Part One: Velikovsky’s Cosmic Faith
Why would Immanuel Velikovsky—a man trained in psychology, not physics—risk ridicule by proposing that electromagnetic forces, not gravity, caused planets to careen through the solar system and nearly destroy Earth? Why cling to a vision so thoroughly dismantled by experts like Carl Sagan?
Because for Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision wasn’t just a scientific hypothesis. It was a revelation.
He believed that ancient myths—Egyptian, Babylonian, Chinese, Mesoamerican—encoded real memories of planetary catastrophes: floods, fire from the sky, long nights and longer days. He saw in these stories a forgotten history of the solar system, one in which Venus was born from Jupiter and nearly collided with Earth before settling into orbit.
Mainstream scientists scoffed. Sagan, in his 1979 book Broca’s Brain, systematically dismantled Velikovsky’s physics: the energy required to eject a planet from Jupiter, the implausibility of its current orbit, the insignificance of electromagnetic forces at planetary scales. He admitted Velikovsky was no fraud—but declared him demonstrably wrong.
Yet Velikovsky persisted. He endured mockery, exclusion from academic journals, and decades of scientific isolation because he believed—not just in his data, but in a broader vision: that myth and memory, long dismissed as superstition, held truths modern science had forgotten.
Velikovsky died in 1979, disillusioned and exhausted. But to his supporters, he was a prophetic voice—a man who saw patterns others refused to see, and who dared to challenge the dogma of his time. Here are some personal reflections on what may have motivated, even driven Velikovsky to persist in the face of such great opposition:
1. Velikovsky’s Personal Convictions: Faith as Intellectual Motivation
Velikovsky was not a trained physicist or astronomer; he was a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and student of ancient literature and comparative mythology. His intellectual roots were in the Freudian method of uncovering hidden truths in dreams, myths, and texts—not in empirical experimentation.
But more than that, Velikovsky had a messianic streak in his work. In her memoir The Glory and the Torment, Velikovsky’s daughter Shulamit Velikovsky-Chayes describes her father as deeply committed to truth, but also torn between intellectual isolation and the need for vindication. For him, Worlds in Collision was not just a scientific treatise—it was a cosmic unmasking of forgotten truths, hidden in the texts of ancient peoples. In that sense, yes, the book was a kind of expression of faith—not religious in the orthodox sense, but in the sense of a metaphysical conviction that ancient wisdom and myth had explanatory power equal to or greater than modern science.
2. Velikovsky as a Tragic Humanist
Many critics, including Carl Sagan, recognized that Velikovsky was sincere and not a fraud. Sagan explicitly said in Broca’s Brain, “Velikovsky is neither a crank nor a charlatan.” Sagan’s deeper critique was not of Velikovsky’s motives, but of his method. And that’s what makes this so poignant. Velikovsky genuinely believed that science had grown too narrow, too dismissive of ancient records, and too arrogant in its mathematical models divorced from lived human memory.
So why did he persist? Because he saw himself as rescuing history from oblivion. He believed that catastrophes of planetary scale were embedded in myth not as metaphor but as memory. In this, he joined a long tradition of Romantic thinkers—people like Giambattista Vico, Goethe, and even Teilhard de Chardin—who tried to fuse the poetic and the scientific. He hoped to bring about a unification of mythos and logos.
3. Driven by the Spirit of the Age
Velikovsky published Worlds in Collision in 1950—at the dawn of the nuclear era, when apocalyptic imagery had become real. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had proven that global catastrophe was no longer hypothetical. Meanwhile, the discovery of the expanding universe and the Big Bang theory were displacing centuries of a steady-state cosmology.
This cultural milieu gave Worlds in Collision a receptive audience. People were hungry for cosmic-scale explanations of trauma, and Velikovsky provided one—complete with planetary near-misses, electrical arcs between worlds, and divine wrath manifest in the heavens. His ideas fed into a collective yearning for meaning amid modern chaos, and that cultural resonance made his work more than pseudoscience—it made it mythically irresistible.
4. Scientific Isolation and Institutional Rejection
Velikovsky died discouraged and depressed. After the initial success of Worlds in Collision—including strong sales and public fascination—he was ostracized from the scientific community. Carl Sagan’s systematic takedown, culminating in the 1974 AAAS symposium and Broca’s Brain, was deeply humiliating, though respectful in tone.
Yet Velikovsky remained convinced that he was a prophet without honor among his own people. He believed that he had discovered something profoundly important and was being shut out not because he was wrong, but because science was dogmatic and blind. This reinforced his sense of personal mission and martyrdom. And like many who feel called to a revelatory role, he doubled down rather than recanted.
