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.
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?