In a sense all of the monumental construction of antiquity is a witness to something that is simply unknown in human conscience today. Why were they all looking back to critical junctures in the age of gods and wonders? Every monument that was ever constructed, every temple, every city, always involved a recreation of a primordial event, and that event did not point to anything that we can name in natural experience today Attention had to be paid to the earliest sources, for whatever has been preserved to the point of cross-cultural agreement; you want to refer it back to the very rst expressions of those themes, as there is a natural tendency towards evolution over time of the myths, to fragment, to distort, to localize the message There was a point at which I realized there were a 100 mythic archetypes or points of agreement and that they are all connected, and that after the mythmaking epoch there is not a single new archetype. That was an incredible revelation that secured for me the possibility of a uni ed theory of myth. That there must have been something unique that was experienced around the
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world that gave rise to this uni ed complex of mythic archetypes.
Because Velikovsky had made this seemingly preposterous claim that the planet Venus appeared in the sky as a great comet, I kept my eye out for that particular question all the time, and I can only say that not only I but all who have seriously investigated this question with the kind of open mind that is required, have concluded exactly the same thing Velikovsky was simply and undeniably correct in saying that the planet Venus was a terrifying Great Comet, the parent of comets. In other words, all of the ideas about comets that humans later discussed or presented or responded to with fear, for example when they responded with fear to a wispy comet coming into view, everything that drove them was a result of that primordial experience with that Great Comet, that Mother of comets .