Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979) was by profession a doctor of medicine, specialising in psychiatry. However, his fame is based on being arguably the most controversial catastrophist of the 20th century.
He daringly proposed that the Earth had a number of close encounters with other planetary bodies that resulted in catastrophic consequences, including interference with the rotation of our planet. He speculated that Atlantis was probably destroyed during one of these cataclysmic events.[037][038] Some have seen the influence of Ignatius Donnelly’s Ragnarok, written seventy years earlier, in Velikovsky’s cosmic collision theories. In fact a number of commentators have noted how Velikovsky seemed reluctant to credit earlier writers, such as W. C. Beaumont and Johann Radlof(b), with their contributions to the development of the theory of planetary catastrophism.
Velikovsky was initially inclined to link the disappearance of Atlantis with the eruption of Thera, but later came to support a location between the Azores and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. He was an early[037] questioner of Plato’s figure of 9,000 years for the age of Atlantis, suggesting that it was exaggerated by a factor of ten.
His other major contribution was in his questioning of the accepted Bronze Age chronologies of the eastern Mediterranean[039]. A website(a) provides us with a considerable amount of his unpublished work, while another offers an encyclopedia of his work(c).
(a) http://www.varchive.org/
(b) http://www.mythopedia.info/radlof.htm
(c) http://www.velikovsky.info/Main_Page
