Scientia Press

Based on his interpretation of ancient sources, Immanuel Velikovsky argued famously that Venus had emerged from Jupiter as a comet; interacted with the Earth and Mars in the second and first millennia BC, causing the Bronze Age catastrophes; and then finally settled into a nearly circular orbit of the Sun.

Three lines of reasoning support a Revised Venus Theory.

First, instead of the various unpersuasive suggestions that Velikovsky and others have made for how a cometary Venus could have emerged from Jupiter, we should consider the possible consequences of the immense gravitational field of Jupiter, which pulls toward it a stream of asteroids and comets, as with Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994.

When Venus first appeared in the skies around 2525 BC, ancient peoples worldwide strove to come to terms with this brilliant and awesome new comet-planet (the best account is in Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, though it has been corrected in a Revised Venus Theory).  That meant assigning the deity a gender and a name.

In the Near East, they tried both genders.  In its masculine incarnation, Venus became the Bull of Heaven (as Velikovsky pointed out, the comet-planet’s body blocked the sun’s rays from the central portion of its tail and thus it was seen as having two horns).  In its feminine version, Venus was called Ishtar or Astarte; and in the Levant Astarte was depicted with serpents in her hands—the twin tails of the comet.

In Greece, according to Velikovsky, planet Venus was originally named Athena.

Historian and scientific researcher Kenneth J. Dillon discusses his theory The Outer Solar System Origin of the Terrestrial Planets (OSSO). OSSO explains how Mercury, Earth, the Moon, and Mars originated outside the orbit of Saturn, then were pulled inward by Jupiter’s gravity. Tidal friction heated them to incandescence, then they tidally locked to Jupiter and were separated, moving as comets into their present orbits. See also https://www.scientiapress.com/outer-solar-system-origin.

Outer Solar System Origin of the Terrestrial Planets

Decades of meticulous investigation have revealed many features of the 1st Century BC Antikythera Mechanism, a portable planetarium that demonstrated the motion of celestial objects.  But we must question researchers’ conclusion that the Mechanism incorrectly represented the orbit of Mars, in particular, by roughly 30 degrees during retrograde motion1.

This discrepancy seems anomalous in a sophisticated device that otherwise exhibited a much smaller range of error.  So maybe there is some other explanation.