Cuvier and Schaeffer’s Catastrophism: The Opening of the Key to the Electric Universe

TPOD Jan 20, 2016 Still0109_00000 550X440

Ancient Egyptian Architecture : Kom Ombo, 1838. David Roberts.

Jan 20, 2016

Criticized, ostracized, derided, scorned and rebuked; Cuvier and Schaeffer.

These two French eccentric geniuses ranged their new practical paradigms against the sanitized teachings of the Royal Society’s consensus science. Georges Cuvier and then later Claude Schaeffer, dared question the hidebound uniformitarian teachings demanded by the Royal Society’s geology darlings, Hutton and Lyle. They insisted that the world’s development was a slow evolutionary process explained by millions of years of uniform steady change. This misneme eventually influenced Darwin to explain evolution as a child of slow “natural selection” that, by chance, produced superior offspring and new species entirely through the agency of “survival of the fittest”. A gross simplification that has survived as a cherished dogma entrenched into every facet of modern science.

But what sets our two practical French geniuses apart?

Georges Cuvier was a child of the French and American Revolutions around the 1800’s. Probably nourished by this chaotic period of tumbling dogmas, he was able to study the incredibly rich layered fossil beds around Paris and beyond unhampered by convention. These distinctive layers revealed many beds of fossils plastered on each other by a succession of marine and then land based phyla of extinct and living flora and fauna. Those blunt separations signalled mass destruction upon destruction and sudden new speciation. He mainly accused catastrophic floods as the tool of these extinctions but then on his various trips to the United States he was intrigued by the mythology of the Native Americans. They spoke of cosmic lightning destroying the megafauna and earlier man.

From the Lakota nation cited by Erdoes and Oritz:

”The creator sang the song of destruction and sent down fierce Thunderbirds to wage a great battle against the other humans and giant animals. Finally at the height of the battle, the Thunderbirds suddenly threw down their most powerful Thunderbolts all at once. The fiery blast shook the entire world, toppling mountain ranges and setting forests and prairies ablaze. The flames leapt up to the sky in all directions, the world’s lakes boiled and the giant animals and evil people burned up where they stood. The Earth split open, sending great torrents across the entire world. The survivors found the bleached bones of the giant animals buried in mud and rock all over the world“

Adrienne Mayer, writing on the early white pioneer fossil hunters, claims they described America as a continent covered by ancient extinct giant fossil bones. Cuvier’s fundamental paradigms described a series of mass extinctions separated by marine and terra firma deposits. Species change followed each upheaval. His bone dissections plotted this in intimate detail. He was an obsessive examiner of every detail of fit and function. Extraordinarily meticulous observation, preservation and comparative deduction chartered his findings. Not only did this clash with the later Hutton and Lyle’s theories but even clashed with Bishop Usher’s fundamentalist theories on a seven thousand year old Earth only once cleansed by a Biblical flood.

The admirable Claude Schaeffer, who possessed many of Cuvier’s practical qualities, through his early excavations in Syria’s Ras Shamira and Enkomi in Cyprus, revealed sequences of civilizations separated by six destruction boundaries. Although artefacts such as pottery and jewellery were useful in discerning different periods of cultural development, he was more intrigued by what caused the instantaneous demise of these physically separated civilizations. Typically this had been attributed to destructive hordes of armies and raiders intent on pillage, destruction, rape and plunder. Theoretically they burnt and destroyed their enemy’s cities.

Schaeffer saw what others had not. Nature had played a major part in this drama. Walls and cities had been bent and twisted by earthquakes. Wild fires had left ashes sometimes many meters thick, unable to be explained by the burning of house timbers. Tsunami deposits were readily seen in Enkomi, Cyprus. Fierce wind deposits and destructive floods could be disseminated in the ruins. Climate change and reversion to nomadic wandering could even be inferred from the obvious footprints of abandonment and rebuilding. He cites indications of climatic catastrophes by pollen analyses, drop of ocean levels and land sinking. He examined over 90 sites in the Middle East and beyond and concluded that in the “Bronze Age “period alone there had been six destructive layers of varying intensity. Importantly he insisted that no catastrophes of this magnitude had been observed in recent times. This was clearly illustrated in his epic work, Stratigraphie Comparée etChronologie de l’Asie Occidentale.

