Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Toto · 11-05-2012, 03:57 PM

The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Michael Gordin

Reviewed here.

Quote:

Between the wars, Velikovsky turned himself into one of those then common Central European scholars of enormous intellectual range, always seeking the Big Unifying Idea. His interest in planetary astronomy was a late development: it was psychoanalysis and Jewish history that were the keys to the story in Worlds in Collision. A Zionist, though not notably religious, Velikovsky was infuriated by Freud’s last book, Moses and Monotheism (1937), which claimed that Moses wasn’t actually Jewish but a runaway Egyptian priest from Pharaoh Akhenaten’s monotheistic sun religion, later murdered by the Israelites, who ended up fabricating a syncretic deity from an Egyptian sun god and a Midianite volcano god called Jehovah. Subsequently, the idea of a Messiah was concocted as an expression of guilt for father-murder, a sense of guilt which has been handed down to the Jews as a common psychological inheritance. The historical account Judaism offered of itself was therefore, according to Freud, a form of dream-work, a collective repressed memory needing skilled decoding by modern interpreters. To Velikovsky, all this was yet another manifestation of Freud’s Jewish self-hatred. How dare he impugn the Old Testament story about who the Jews were and how they came to be Chosen? But Freud’s methods in Moses and Monotheism nevertheless signalled a productive new way of interpreting human history, one in which psychoanalytic techniques could effectively expose the true meaning of the world’s dream-myths.

At the same time, Velikovsky was convinced that the Old Testament, decoded in this way, was an overwhelmingly reliable historical account, that the Jewish records could be used as a standard to calibrate archives of dream-myths – from the Egyptian and Greek to the Chinese and Choctaw – and that, once this radical reinterpretation of world religions was achieved, we would have an accurate account of the physical events that had occurred in historical times and were encrypted in the dream-myths.

semiopen · 11-07-2012, 05:47 AM

I looked at this at a bookstore and was sure I didn't want it at retail but the Amazon prices look better.

As the reviewers state, it tends to treat Velikovsky with more respect than he generally gets. Probably this is good, but it can get annoying to certain personality types (like mine).

I see there is a kindle edition for $10, seems reasonable enough to try.

Thanks for mentioning this Toto.

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11-07-2012, 05:47 AM	#2
semiopen Veteran Member Join Date: Dec 2008 Location: Hillsborough, NJ Posts: 3,551	I looked at this at a bookstore and was sure I didn't want it at retail but the Amazon prices look better. As the reviewers state, it tends to treat Velikovsky with more respect than he generally gets. Probably this is good, but it can get annoying to certain personality types (like mine). I see there is a kindle edition for $10, seems reasonable enough to try. Thanks for mentioning this Toto.

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