5. Velikovsky’s Religion Was Pattern Recognition
Velikovsky’s “religion” was a faith in correspondences—a belief that ancient myths, if properly decoded, revealed real astronomical and geological events. He saw planetary deities in every tradition (Venus, Mars, Jupiter) and found recurring themes: fire from the sky, floods, long days, reversed rivers, pillars of smoke. He read these not as metaphor, but as fragmented eyewitness accounts of cosmic catastrophe.
In this sense, his religion was a belief in the primacy of mythic memory over empirical denial. He trusted the ancients more than the equations of modern astrophysics. That’s a profound inversion of the scientific method—but it also makes him a kind of gnostic outsider, or even a “prophetic scientist” in the mold of Blake or Swedenborg.
Final Reflection: A Martyr to His Vision
Velikovsky’s legacy remains controversial. While his specific claims (e.g., Venus from Jupiter, electromagnetic planetary interactions) have been soundly debunked—most notably by Sagan and the subsequent scientific record—his cultural influence lingers.
He reminds us that science is not just a set of methods, but a human endeavor, susceptible to passion, imagination, and longing. And in this sense, Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision may not have succeeded as science—but it succeeded as a kind of modern myth, and as a cautionary tale of what happens when inspiration outruns evidence.
Part Two: Anthony Larson’s Latter-day Collision
That same pattern—of conviction colliding with culture—played out again in the life of Anthony E. Larson (1943–2018), a modern-day writer, teacher, and independent religious scholar who built his life’s work around a similar claim: that ancient scripture, temple ritual, and prophecy encode memories of real planetary catastrophes, and that the restored gospel of Jesus Christ affirms it.
Larson’s books, especially his Prophecy Trilogy (beginning with And the Moon Shall Turn to Blood), drew heavily from Velikovsky and the “Polar Configuration” theories of David Talbott. But unlike Velikovsky, Larson placed his research squarely within the context of Latter-day Saint theology. He believed that Joseph Smith, in his teachings about Kolob, the return of Enoch, and the signs of the last days, was pointing to a cosmological narrative that modern Saints had largely forgotten or dismissed.
Despite his faithfulness to the Church, Larson encountered resistance at nearly every turn. As he told me in our early correspondence:
“Every effort I’ve made to secure a publisher has ended in disappointment. One publisher told me his editorial board believed my material to be very worthwhile, but there wouldn’t be enough interest among Church members… The heart of the problem is not LDS publishers—it seems to be the Saints themselves.”
Like Velikovsky, Larson was not rejected because of heresy, but because of irrelevance. His ideas were seen as “too strange,” “too speculative,” or simply “not correlated.” Saints, he lamented, were more interested in sentiment than symbol—and if a teaching hadn’t come from the pulpit, it was suspect.
His frustration was palpable in dozens of letters:
“Indifference or apathy plays a large role. The other component is fear—fear that because they haven’t heard these things from a general authority, that it may be false doctrine… After nearly three decades of assaulting it, I’m not sure anyone can overcome it.”
Like Velikovsky, Anthony never stopped believing. He saw the return of the “destroying planet” as central to Latter-day prophecy. He believed that the temple endowment, the Book of Abraham, and the facsimiles were all rooted in real ancient events—comets, planets, plasma discharges, and heavenly battles. As he told me many times:
“Catastrophism isn’t optional for the Restoration. It’s foundational.”
And yet, for all his writing, teaching, and video production, his core audience never showed up. Ironically, like Velikovsky, Anthony found more resonance outside his religious tradition than within it, as secular students of the Electric Universe or planetary mythology picked up his ideas.
A Shared Fate, A Shared Flame
Velikovsky died alone in his academic exile. Anthony died surrounded by his family but similarly frustrated that his life’s work had never broken through. Both men believed they were on to something profound, yet lived to see their work misunderstood, dismissed, or forgotten.
But their legacy lives on—in their books, in their correspondence, and in the hearts of those few who listened.
As I work now to complete a novel inspired by Anthony’s vision—a story of ancient skies, returning planets, and symbolic prophecy—I think of that promise I made to him before he died: “I will finish it.” His ideas, like Velikovsky’s, may always be outside the mainstream. But that does not make them unworthy.
Because sometimes, the edge of accepted truth is where the next great revelation begins.
You can read more about Anthony Larson from this bio I posted earlier here on Red Sky Story blog.
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