At www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4988 there was a bit of a splat between Gary Gilligan and the Saturnists in which some basic problems endemic to the Saturn theory and likewise of Gary's interpretation of Egyptian texts and monumental inscriptions, were aired in public. Leroy has of course been rabitting on about these kind of things for years – banging his head against the wall. Gary is not as blunt as Leroy and there is no doubt this is an aspect people must wonder about – when did earth detach itself from Saturn and begin orbitting the Sun, and when did Ra cease to be Saturn, the so called sun of the night, and become Ra the god associated with our Sun, the big yellow orb in the sky. One could say the sun at night was a prominent comet and was endowed with the epithet of Ra simply in passing whilst remaining firmly attached to the Sun. However, in the Saturn theory this can not be so – and at some point in the historical past Ra changed personalities – but when? This is what intrigues Gary Gilligan – a question posed after his own theories were treated rather loosely on the forum. What is the evidence of such a thing happening? When did it happen? Is it a likely idea? and so on. Gary Gilligan has claimed that there were catastrophic encounters between earth and other cosmic bodies and that these are described as battles in the ancient world, especially in Egypt. In his view the battles were between gods and other gods, or cosmic forces, and a human element is missing. A similar thing could be argued quite strongly for such an interpretation of the early parts of the Bible – being a story of gods rather than humans, from Abraham to Moses, Jacob to Esau etc. However, on the face of it, attributing descriptions of battles as having no human element but wholly a catastrophic and cosmic origin, is difficult to accept – which is how the splat began. The Forum commenters were not impressed – so Gary Gilligan made the same point about their theories and points of view regarding the planet Saturn. The idea of gods fighting battles is not new as it is one interpretation of tales such as those of Cuchulainn, King Arthur and Merlin etc. Velikovsky pictured the Trojan War as a human attack on the city of Troy by the Greeks – in the backcloth of a catastrophic event, a theory with some support from conventional sources.
One interesting point emerged from the forum and that was that Ev Cochrane did not think any of the revisions of history had much going for them – and Velikovsky's Ages in Chaos reconstruction was flawed from start to finish and thus serves as a very poor guide to ancient history. He recommended reading and absorbing the Cambridge Ancient History series that was largely correct and gave a good overall understanding of the ancient world. This piece of down to earth realism, it could be argued, is in contrast to some of his mythological papers and especially those on the role of Saturn in the solar system of the mid Holocene era.