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Mankind in Amnesia

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Mankind in Amnesia, (Doubleday, New York, 1982) by Immanuel Velikovsky

Dr. Velikovsky gave us the controversial best seller "Worlds in Collision" (1950), and sequels on the same theme including "Ages in Chaos" (1952) and "Earth in upheaval" (1955). "Mankind in Amnesia" is the first of several to be published posthumously and it develops the thesis addressed in his other books, namely the catastrophic history of our planet-so traumatic that the human race has rejected it from memory and refuses to face evidence of it. He postulates near collisions between Earth and Venus and other bodies.

Velikovsky, a Russian-born Jewish psychiatrist, uses his theory to justify a literal reading of the Exodus. The miraculous events (the parting of the Red Sea, manna from Heaven, etc.) he ascribes to natural causes.

He was quite a salesman. Although his formal education, gained throughout Europe, was in medicine, obviously his great interest was astronomy, cosmology, geology and the architectonics of the universe. And his writing has had an impact on those who pursue knowledge in those areas. The late Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, said of the book, "...an extraordinarily important book, beautifully researched and devastatingly true." Or, so he is quoted on the dust jacket. The late Carl Sagan, on the other hand, calls his approach "shoddy, ignorant and doctrinaire," and strongly implies that his scientific understanding is sadly lacking (Broca's Brain, Random House, N.Y., 1974.)

So, Velikovsky's theories, to put it mildly, are not universally embraced by his peers. Nevertheless, this is a good book. He has a good vocabulary and he uses it enchantingly and persuasively to sell his great idea. It is a book for the literate person who relishes new ideas and fresh approaches to old ones.

Joseph Pierre,
Author of THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS: Our Journey Through Eternity

I went to a lot of trouble to locate this book in another town's library. It was well worth the effort.

Velikovsky endured scathing abuse by the scientific community for his unconventional theories merging cosmology, geology, archeology and mythology. Despite his serious research to support his theories, he was proclaimed unqualified to discuss subjects outside his field of medicine.

Well, the ideas set forth in this book cannot be dismissed by similar claims. Velikovsky was, by training, a psychoanalyst trained by a student of Freud, eminently qualifying him to discuss the possibility that our species has repressed the memories of earth-shaking events too terrible and frightening to acknowledge.

It gives one a new perspective on the vicious denunciations of Velikovsky's unorthodox theories by mainstream scientists. Just why did the scientific community find Velikovsky and his ideas so threatening? Read this book and you may wonder if Velikovsky was really onto something.

"The agitation and trepidation preceding global upheavals, the destruction and despair that accompanied them and the horror of possible repetition all caused a variety of reactions, at the base of which was the need to forget, but also the urge to emulate."
- Immanuel Velikovsky

Mankind suffers from traumatic amnesia. This is the result of our ancestors having survived global cataclysms in the past. The planets have made close approaches to each other, and immense interplanetary electrical discharges have wreaked havoc on Earth and other planets. Our ancestors have encoded this (urge to emulate) in mythology, petroglyphs, allegory, and ritual.

Science took a wrong turn 60 some odd years ago when they chose to unscientifically attack, ridicule, and ignore Velikovsky's Magnum Opus- Worlds in Collision. While Velikovsky made some conceptual errors by force fitting astronomical events into certain time-frames, and many question his particular interpretations of mythology, his overlaying idea that electromagnetism plays a far greater role in celestial mechanics than was, or is admitted, has been verified and confirmed. See: Thunderbolts(dot)info

So why hasn't modern Astronomy, Cosmology, and Astrophysics caught on? Why is NASA "baffled" on a regular basis? It may be partially because this "Traumatic Amnesia" is so pervasive and powerful that we collectively deceive ourselves in order to spare ourselves the pain of actually remembering. But of course by denying our past we sabotage our future.... as the only cure offered by Velikovsky to this trauma based amnesia is... Full disclosure.

By recognizing the fact that The Earth has been subject to disasters on a global scale, and that such paroxysms have shaped our collective psyche, is to free oneself from the conceptual "coddling" that underlies modern scientific and indeed collective "civilized" thought. We do not live in a quiet corner of the galaxy. Life in space for Stars, Planets and indeed the beings that inhabit them is precarious and uncertain. Every moment is a gift.

So Velikovsky urges us to remember, for if we do not, we may be doomed to act out and repeat our trauma (as victims often do) in war, and weapons on a mass scale. According to Velikovsky, the stakes are high, and the hour is late. I would tend to agree. He offers this hopeful passage-

"We are in a race with the reaper,we hastened, he tarried, we won. I hope it is not the other way around." - Epilogue

Read this book, read Earth in Upheaval, read Worlds in Collision.
Remember.

