Open Veils · Answer
What did Ignatius Donnelly write about a comet in Ragnarok?
Donnelly's Ragnarok is the founding document of cometary catastrophism in the English-speaking world. Writing in 1883, he argued a massive comet either struck or made near-collision with Earth in deep prehistory, producing the vast sheets of clay, gravel and drift that blanket the northern hemisphere — deposits geologists of his day attributed solely to glaciation. He tied this event directly to the destruction of Atlantis, the biblical Flood, and the extinction of the mammoth, framing them as a single catastrophic episode erasing an advanced global civilization.
Evidence
- In Ragnarok, Donnelly asked a pointed geological question: what force could have deposited the enormous sheets of till, clay, sand and gravel spread across North America and northern Europe?
- Donnelly argued that only Atlantis, as a refugium, preserved the remnant of that elder civilization — directly linking Ragnarok to his 1882 Atlantis: The Antediluvian World as companion volumes of a unified catastrophist thesis.
- Immanuel Velikovsky explicitly built on Donnelly's framework in Worlds in Collision (1950), taking the cometary-catastrophe model and grafting it onto historical-mythological timescales.
- His answer was that the Earth passed through the tail of a comet — or suffered direct collision — raining fire, poisonous gases and debris across the planet.
- The resulting conflagration and prolonged winters destroyed a pre-existing high civilization, driving survivors into caves where they lost all accumulated knowledge of art, engineering, literature and philosophy.