MYTHS ARE HISTORY
            On the Long-lived Lineage of       
​                  Catastrophist Speculation​
         
On the Long-lived Lineage of Catastrophist Speculation
In all actuality, the idea that many myths encoded knowledge of natural events, mostly of a catastrophic nature, and that many mythological gods and monsters were anthropomorphic images emblematic of celestial and geological phenomena  keeping alive  cultural memories of concrete cosmological events, has been argued for hundreds of years.  While such a definition is not currently popular or favored, such an approach to the study of myth is not new, but is, in fact, one of the oldest approaches, with a surprisingly lengthy lineage of inquiry.   The idea that near collisions between the Earth and other celestial bodies were responsible for dramatic geological upheavals and remarkable biological effects, including the creation and destruction of many living species was, in fact, commonly accepted until the early nineteenth century by a variety of notable minds worldwide. 

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Among the classical Greeks themselves, playwrights and poets and their audiences found normal the physical presence of divine and powerful beings among humankind. They were not regarded as symbols or rhetorical devices, nor were they taken as an expedient fiction of literary epic machinery.  [. . .]

[The Agon of Homer and Hesiod . . . ]

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Throughout antiquity prophets and priests warned our ancestors that riot, plague, and the fall of nations were merely the profane manifestations of celestial disharmony, or what they called 'a perturbation of the heavenly spheres.' [. . .]

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Others who openly professed a belief in historical catastrophism include: 
Solon (c. 630-560 BC)

Timaeus of Locri (5th century BC)

Thomas Burnet (c. 1635–1715)

Edmund Halley (1656-1742)

William Whiston (1667-1752)

Thomas Wright (1711-1786)

Nicolas Antoine Boulanger (1722-1759)

Giovanni Rinaldo, count of Carli-Rubbi (1720-1795)

Charles-Francois Dupuis (1742-1809)

Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827)

Georges Cuvier (1769-1832)

Godfrey Higgins (1772-1833)

Johann Gottlieb Radlof (1775-1846)

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854)

William Buckland (1784-1856)

Edward Higginson (1807-1880)

Antoine Bernard Alfred, baron d’Espiard de Colonge (b. 1810)

Rev. John Fleming (active c. 1879)

Ignatius Loyola Donnelly (1831-1901)

Isaac Newton Vail (1840-1912)

Franz Xavier Kugler (1862-1929)

William Comyns Beaumont (1873-1956)

Alexander Pavlovitch Braghine (1878-1942)

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Egerton Sykes (1894-1983)

Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979)

Claude Schaeffer (1898-1982)

Hans Schindler Bellamy (1901-1982)

Clyde Kluckhohn (1905-1960)

Philip Freund (1909-2007)

Alfred de Grazia (1919-2014)

Julian Jaynes (1920-1997)

Ralph Juergens (1924-1979)

Roger Williams Wescott (1925-2000)

Lynn E. Rose (1934-2013)

Dwardu Cardona (1936-2016)

Thomas D. Worthen (1937-2016)

Jno Cook (1940-2018)

C. J. Ransom (b. ?)

David Talbott (b. 1942)

Wal Thornhill (1942-2023)

Gunnar Heinsohn (1943-2023)

Lewis M. Greenberg (b. ?)

William Mullen (1946-2017)

W. Bruce Masse (b. 1948)

Richard Heinberg (b. 1950)

Richard J. Huggett (b. ?)

Michael Rappenglueck (b. 1957) 

Barbara Rappenglueck (b. ?)

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