This is perhaps Velikovsky's weakest book - yet it's still a fascinating read. (Would Velikovsky even have been capable of writing something uninteresting?) Mankind in Amnesia, as the title suggests, argues that human beings as a whole have, through a process similar to amnesia, forgotten the great catastrophes which afflicted the earth throughout our early history. These events were so traumatic, he claims, that human beings involuntarily suppressed them into the unconscious. As a good Freudian, he also suggests that, because these things have been repressed, they are psychologically damaging, and he hints that violent ideologies, such as Nazism and Communism, subconsciously try to recreate the catastrophes of nature which haunt their collective unconscious.
You don't need to agree with everything Velikovsky says here to admit that some of what he proposes is plausible. It is undeniable that utopian cults, such as Nazism and Communism, which imagine an eternal earth free of catastrophes upon which their perfect society can flourish forever, tend to be extremely violent; and it is equally undeniable that, on the other hand, cults which stress the existence of catastrophes, such as Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists, tend to be pacifist. It should be remarked also that Hinduism, which has as a central feature of belief the cyclic destruction and regeneration of the earth, is one of the most pacifist of all religions.
Yet interpretations other than an unconscious Freudian desire to recreate the catastrophes they have suppressed from their minds could be forwarded to explain the violence of utopian cults. Velikovsky is not convincing here. Not that a "Collective Unconscious" does not exist: the evidence suggests that it does. Instinct is a very obvious example of the Collective Unconscious at work. I'm just not convinced that the Freudian interpretation of many things is the most valid. People do not need suppressed memories of catastrophes to be violent - they have a thousand other reasons for being so. Having said that, there is no question that, should the recent cataclysms Velikovsky wrote of be fully accepted by academics and our culture in general, then the world probably would be a less violent place. But this would not be because of the supposedly therapeutic effect of bringing unconscious traumas to mind: it would be simply the result of men realizing the futility of empire-building. (It's a striking thought that, had a natural history and cosmology similar to Velikovsky's prevailed in the 1860s, rather than the Darwin/Lyellist one, then we'd probably have avoided the horrors of Stalin and Hitler).
Returning to the question of the Collective Unconscious, it is strange to see the author (and uncharacteristically unkind of him) try to deprive Carl Jung of priority for this idea: and his attempt to portray Jung as a secret Nazi sympathiser strikes one as bizarre.
Velikovsky goes through a brief history of the belief in and rejection of catastrophes, and comes to the rather strange notion that this was behind the workings of the Inquisition. And equally oddly he traces both the Inquisition and modern Uniformitarianism to Aristotle. But Giordano Bruno and Galileo were not put on trial for questioning Aristotle, or insisting on catastrophes; they were put on trial for questioning the Scriptures. The greatest "crime" committed by Bruno was the preaching of reincarnation; and the origins of the Inquisition, contrary to what Velikovsky says, lie firmly in the Christian idea of the uniqueness and exclusiveness of Christ's message; and this in turn is traceable to the biblical roots of Christianity. Velikovsky either could not, or would not, recognize this. The reason Aristotle, rather than Plato, became the philosophical cornerstone of medieval philosophy had little or nothing to do with what either said about celestial mechanics, and much more to do with the fact that nothing of what Aristotle said on religion was obviously contrary to Christian dogma. Plato, on the other hand, wrote a great deal about these things, and what he said on many issues, such as his preaching of transmigration, was clearly incompatible with orthodox Christianity. Hence Plato was sidelined.
One final point, if there is a psychological scotoma among modern mankind with regard to catastrophes, it is a blindness that afflicts only the more educated and wealthy and generally comfortable members of society. My experience is that most of the uneducated, as well as those generally in the "lower ranks" of society, accept the existence of past catastrophes such as the Flood, as a given fact. And surely this is where Velikovsky should have looked for his "amnesia" explanation. Those whose life is difficult tend not to fear catastrophes or the "end of the world". For our modern materialist civilization, which places its hopes in a future in this world, rather in the other world, all talk of catastrophes is anathema. People, in short, see what they want to see, and believe what they want to believe. The therapy involved in recovery of "unconscious" or "suppressed" memories lies then in the acceptance of things that are unpleasant to us, such as our mortality, or our immorality. This is what is therapeutic about recovery of lost memories: what used to be called, before this age of appalling psychobabble, humility.

This book was great in that it tied to the previous Velikovsky books. It brought all the ideas together in a concise manner. It would also be helpful to those reading Velikovsky for the first time, since it is simpler and easier to follow, with references to the former books for those who are interested in reading more in depth.

I've been a devotee of Velikovsky's work for nearly 40 years, particularly his historical reconstruction. But his cosmic thesis, whether right or wrong, was also compelling and opened up whole new vistas of thought. Whether right or wrong, it is atrocious to hear the slander in some of these reviews of Velikovsy's books heaped on them by people who simply assume he was wrong without saying why, or assume that conventional science was correct without even questioning. No scholar since Einstein shook the shoulders of our minds as Velikovsky did, and in a greater number of academic fields than Einstein did. Still, this work, while compelling and offering much of interest, is based on Carl Yung's concept of a collective subconscious mind. Yung was strongly influenced by Hinduism. He saw people around the world being essentially the same and, rather than think that their Creator might have created them all essentially the same, postulated the collective subconscious mind to account for the similarities. From this, Velikovsky postulated collective amnesia to account for the fact that we have forgotten the celestial and terrestrial cataclysms that shook the planet in historical times. Our ancient ancestors wrote them down, but in the age of uniformitarianism (the assumption that the earth developed totally through the slow gradual peaceful processes of weathering and erosion with no major cataclysms) our ancestors were written off as ignorant savages and Velikovsky's work was ridiculed, slandered and scorned, as it still is today by the undiscerning and unscholarly. But, as I do not believe in Hinduism, this is the one work of his that, however well-written, I do not accept the premise of.