. He likes Barry Fell's 
books about the Phoenician, etc., visits/explorations of the Western 
continents (the Americas). He's interested in other chronological and 
cultural revisionism of the ancient world history, which after all (despite 
one article after another that parrots the same thing), is in fact all that 
certain. There are, for instance, good arguments for shifting the date of 
the fall of Troy to about 800 BC, thus revitalizing the story of Aeneas's 
founding of proto-Rome. (See *Centuries of Darkness* by James).
         But I seriously doubt if GW is interested in astral catastrophism.
         While I'm at it, I think it would be well to remember when rooting 
around for sources for GW's stuff, that his main source is the Bible and 
Church history. I don't doubt that he has drawn motifs from Graves, and 
maybe from Santillana, but the Bible contains a lot of the same motifs and 
symbolism, and in the form Wolfe sees as foundational and authoritative. 
Wolfe need go no farther than the Bible to see four-faced cherubim as 
guardians of doors, or to find four great empire-ruling monsters arising 
from the sea (Daniel chapter 7).
         I'm not denying other sources. But I recall when I asked GW about 
Briah and Yesod, and asked about the rest of the Qabbala worlds, that he 
replied that he had just grabbed those two words out and used them for his 
own narrative. I'm not sure his use of Quetzl(acoatl) is any more than just 
the use of the name and a couple of common associations (serpentgod from 
elsewhere), for his own purposes. I don't know for sure, but I wonder if 
reading up on Aztec/Mayan myths in detail is going to illuminate what GW 
actually intended.
         This is just a caution about assuming too much, and/or ranging too 
far in seeking for sources for things in the books.
         FWIW.

Nutria

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