Curiously, the equally lambasted Immanuel Velikovsky had come to similar conclusions from separate evidence. Velikovsky relied on ancient testimony and insights from many ancient sources. But he also understood that celestial mechanics was fundamentally influenced by electromagnetic drivers. This had been ignored by most cosmologists.

Schaeffer relied on the practical observations of an archaeologist with dirt on his hands. However, he too acknowledged, as had Velikovsky, the importance of ancient texts in researching fundamental cause. Both became friends due to their frustration with the dogmas of the day. Schaeffer commented to Velikovsky:

“You are working in the right direction and time will help to show the reality of global catastrophes. Already continental catastrophes cannot be doubted as I showed by my stratigraphical work in the Near East.”

Both Velikovsky and Schaeffer appreciated the value of Cuvier’s foundational work:

“You refer very well to Cuvier’s views which are too often forgotten nowadays. I feel exactly the same way, I know that those vast crises and cataclysms have occurred.“

The great minds of Cuvier and Schaeffer fully concurred on the reality of the crises but equally both searched vainly for a primal cause. Velikovsky was certainly not the first to propose a celestial cause but he was probably the first to nail electromagnetism as the essence of planetary dynamics and propose chaos in the cosmos as driven by this erratic fundamental. Thus amongst many others these three came together to offer a new driving paradigm to mankind’s fate.

However Schaeffer’s final words to Velikovsky reveals acceptance of this was not going to be an easy task.

“Many of my colleagues are not easily accessible to new ideas and use their arguments in order to discredit the whole idea of the reality of crises on continental scale. It disturbed their conservative and comfortable outlook on the historical events during the catastrophic events of earlier millenia. It will take more time until the new idea take root, but it will ultimately take root for the truth always in the end prevails.“

Peter Mungo Jupp

Films: www.mungoflix.com Articles: www.ancientdestructions,com

Catastrophism in the Humanities—a Low-down Part One

Did extraordinary natural events inspire ancient traditions? Yes, according to Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901) (left). No, according to Ulrich Von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf (1848-1931) (right).

Mar 09, 2012

Ever since the gradualist doctrine natura non facit saltus cast an ossifying spell on the academic community, catastrophist theories of myth and other traditions have been anathema to the learned.

Pre-Lyellians such as Thomas Burnet (c. 1635? – 1715), William Whiston (1667-1752) and Robert Jameson (1774-1854) had been free to ponder cometary flybys, axial tilts and universal floods, the uniformitarian savants of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries chose to finger the very most mundane aspects of nature as the wellspring of myth and religion.

Thus, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff (1848-1931), a German classicist of great renown, would express much confidence in his idea that the Greek myth of Ouranos’ castration derived from the fructifying fall of rain from the sky. Oblivious to the futility of such conjecture, the benighted heirs of this school of thought continued to grope for answers. As a typical example, the Dutch historian Abraham Bos (1943-) would draw much satisfaction from the opinion that the divine succession from Ouranos to Kronos and Kronos to Zeus encoded ‘the changing of the seasons as brought about by figures of divine stature’.

Throughout the twentieth century, a trickle of dissenters survived within the stifling environment of scholars who vehemently opposed the notion of historical cataclysms enshrined in ancient traditions as a disastrous one. Comprising a mixture of paragons and mavericks, the common element these thinkers shared was the deafening silence that greeted their enunciations. As the tides are slowly turning today, it will prove quite salutary to reconstruct the ‘hidden history’ of this intellectual undercurrent within the humanities.

Although familiar fringe writers such as William Comyns Beaumont (1873-1956), Alexander Braghine (1878-1942), Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979) and Hans Schindler Bellamy (1901-1982) sedulously argued the case for ‘catastrophist mythology’ with considerable eloquence and sagacity, their lack in professional training in these fields – which was indeed palpable – undermined their credibility to the scholarly establishment. But drowned out by the noise are the feeble voices of experts in the mainstream, of impeccable reputation, whose articulations on the catastrophic origin of myths were conveniently ignored.

Our roll call opens with the Oxford classicist Lewis Farnell (1856-1934), who professed in 1919 that ‘what is quite normal in nature and society rarely excites the myth-making imagination, which is more likely to be kindled by the abnormal, some startling catastrophe, some terrible violation of the social code’. While he may not have thought of natural catastrophes, an American colleague certainly did: the author of a popular handbook on classical mythology, Edward Tripp (1920-1999), opined that the mythical battle ‘is generally believed to have been a personification of terrifying natural phenomena … of cataclysmic proportions’.

