Curiously enough, the cause of such perturbation is revealed in beliefs like that of the people of Flanders in France. Thus we read: "In Menin (Flanders) the peasants say, on seeing a comet: 'The sky is going to fall; the earth is turning over!'"1T
Changes in the Times and the Seasons
Many agents collaborated to change the climate. Insolation was impaired by heavy clouds of dust, and the radiation of heat from the earth was equally hindered.1 Heat was generated by the earth's contacts with another celestial body; the earth was removed to an orbit farther from the sun; the polar regions were displaced; oceans and seas evaporated and the vapors precipitated as snow on new polar regions and in the higher latitudes in a long Fimbul-winter and formed new ice sheets; the axis on which the earth rotated pointed in a different direction, and the order of the seasons was disturbed.
Spring follows winter and fall follows summer because the earth rotates on an axis inclined toward the plane of its revolution around the sun. Should this axis become perpendicular to that plane, there would be no seasons on the earth. Should it change its direction, the seasons would change their intensity and their order.
The Egyptian papyrus known as Papyrus Anastasi IV contains a complaint about gloom and the absence of solar light; it says also: "The winter is come as (instead of) summer, the months are reversed and the hours are disordered." 2
15 Hastings, "Eschatology," Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics.
!« Olrik, Ragnarok. p. 406.
if Revue des traditions populaires, XVII (1902-1903), 571.
1 Cf. the works of Arrhemus on the influence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on the temperature, and J. Tyndall (Heat a Mode of Motion, 6th ed., pp. 417-418) on the influence or the climate of a theoretical layer of olefiant gas surrounding our earth at a short distance above its surface.
2 A. Erman, Egyptian Literature (1927). p 309. Cf. also J. Vandier, La Famine dans I'Egtjpte ancienne (1936), p. 118: "Les mois sont a l'envers, et les heures se confondent" (Papyrus Anastasi IV, 10), and R. Weill, Bases, methodes, et risultats de la chronologie igyptienne (1926), p. J>5.
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"The breath of heaven is out of harmony. . . . The four seasons do not observe their proper times," we read in the Texts of Taoism.3
In the historical memoirs of Se-Ma Ts'ien, as in the annals of the Shu King which we have already quoted, it is said that Emperor Yahou sent astronomers to the Valley of Obscurity and to the Sombre Residence to observe the new movements of the sun and of the moon and the syzygies or the orbital points of the conjunctions, also "to investigate and to inform the people of the order of the seasons." * It is also said that Yahou introduced a calendar reform: he brought robin-bobin
the seasons into accord with the observations; he did the same with the months; and he
"corrected the days." 5
Plutarch gives the following description of a derangement of seasons: "The thickened air concealed the heaven from view, and the stars were confused with a disorderly huddle of fire and moisture and violent fluxions of winds. The sun was not fixed to an unwander-ing and certain course, so as to distinguish orient and Occident, nor did he bring back the seasons in order." 6
In another work of his, Plutarch ascribes these changes to Typhon, "the destructive, diseased and disorderly," who caused "abnormal seasons and temperatures." 7
It is characteristic that in the written traditions of the peoples of antiquity the disorder of the seasons is directly connected with the derangement in the motion of the heavenly bodies.
The oral traditions of primitive peoples in various parts of the world also retain memories of this change in the movement of the heavenly bodies, the seasons, the flow of time, during a period when darkness enveloped the world. As an example I quote the tradition of the Oraibi in Arizona. They say that the firmament hung low and the world was dark, and no sun, no moon, nor stars were seen. "The people murmured because of the darkness and the cold." Then the 3 Texts of Taoism (transl. Legge), I, 301.
* Les Memoires historiques de Se-ma Ts'ien (transl. E. Chavannes, 1895), p. 47.
B Ibid., p. 62.
6 Plutarch, "Of Eating of Flesh," Morals (transl. "by several hands," revised by W. Goodwin, ed.
1898).
7 Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, 49.
122 WORLDS IN COLLISION
planet god Machito "appointed times, and seasons, and ways for the heavenly bodies." 8
Among the Incas the "guiding power in regulating the seasons and the courses of the heavenly bodies" was Uira-cocha. "The sun, the moon, the day, the night, spring, winter, are not ordained in vain by thee, O Uira-cocha." 9
The American sources, which speak of a world colored red, of a rain of fire, of world conflagration, of new rising mountains, of frightening portents in the sky, of a twenty-five-year gloom, imply also that "the order of the seasons was altered at that epoch." "The astronomers and geologists whose concern is all this . . . should judge of the causes which could effect the derangement of the day and could cover the earth with tenebrosity," wrote a clergyman who spent many years in Mexico and in the libraries of the Old World which store ancient manuscripts of the Mayas and works of early Indian and Spanish authors about them.10 It did not occur to him that the biblical narrative of the time of the Exodus contains the same elements.
.->With the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, when the Israelites left that country, the old order of seasons came to an end and a new world age began. The Fourth Book of Ezra, which borrows from some earlier sources, refers to the "end of the seasons" in these words: "I sent him
[Moses] and led my people out of Egypt, and brought them to Mount Sinai, and held him by me for many days. I told him many wondrous things, showed him the secrets of the times, declared to him the end of the seasons." n
J>Because of various simultaneous changes in the movement of the earth and the moon, and because observation of the sky was hindered when it was hidden in smoke and clouds, the calendar could not be correctly computed; the changed lengths of the year, the month, and the day required prolonged, unobstructed observation. The words
8 Donnelly, Ragnarok, p. 212. • C. Markham, The Incas of Peru, pp. 97-98. 10 Brasseur, Sources de Vhistoire primitive du Mexique, pp. 28-29. In his later work Quatre lettres sur Mexique (1868), Brasseur came to the conclusion that a stupendous catastrophe occurred in America and that migrating tribes carried the echo of this catastrophe to many peoples of the world, ii IV Ezra 14 : 4.
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of the Midrashim, that Moses was unable to understand the new' calendar, refer to this situation;
"the secrets of the calendar" (sod ha-avour), or more precisely, "the secret of the transition" from robin-bobin
one time-reckoning to another, was revealed to Moses, but he had difficulty in comprehending it.
Moreover, it is said in rabbinical sources that in the time of Moses the course of the heavenly bodies became confounded.12
"^>The month of the Exodus, which occurred in the spring, became the first month of the year:
"This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you." 18 Thus, the strange situation was created in the Jewish calendar that the New Year is observed in the seventh month of the year: the beginning of the calendar year was moved to a point about half a year away from the New Year in the autumn.
With the fall of the Middle Kingdom and the Exodus, one of the great world ages came to its end. The four quarters of the world were displaced, and neither the orbit nor the poles nor, probably, the direction of rotation remained the same. The calendar had to be adjusted anew. The astronomical values of the year and the day could not be the same before and after an upheaval in which, as the quoted Papyrus Anastasi IV says, the months were reversed and "the hours disordered."