To those who know these subjects well are more amused by, than contemptuous of his writings, which have staged a come-back in this age of paperback reprints of interesting rubbish. But even if Velikovsky's fancies were facts, how could they possibly impinge upon the historical reconstruction of astrology. Since the vast majority of astrologers in the history of the world have been siderealists, and the traditional threads have run unbroken through some five millennia, the Western popularization of classical astrology by Cyril Fagan is hardly to be taken as something worked out from a premise either true or false. The statement in your letter is surely the non sequitur of the year. We suggest that you dig just a little deeper into the facts, read just a little more extensively, and be just a bit less impressed by lurid reading matter.
Reality is more fascinating than fiction.
But it was not until 1881, when the Jesuit fathers Epping and Strassmaier recognized sophisticated Babylonian lunar theory in cuneiform texts, that the real scientific astronomy of the ancient world came to light. The interpretation of Babylonian astronomy has its own controversies. These tablets are closely involved with Immanuel Velikovsky's contentious theories. Among numerous hyperspeculations, Velikovsky proposed that two major catastrophes occurred sometime in the past owing to the Earth's dynamic interaction with a comet and then Mars. In both encounters Velikovsky claimed that the directions of the Earth's axial spin was switched plus the angle of tilt of the axis itself, resulting in a major change in the obliquity of the ecliptic.