Yet another British classicist, Herbert Rose (1883-1961), who authored another standard textbook on mythology, reflected as follows on the Greek myth of the Titanic War in 1964: ‘… the imagery of the battle is so reminiscent of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that I do not believe the resemblance merely accidental’. In the same year, the Dutch anthropologist Cornelis Ouwehand (1920-1996) considered more generally:

‘When a crisis event (such as an earthquake) so deeply shocks and so totally affects the individual and the society to which he belongs that the cause and consequences of the event are beyond comprehension and cannot be coped with by normal intellectual perception … at such a time the ‘fabulation’ takes effect, and it then becomes a function of religion as a defensive reaction against the overpowering force (or deadening impotence) of the intellect’. (italics in the original)

It was the late geologist Dorothy Vitaliano (1916-2008) who founded the subdiscipline of ‘geomythology’ on this principle: ‘For unless human nature has changed considerably through the ages, what is considered news, and therefore what may be remembered when the normal events of daily life are long forgotten, is the unusual, particularly the violently unusual. And what is more violently unusual than a natural catastrophe?’

Rens Van Der Sluijs

Mythopedia.info

Books by Rens Van Der Sluijs:

Traditional Cosmology: The Global Mythology of Cosmic Creation and Destruction

Volume One: Preliminaries Formation

Volume Two: Functions

Volume Three: Differentiation

Volume Four: Disintegration

The Mythology of the World Axis

The World Axis as an Atmospheric Phenomenon

What’s There and What’s Not There
Jul 20, 2011

Did sediment build up gradually over millions of years, become pressure-transformed into rock, somehow get lifted a mile above sea level, and then get mostly eroded by wind and rain until only this tiny (compared to the original extent) mesa remains? Or did material with the consistency of wet-concrete slurry flow this far into a catastrophic global flood, sorting itself into layers and hardening some layers chemically or electrically?

The popular conception of the scientific method is that the scientist observes a phenomenon, develops or modifies a hypothesis to explain it, and then tests the hypothesis against further observations. The three steps are repeated until the scientist decides that accepting the hypothesis is more reasonable than not accepting it.

A deeper examination reveals that the initial observations are not performed by a mind that is a tabula rasa but by one that has many often unconscious preconceptions. Indeed, the data or sensations of observation are indistinguishable from the noise unless the observer has criteria with which to distinguish data from noise.

This is why the three steps of the popular method should be—and often are, although without it being remarked—supplemented by a fourth step, called by some “error probes,” in which alternative preconceptions and hypotheses are actively searched for.

In geology, one pair of these alternatives is what could be called the “figure–ground inversion.” Will we “see” geological formations as what’s left after gradual deformation and erosion of continuous slabs of rock, or will we see them as essentially undisturbed surficial catastrophic deposits?

Since we cannot travel back in time to observe the origin of formations, both alternatives leave us with an insoluble tension between seeing what is not there and not seeing what is there: In the first case, the gradualist vision sees “missing” material that has been eroded away; the catastrophist vision sees an episodic past of forces not present today. In the second case, the gradualist vision does not see sharply limited “dumps” of material; the catastrophist vision does not see remains of gradual sculpting over millions of years.

These visions are the preconceptions that enable geologists to distinguish data from noise. They translate undifferentiated data-noise into facts and irrelevancies. On these facts—now “observed facts”—hypotheses are constructed, and against similarly determined facts hypotheses are tested. The circularity (or, better, helicity, since the process is repeated with new facts) of the process is mitigated to some extent by its iteration and more so by error probes—by keeping alternatives in mind.

The final choice of hypothesis—or, rather, the temporarily popular choice, since by the nature of the process there cannot be finality—will depend on which one geologists find most useful in helping them to do what they then want to do. Because geologists are human, egotistical and political motives are an inseparable part of the process, and the science will always have to trickle around declarations of finality and conspiracies to dismiss alternatives. Acquiescence in pretenses of “secure knowledge” will lead only to a self-congratulatory sterility. Curious minds will wander off to see things with new visions.

Mel Acheson