Jerusalem, Dec. 27th, 1963.

Dear Dr. Velikovsky,

Thank you for your letter of Dec. 18th. It is quite true that so far most of that what I have written has not been understood. But that is not because I have removed myself to some lofty heights where nobody can follow me, but because of the very susceptible theme involved, whose tangible substrate humanity for all its longing for redemption, is not readily willing to recall from its past. Actually to let the patient (cf. the goddess in Ovid’s Meth. XV. “This present fear of mine does not permit me to remember former woes” ), is not easy and demands as in Freud’s treatment of hysterics the repetition of repressed emotions, which procedure might be dangerous sometimes.

It should be clearer by now why the genesis of the upheaval was unconsciously projected on the Jews. Anna Freud’s saying, “Ein solches Ich (das die kritisierenden Autoritäten als Über-Ich introjiziert) ist intolerant gegen die Aussenwelt, ehe es streng gegen sich selbst wird” , covers the mechanism fully. In the September issue of the American Behavioral Scientist (p. 26) Prof. Stecchini refers to Kant’s famous passage about the starry heavens and the moral laws (concluding the Critique of Practical Reason). Continuing he cites the following words of Freud: “This combination sounds odd, for what could the heavenly bodies have to do with the question whether a human being loves or murders another, but it touches a profound psychological truth” (Über die Weltanschauung). Our awareness of the connexion of the heavenly bodies with the behavior of man has lately been considerably augmented. Actually all events on the firmament are mirrored on this earth. To pacify these sky-phenomena, in case of their thundering, indignated and wrathful appearance, no handier victims for sacrificial offerings can be imagined, than those very people who are thought to have provoked their emergence and simultaneously evoked the pronouncement of the moral laws (10 Commandments).

We must not overlook in this context (I have cited the relevant part already in some other places) that F. Zöllner, the author of Über die Natur der Cometen, introduces the a/m dictum with the following words: “Kant [hat] für Alle, welche nicht nur glauben, sondern auch erkennen wollen, die folgenden ewig denkwürdigen Worte verheissungsvoll an die Nachwelt gerichtet: ‘Zwei Dinge erfüllen das Gemüth mit immer neuer und zunehmender Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht [je öfters und anhaltender sich das Nachdenken damit beschäftigt]: der bestirnte Himmel über mir, und das moralische Gesetz in mir’” (Wissensch. Abh. I, S. 286).

Concerning the readiness to identify the Jews with evil-doers I beg you to compare the following parts: “... on the shrine found in el-Arish the story is told of a hurricane and of a prolonged darkness when nobody could leave the palace, and of the pursuit by the pharaoh Taoui-Thom of the flying slaves when he followed to Pi-khiroti, which is the biblical Pi-ha-khiroth. ‘His Majesty leapt into the place of the whirlpool!’ Then it is said that he was ‘lifted by a great force’ .” Griffith translates: “Then the majesty of (Seb met her) he found her in this (?) place which is called Pekharti (?) he seized her by force (the palace was in great affliction) Shu had departed to heaven...” . “Under cover of darkness intruders from the desert approached the border of Egypt [...] his majesty of Shou went to battle against the companions of Apopi” . Apopi was the fierce god of darkness. The king and his hosts never returned; they perished. “Now when the majesty of Ra-Harmachis (Harakhti?) fought with the evil-doers in this pool, the Place of the Whirlpool, the evil-doers prevailed not over his majesty. His majesty leapt into the so-called Place of the Whirlpool.” First passage from Worlds in Collision p. 88, second passage from Ages in Chaos p. 42.

While there is no question about the identity of Pekharti (Pi-khiroti) with the biblical Pi-ha-kiroth, I can find no foundation for linking the flying slaves, which are familiar to us from the Bible, with the evil-doers engaged in battle by Pharaoh Shou at the Place of the Whirlpool. The term Pi-khiroti appears in the text of the shrine some pages before the battle with the evil-doers is narrated, the names of the respective pharaohs are different and it is stated in the text expressively that the campaign was undertaken to rescue the sungod Ra from the children of the dragon Apep, the evil-doers from the red-country who invaded Egypt. It might be of interest in this connection, that I encountered by chance another source describing evidently the same happenings.

