TH7. Vertebral Euhemerism

In 1993, respected cosmologist Fred Hoyle, whose speculations on backwards causation, extraterrestrial viruses, and intelligent interstellar dust-clouds had already rendered him congenial to Barker, would himself deliver a lecture attempting to trace the intersection between Solar System disasters and the major events of human prehistory. Over the past 10,000 years, he would claim, cometary cataclysms have triggered the Iron Age, germinated world religions, and embedded their legacy deep in the recesses of the Abrahamic psyche (which, therefore, retains submerged relics of this ‘strange nightmare of the past’).1

Hoyle had once met Immanuel Velikovsky at Princeton and, despite dismissing his methodologies as unsound, proclaimed that the furore provoked by Worlds in Collision’s egregious anti-uniformitarianism nonetheless uncovered something troubling:

[C]ould it be that Velikovsky had revealed, admittedly in a form that was scientifically unacceptable, a situation that astronomers are under a cultural imperative to hide? Could it be that, somewhere in the shadows, there is a past history that it is inadmissible to discuss?2

As documented in The Velikovsky Affair,3 in 1950, Velikovsky had submitted Worlds in Collision to Macmillan. It was accepted, but triggered a reaction from the scientific community that many regarded as bordering on the neurotic. After concerted threats of boycott, Macmillan was forced to transfer the book to Doubleday (where it duly became a popular bestseller).4 The book itself, deranged in its scope and aims, argues for a universal catastrophist euhemerism: reading the collected works of mythology and religion, of bard and sage, as so many memory-traces of earth-shuddering calamities and the interplanetary interactions that caused them. Such theories on the origins of religions date back at least to Hume and Montesquieu, yet Velikovsky took them to dizzying extremes, seeking to provide a prognosis of the human condition that advanced ‘from the deepest recesses of man’s inner torment to the outer reaches of our solar system’.5

What is interesting is that Velikovsky was trained neither as an astrophysicist nor as an archaeologist, but had made his living as a clinical psychiatrist. His euhemerist machinations—those that made him infamous—were, arguably, mere by-products of his firmly-held psychoanalytic suppositions on what he called ‘deeply imbedded phylogenetic memories’ and the ‘inherited trauma’ with which they were freighted.6

In 1982’s Mankind in Amnesia (a retrospective of the 1950s controversy and analysis of his detractors’ motives), Velikovsky explicates this, his motivating backdrop. We are, he says, a palimpsest of ‘inherited unconscious memory’; ‘the human race is a carrier of traumatic experience of earlier generations’; and the more distressing the impression, the more likely it is to become ‘permanent through unconscious mneme or mneme complex’. As Velikovsky writes, ‘the most devastating experiences are the most deeply buried and their reawakening is accompanied by a sensation of terror’.7 (Hence the tremendous provocation of and neurotic reaction to Worlds in Collision.) With this in view, the Russian psychoanalyst announced that the upheavals of our ‘Atomic Age’ (that threshold of ‘profound significance’ for Alsberg) had unleashed within us ancient neuroses via reactivating markers of phyletic paroxysm. It was nuclear detonation that provided the reverberant ‘chord’, awaking our ‘ancient engram’:

The two World Wars, the ashes of Hiroshima and the cinders of Nagasaki touched such a chord; then the story of ancient cosmic upheavals needed to be told so that the lost phylogenetic memories could come forth with sails unfurled from the sealed haven they entered thousands of years ago.8

In a phenomenological observation as Ballardian as it is Barkerian, he maintains that we feel this revividus as ‘a throb in the arteries, a hidden key to the endocrine system, the solar plexus, medulla, gray matter’. A chord in the cord:

[W]herever the ancient terror had dug itself in, something started to vibrate slightly differently, the key made a partial turning, some mnemes lit up, a spark flying forth and back and around the million cells holding the engrams of racial origin—a network criss-crossed by flashes.9

The elder portions of the spine resonate to the nuclear sunset; blast wave and recollection cascade. (‘An avalanche backwards into the past’, as Ballard would put it.) And the ‘sealed havens’ from which these phylogenetic memories burst—the sacral sarcophagi of cosmic trauma—are, of course, the ‘nerve cells as carriers of memory’.10

It was in a paper published in the 1930s, when he was working as a psychiatrist, that Velikovsky had first ventured these notions. Entitled ‘On the Physical Existence of the Noetic World’, the paper argued that, distributed throughout the CNS, ‘nerve-energies’ (Nervenenergie) conserve memories across the aeons. Ergo, ‘the thoughts of man are common property’; and one can talk of the ‘immortality’ of experience, and even of a mnemonic ‘consciousness of inorganic material’ (ein Bewußtsein der anorganischen Materie).11 Realizing the truly troubling nature of such ‘immortality of experience’, Barker would make this a keystone idea, extrapolating Velikovskian suggestions into the conviction that his own bodily ‘tics’ were but the reverberant echoes of cosmic traumatisms.

Velikovsky later recounted that, in 1931, he had sent his article to a fellow researcher, who approvingly affirmed that he was in ‘complete agreement’ with Velikovsky’s conclusions on the matter. Indeed, this fellow explorer of the unconscious of mankind would return, throughout his life, to the question of recapitulation and inorganic memory. His name: Sigmund Freud.12