GODS OF THE CATACLYSM

by Hugh Fox ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 25, 1976

What Hugh Fox is suggesting--nay, insisting--via Velikovsky, Heyerdahl, and his own omnivorous research into history, archaeology and myth, is that Columbus' blooper in calling the native Americans ""Indians"" was perhaps an unwitting felicity. He believes the Aztecs (like the Chinese) to be cultural descendants of the East Indian Dravidians, the Hopi to be migrant Cretans, and ultimately the whole human race to be the spawn of a primal stock he calls Proto-Indo-Mediterranean-Amerindian, which circumnavigated the globe freely until interrupted by the Velikovskian cataclysm also known as the Biblical Flood. Fox is hardly the first to be intrigued by the resemblances between Mayan and Chinese and Dravidian dragon gods/plumed serpents, Yogic yantras and Mayan hieroglyphs, Cretan mazes and Pueblo kivas, and so on. But he is perhaps the most excited and totalistic proponent of the school that believes these resemblances are due to historic contact rather than archetypal coincidence. Fox is well versed in a wide range of evidence, and he is a participant in a legitimate reconsideration of the pieties of academic history and the factual versus fanciful status of myth. Unfortunately, Fox shows those characteristics of thought that all too often throw the question into disrepute with the questioner: eagerness to jump to conclusions, a willingness to distort or invent evidence to fit his hypothesis, and an utter disregard for the possibility that similar symbols and myths might simply be the responses of identical human equipment to identical facts of life.

Pub Date: Feb. 25, 1976

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper's Magazine Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1976

Categories: NONFICTION