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Victor Clube
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Biography
The author has been in the business of making sense of our knowledge of ancient civilisations, particularly their astronomy and their religion. Over the years, with several colleagues, he has argued that the last ice age and current interglacial represent a microcosm of earth history which has been dominated by a single giant comet, such as have repeatedly occurred during the course of geological and biological evolution. Apart from upsetting civilisation through periodic catastrophes, the evolution of each giant comet also provides intervals of respite from catastrophe when mankind largely survives and establishes new evolutionary heights. The picture that emerges therefore is that of punctuated equilibrium not just with respect to biological/geological evolution but with respect to recent sociological evolution as well. |
Victor Clube is co-author of several books (e.g. THE COSMIC WINTER, THE ORIGIN OF COMETS and THE COSMIC SERPENT) and is currently Senior Visiting Fellow at Armagh Observatory.
The Lecture...
SCIENTIFIC REVELATIONS - the Origins of Catastrophe Myths and Legends
Victor is arguably one of the world's leading catastrophists. Yet he is also a renowned astronomer as well as an open-minded scholar who is happy to accept new ideas regarding our ancestors' understanding of impact events in former ages. He spoke much about time cycles of impact events that were realised by ancient cultures and incorporated into their calendars in order that they might be able to predict future catastrophes. He said that the most important cycle of all, and one which we have been denied knowledge of until fairly recently, recurs ever 2,500 years. This has been determined not just through the study of the orbits of comet, asteroid and meteor fields, but also through Greenland ice-core samples. They reveal peaks every 2,500 years of dust particles which accumulate in the atmosphere and then fall on to the ice following clusters of impact events of the type experienced in Tunguska, Siberia, during 1908. Once a knowledge of this cycle is understood we can see that it corresponds very well with major changes in history including the fall of Sumeria around 2200 BC.
I was most fascinated by the manner in which Victor linked this cycle with the calendrical system presented in the Dead Sea Scrolls found in 1947. It revolves around a 364-day year broken up into 52 weeks of seven days, with a leap week every seven years. Victor pointed out that the accuracy of this calendar was remarkable, showing that their knowledge of the solar year was exactly the same as ours. More curiously, the writers of the scrolls claimed that knowledge of their calendrical system had been passed down through countless generations and came originally from Enoch. The question is - from whom did he obtain it?
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