Velikovsky was adept at bolstering his cult status amongst devotees, helping his books to become best-sellers. A skillful self-propagandist, his chief tactic was to portray himself as the victim of an academic dirty-tricks campaign, and that his ideas were not being given a 'fair hearing' by universities. This is a trick often known as the Galileo gambit, although Velikovsky preferred to liken himself to that other renaissance martyr, Giordano Bruno. A substantial amount of writings were devoted to his own hagiography in this respect (e.g. Stargazers and Gravediggers), however more often he would persuade other friends with letters after their names to write pieces on his behalf. More often than not, these academics would come to Velikovsky's defense in an area outside their own field - historians and linguists asking for a fair hearing for his physics, and geologists for his history. Velikovsky was also keen to namedrop his acquaintance with Einstein.
Particular capital was made out of the actions of the astronomy faculty at Harvard University, led by Harlow Shapley. Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision was initially published in 1950 by Macmillan, and became an runaway bestseller. Shapley threatened to organise a US-wide boycott of Macmillian's textbooks if they did not drop the book. Macmillian duly caved in and within months had transferred Velikovsky's contract to Doubleday.
By the early 1970s, Velikovsky was claiming that findings from NASA's Mariner space probes (e.g. that Venus was hot) provided confirmation of his theories. (This overlooked some incorrect predictions e.g. that the Apollo landings would find oil on the moon.) In an era of hippiedom, free love, and anti-Vietnam protests, these claims were finding enthusiastic support across US campuses, with Velikovsky milking support in a series of sellout lecture tours. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) became sufficiently alarmed by the levels of rising woo that they staged a special conference on the matter in 1974. Poor Velikovksy thought the event was to be a serious examination of his theories, but the AAAS had other ideas, clearly intending it more as a grand debunking. They assigned showbiz astronomer Carl Sagan to lead the attack, who proceeded to deliver a rollicking demolition of Velikovsky's work to the amassed audience. This rather backfired however, as Sagan, underestimating the dedication of the faithful, had allowed himself the liberty of including a few flip straw man in his talk (e.g. claiming Velikovsky had written of 'plagues of frogs falling to Earth from Venus') and hand waving schoolboy errors in his maths. These details were merely seized upon by the Velikovsky fan base, allowing them to ignore the big-picture impossibility and instead quibble with the details for years to come. The planned debunking was held up as yet another example of establishment suppression of an academic martyr.
Velikovsky was in a sense the most serious of pseudoscience writers. His books are densely argued, show some extensive reading on his part, albeit often misdirected, and to a very limited extent he did address a few genuine problems in relation to mainstream scholarship, although he ended up rather wildly going off at a tangent, and mainstream scholarship has moved on since he was writing in the 1950s. He was a peculiar secular Jewish fundamentalist, and religious fundamentalists might have found some of his theories offensive or problematic. He made the assumption that if anything in the Hebrew Bible conceivably could have a natural explanation then this is how it should be interpreted, even if this meant e.g. adopting highly unconventional astronomical theories. Faced with something like the "killing of the firstborn" in the plagues of Egypt which he realized that even he could not come up with a natural explanation for, instead of just dismissing it as a myth, he put it down to a mis-transcription. Like some other forms of pseudoscience, Velikovsky's approach meant gutting the religious content from what are to a large extent religious texts, an approach which many people would find problematic whatever their religious views. Somewhere in his writings you might find the word "God", but you might have to look long and hard before you found it. (He also considered that King Saul was a better ruler than the Bible makes out, there might just possibly be a tenable case for saying this, Stefan Heym novel The King David Report explores some similar terrain, but not the sort of claim which would go down well with some religious types.)
For all his radicalism Velikovsky was in some ways a conservative e.g. arguing against continental drift, resurrecting debates between 19th century geologists, and assuming that the history of the Ancient Near East only became firmly established during the Hellenistic period, and that our best guide to what happened before then is the Hebrew Bible, with serious support from the Iliad. Although even the writings of conventional historians can sometimes reflect the concerns of their own time, in places Ages in Chaos now clearly reads as a product of a time when the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel were a very recent memory.
Particular capital was made out of the actions of the astronomy faculty at Harvard University, led by Harlow Shapley. Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision was initially published in 1950 by Macmillan, and became an runaway bestseller. Shapley threatened to organise a US-wide boycott of Macmillian's textbooks if they did not drop the book. Macmillian duly caved in and within months had transferred Velikovsky's contract to Doubleday.
By the early 1970s, Velikovsky was claiming that findings from NASA's Mariner space probes (e.g. that Venus was hot) provided confirmation of his theories. (This overlooked some incorrect predictions e.g. that the Apollo landings would find oil on the moon.) In an era of hippiedom, free love, and anti-Vietnam protests, these claims were finding enthusiastic support across US campuses, with Velikovsky milking support in a series of sellout lecture tours. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) became sufficiently alarmed by the levels of rising woo that they staged a special conference on the matter in 1974. Poor Velikovksy thought the event was to be a serious examination of his theories, but the AAAS had other ideas, clearly intending it more as a grand debunking. They assigned showbiz astronomer Carl Sagan to lead the attack, who proceeded to deliver a rollicking demolition of Velikovsky's work to the amassed audience. This rather backfired however, as Sagan, underestimating the dedication of the faithful, had allowed himself the liberty of including a few flip straw man in his talk (e.g. claiming Velikovsky had written of 'plagues of frogs falling to Earth from Venus') and hand waving schoolboy errors in his maths. These details were merely seized upon by the Velikovsky fan base, allowing them to ignore the big-picture impossibility and instead quibble with the details for years to come. The planned debunking was held up as yet another example of establishment suppression of an academic martyr.
Velikovsky was in a sense the most serious of pseudoscience writers. His books are densely argued, show some extensive reading on his part, albeit often misdirected, and to a very limited extent he did address a few genuine problems in relation to mainstream scholarship, although he ended up rather wildly going off at a tangent, and mainstream scholarship has moved on since he was writing in the 1950s. He was a peculiar secular Jewish fundamentalist, and religious fundamentalists might have found some of his theories offensive or problematic. He made the assumption that if anything in the Hebrew Bible conceivably could have a natural explanation then this is how it should be interpreted, even if this meant e.g. adopting highly unconventional astronomical theories. Faced with something like the "killing of the firstborn" in the plagues of Egypt which he realized that even he could not come up with a natural explanation for, instead of just dismissing it as a myth, he put it down to a mis-transcription. Like some other forms of pseudoscience, Velikovsky's approach meant gutting the religious content from what are to a large extent religious texts, an approach which many people would find problematic whatever their religious views. Somewhere in his writings you might find the word "God", but you might have to look long and hard before you found it. (He also considered that King Saul was a better ruler than the Bible makes out, there might just possibly be a tenable case for saying this, Stefan Heym novel The King David Report explores some similar terrain, but not the sort of claim which would go down well with some religious types.)
For all his radicalism Velikovsky was in some ways a conservative e.g. arguing against continental drift, resurrecting debates between 19th century geologists, and assuming that the history of the Ancient Near East only became firmly established during the Hellenistic period, and that our best guide to what happened before then is the Hebrew Bible, with serious support from the Iliad. Although even the writings of conventional historians can sometimes reflect the concerns of their own time, in places Ages in Chaos now clearly reads as a product of a time when the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel were a very recent memory.
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