has anyone read this book?

Josh Geller · 07 Sep 2003, 02:25 · from urth-v0309.mbox · original

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From: Josh Geller <brunians at brunians.org>
Subject: Re: (urth) has anyone read this book?
Date: 06 Sep 2003 19:25:58 -0700
Message-ID: <urth-v0309-4054 at digest.urth.net>
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On Sat, 2003-09-06 at 18:41, Lisa Schaffer-Doggett wrote:
> On Saturday, September 6, 2003, at 07:07 PM, Josh Geller wrote:
>> On Sat, 2003-09-06 at 18:20, Lisa Schaffer-Doggett wrote:

>>> http://www.catastrophism.com/cdrom/pubs/books/saturn/

>>> All this site shows is the table of contents and a synopsis but I'd=20
>>> bet
>>> dollars GW has read it.

>> What evidence do you have that Wolfe has ever bought into this kind of
>> Velikovskite claptrap?
=20
> Oooh, elaborate please.  I know nothing about any of this stuff.  I was=20
> just intrigued by the table of contents.  If it's too much bs for the=20
> list send it off list.

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=20
conclusions. Immanuel Velikovsky is the most famous of these. He=20
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=20
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.

=2E

--=20

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