Heinrich Brugsch’ “Die neue Weltordnung: Nach Vernichtung des sündigen Menschengeschlechtes” (Verlag S. Calvary und Co., Berlin 1881) brings the original transliterated text, the German translation and the transformation into fluent speech. Amongst the significant passages there are for instance:

If Hathor was an offspring of Ra, in apparently much a similar way as Minerva descended from the head of Jupiter (Porphyrius testatur Minervam esse virtutem solis, cuae hamanis mentibus prudentiam subministrat. nam ideo haec dea Jovis capite prognata memoratus, id est summa aetheris parte edita, unde origo solis est. Macrob. VII, 17, 65-70) then we should have less difficulty to understand the riddle of the sphinx and the human sacrifices which were offered to the effigy of the goddess Tefnut or Hathor, id est to the sphinx. (“The slayer of the human race, who had to be appeased and worshiped lest she repeat the bloodshed,...” Oedipus and Akhnaton, p. 35). Brugsch’ text, which is taken from a small room connected to the last hall of pharaoh Seti I’ grave, continues:

(Cf. The man who came closer than anyone else before him to solving the ‘secret’ of the Sphinx was the learned Egyptologist, Prof. Edouard Naville; in the course of almost 5 decades (1875-1924) he published several essays dealing with the problem. ‘The destruction of Men by the Gods, [...] was an early publication of Naville’s pertaining to the subject. The text says: ‘This goddess (Hathor) went out and killed the men on earth [...] And lo! Sechmet waded with her feet through many nights in their blood, down to the city of Heracleopolis.’ Oedipus and Akhnaton, p. 34.)

(Brugsch had cognizance of Naville’s publication “La destruction des hommes par les Dieux” , he mentions on p. 33: “Die Inschriften, von denen die Rede ist, bedecken mit ihren 95 langen Kolonnen die vier Seiten der Kammer. An der Westwand befindet sich noch gegenwärtig die Abbildung der rothen [!] Himmelskuh, die wir nach der von einem Schweizer Gelehrten, Herrn Naville, genommenen Zeichnung unsren Lesern zum besseren Verständnis der darauf bezüglichen Inschriften auf der Tafel im Angange zu dieser Abhandlung vorgelegt haben.” )

The following sentences in Brugsch’ text elucidate the motive of all bloody warfares and holocausts and the dangers implied to any group, which subconsciously be considered the descendents of the evil-doers of by-gone days:

I think that eucharistic offerings, holy masses and hosties root in the following: Not always are the sacrifices symbolic only, as the last sentence would make us believe. Recent and ancient history has taught us different. “Die guten Menschen selber übernehmen fortan das Amt der Rächer gegen die Feinde und Gegner des Lichtgottes auf Erden und greifen zu den Waffen, um sie zu tödten. Ra verheisst ihnen dafür Vergebung ihrer Sünden, denn, wie er hinzufügt mit eigenem Munde: die Schlachtopfer (der von den Menschen getödteten Gegner des Sonnengottes) haben beseitigt und überflüssig gemacht das (fernere) Hinschlachten (der Bösewichte durch göttliche Hand). Daher der Ursprung der Schlachtopfer auf den Altären der Gottheiten d. h. gewisser Thiergattungen, welche als Symbole der Feinde des Gottes geopfert wurden.” Brugsch refers the reader in a footnote to 1 Mos. 20-21. I would like to refer the reader also to a chapter “Der Ritus der Messe. Das unblutige Opfer abermals durch die Konsekration in ein blutiges verwandelt” (Rudolf Kleinpaul, Menschenopfer und Ritualmorde (Leipzig o. J.), Verlag von Schmidt und Günther).

