has anyone read this book?

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

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

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

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. .

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