Scientia Press

Based on his interpretation of ancient sources, Immanuel Velikovsky argued famously that Venus had emerged from Jupiter as a comet; interacted with the Earth and Mars in the second and first millennia BC, causing the Bronze Age catastrophes; and then finally settled into a nearly circular orbit of the Sun.

Three lines of reasoning support a Revised Venus Theory.

First, instead of the various unpersuasive suggestions that Velikovsky and others have made for how a cometary Venus could have emerged from Jupiter, we should consider the possible consequences of the immense gravitational field of Jupiter, which pulls toward it a stream of asteroids and comets, as with Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994.

Once a leading theory of the origin of the Earth-Moon system, the Capture Theory is simple and intuitively plausible.  The numerous instances of moons with retrograde orbits support it.  The lunar orbit’s three moments of inertia are consistent with a past very eccentric orbit, which fit a capture1.  However, the Moon would have to come from a different part of the solar system to account for its very depleted iron compared to the Earth’s iron, which means that it would approach the Earth at a high velocity that would prevent capture.  Researchers have searched in vain for a braking mechanism that would slow it down so it could be captured.  Still, the accumulated evidence and arguments make the Capture Theory a viable one.

But

If we can interpret ancient myths correctly, they could lead us to more accurate and penetrating views of the history of the solar system.  They might teach us about the forces at work and explain anomalies bequeathed to us by a long-hidden past.  But how can we interpret these myths, the products of minds so far removed from ours?  How do we know which interpretation is correct, if any?  Are we doomed to speculate without ever achieving certainty?

Here we will interpret two Bronze Age myths to illustrate the high scientific value such myths might contain.  We will also see how easy it can be to understand a myth once the right interpretation becomes available.

When Venus first appeared in the skies around 2525 BC, ancient peoples worldwide strove to come to terms with this brilliant and awesome new comet-planet (the best account is in Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, though it has been corrected in a Revised Venus Theory).  That meant assigning the deity a gender and a name.

In the Near East, they tried both genders.  In its masculine incarnation, Venus became the Bull of Heaven (as Velikovsky pointed out, the comet-planet’s body blocked the sun’s rays from the central portion of its tail and thus it was seen as having two horns).  In its feminine version, Venus was called Ishtar or Astarte; and in the Levant Astarte was depicted with serpents in her hands—the twin tails of the comet.

In Greece, according to Velikovsky, planet Venus was originally named Athena.

Historian and scientific researcher Kenneth J. Dillon discusses his theory The Outer Solar System Origin of the Terrestrial Planets (OSSO). OSSO explains how Mercury, Earth, the Moon, and Mars originated outside the orbit of Saturn, then were pulled inward by Jupiter’s gravity. Tidal friction heated them to incandescence, then they tidally locked to Jupiter and were separated, moving as comets into their present orbits. See also https://www.scientiapress.com/outer-solar-system-origin.

Outer Solar System Origin of the Terrestrial Planets

Decades of meticulous investigation have revealed many features of the 1st Century BC Antikythera Mechanism, a portable planetarium that demonstrated the motion of celestial objects.  But we must question researchers’ conclusion that the Mechanism incorrectly represented the orbit of Mars, in particular, by roughly 30 degrees during retrograde motion1.

This discrepancy seems anomalous in a sophisticated device that otherwise exhibited a much smaller range of error.  So maybe there is some other explanation.