While I am of the opinion that the events described under the pharaohs Shu, Taoui-Thom and the gods Geb and even Re belong to different periods and were only meddled with because of our lack of sense of time, owing to which the crossing of the flying slaves at Pi-hakiroth (which Moses probably understood to direct according to a time-table which avoided the returning water-masses), got mixed up with an earlier encounter at the Whirlpool, where the pharaoh and all his train perished in the floods, I think there can’t be any doubt regarding the nature of the eye of the Sun, which was ejected at the beginning of things by Re and charged to annihilate the enemy. “Die Wüste war in Staub gehüllt, als sie (Tefnut) mit ihrem Schweif einen Reif schlug [...] Die Wüste warf Feuer aus, wenn sie ihre Krallen wetzte. Die Wälder [...] verdorrten, als ihre Nase Rauch ausatmete, indem sehr viele Fliegen aus ihr hervorkamen. Sie liess eine brüllende Stimme ertönen wegen der Kraft ihrer Stimme.” (Cf. Le mot /// a causé un petit embarras aux interprêtres. La traduction des Septantes, l’Arabe et le chaldéen le dérivent de /// qui veut dire resplendir; la traduction syriaque de /// qui veut dire hurler. (Explication du XIII^e et d’une partie du XIV^e Chapitre du Prophète Esaie. Geoffroi Dürrbach, Strasbourg 1836). The just mentioned text about Tefnut is from Sitzungsberichte der Königl. Preuss. Akad. der Wissensch., “Der ägyptische Mythus vom Sonnenauge in einem Demotischen Papyrus der röm. Kaiserzeit” , vorgelegt von Herrn Erman am 11. Nov. 1915.

By the way, there is another description of Shu’s escapades in Roscher’s Mythol. Lexikon, Artikel “Shou” . Thunderstorm, upheaval and darkness are here subscribed to a punishment for Geb’s unlawful love to his mother Tefenet. It is my belief that that what you rightly call The Great Fear, was caused by the disappearance of the light of the sun for an extensive period, that this fear consists until this day unconsciously in man, and that he tries to win the deity to his side by all kind of sacrifices. In this way a circulus vitiosus is created, because atonement for previous murderous sacrifices implies the offering of fresh bloody sacrifices.

In another, script Götterdämmerung oder Götterfinsternis?, I hinted to the relationship between the Nordic Muspilli (“mutspelli kommt wie ein Dieb in der dunkeln Nacht” , der sächsische Heiland 2591, 4358) with “the children of the dragon Apep [...] invading Egypt by nightfall” and I think that I put in this context some of the important questions of our age in a nutshell: “Wenn wir uns an Zöllner’s Definition der veränderlichen Erscheinungsformen eines unveränderlichen Objektes erinnern, so können wir die Juden als eine von den Muspilli geworfene Schatten-Projektion betrachten. Andere Formen wären die Neger, von denen Novellist J. Baldwin sagt: “I think, if one examines the myths which have proliferated in this country concerning the Negro, one discovers beneath this myth a kind of sleeping terror of some condition which we refuse to imagine” (Life Int., June 3rd, 1963) ??? und die Kommunisten, deren Ursprung vom Red Country von Usheru (Antiqu. Tell el Yahudiyeh), dem Muspellheim der Wüstenstämme die Ägypten überfielen, ja feststeht.”

Franz Comont states in Lux Perpetua (Chapt. Les Mystères, p. 265): “Apulée a soulevé un coin du voile d’Isis” . We have succeeded since then to lift more than a corner of this veil of “the queen of the dead, first of heaven’s denizens, in whose aspect are blent the aspects of all the gods and goddesses” (The Golden Ass). But there remains still the question “Warum bringt es Verderben, den Schleier des Isisbildes zu heben? (L. Klages, Vom Kosmogonischen Eros, S. 208). Maybe the answer lies in the following: “Wir fanden nämlich anfangs zu unserer grössten Überraschung, dass die einzelnen hysterischen Symptome sogleich und ohne Wiederkehr verschwanden, wenn es gelungen war, die Erinnerung an den veranlassenden Vorgang zu voller Heftigkeit zu erwecken, damit auch die begleitenden Affekte wachzurufen,... Affectloses Erinnern ist fast immer völlig wirkungslos” (Studien zur Hysterie, Breuer und Freud, 1895).

I would appreciate very much your advice about the potential dangers which a too sudden revivification of the events could produce. On the other hand, I must say that it is not easy to make myself understood, but should I feel justified in expecting the slightest echo, I would shun no effort to make my representations more comprehensible and popular.

Cordially,

[signed] Zvi Rix