I might be in the process of drafting a book that takes place before the Flood. So that is forcing me to tackle this issue. Besides needing to get it settled in my own mind, this post is meant to test the waters and see how you, my readers, react to this concept. If I even bring it up, will I be kicked out of polite society?
So, this post is a historical survey of sister-marrying. And it starts in Egypt.
Royals did it
Marrying one’s sister, or half-sister, was not unheard of in the royal families of Ancient Near Eastern cultures. See the following two links for some hair-raising proof that it happened in ancient Egypt:
The practice of royal inbreeding continued so long in Egypt that, by the time we get to Tut-ankh-amen, he has a myriad of health problems and is rather strange-looking.
This was such an established part of married love, at least among royals, in the Ancient Near East that calling someone “my sister” became a conventional endearment. Here, for example, is Solomon:
You have stolen my heart, my sister, my bride,
you have stolen my heart with one glance of your eyes,
with one jewel of your necklace.
Song of Solomon 4:9
And why did they do it? The obvious answer is to keep the royal bloodline pure. Most ANE cultures tended to believe that their royal family was descended from the gods (see my post Genetic Engineering in the Ancient World), and to add another layer to this, their myths about the gods also often featured sibling-marriage. Typically, you’d have gods and goddesses all being descended from the same being (Father Sky and Mother Earth, say), and then reproducing with each other to produce all the typically observed features of the cosmos. (Please, for the love of God, take my word for this and don’t read the Sumerian creation myths. I’m begging you–don’t!)
Speaking of Sumerians, here is an article that argues that Abram married his half-sister Sarai (whose name means princess) for the same reason: because their family was some kind of royalty in Mesopotamia before he left on his journey.
My question, however, is this. Did this practice of royals marrying their sisters represent breaking an established taboo for a “good” reason, or was it a case of carrying on a common practice a little longer than most people? My contention is that it’s the latter.
Let’s Go to Genesis
Genesis is, as I have often said, my favorite ancient history book. The more I study all of this, the more I realize that it is by far the most accurate written record we have of really ancient history, and of course it’s the only written record we have for some events that are, nevertheless, corroborated indirectly by archaeology, genetics, and historical traditions from around the world.
So, in Genesis, we have humanity starting out with one single couple. If we take this seriously, we have to conclude that the first generation would have had to marry their brothers and sisters, because there was nobody else around.
Nowadays, this would be an impossible genetic problem, besides being taboo. However, clearly it wasn’t taboo at the time. By producing families, people were obeying God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it.” (Gen. 1:28) Based on the extremely long lifespans recorded in Genesis, we can infer that the newly created people were much healthier than we are, with a much more varied and robust genetic code. They would have had few diseases as yet, and almost no harmful mutations to inherit. Adam and Eve, who didn’t die until they were into their 900s, could have had literally a hundred or more children in that first generation. Furthermore, these children need not all have looked alike, except in the sense of being human. We have to remember that Adam and Eve had within them the potential to produce every genetic variation we see today (and actually more, since most of the variety was lost during the Flood).
By the time Cain kills Abel, there are enough people in the earth that Cain can complain, “I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.” These other people that he is worried about would have been his siblings, nephews and nieces, grandnephews and -nieces, and so forth. If we figure that Seth was born not long after the murder of Abel, then the murder of Abel took place just under 130 years after the Fall. (Genesis 4:25 – 5:3) Apparently, that was enough time for the world to be populated.
In this video, starting at about 20:00, geneticist Nathaniel T. Jeansen discusses how our ancestors had to have been more closely related “than we are usually comfortable with.”
A Detour into Evolutionary Theory
“But wait!” you may say. “All this is nonsense. People didn’t all come from one founding couple, we evolved from several different but related species of hominids.”
Actually, if you think that way, you probably stopped reading this article before you got to this section. But let’s dip a toe into natural selection, just in case there is anyone hate-reading or any readers who are intrigued by what I’m saying about history, but are bothered by the science side of things.
Natural selection, in order to work as a mechanism, has to have a population of creatures already in place, with some genetic variation already in their genome. And–this is critical–they have to be already reproducing. That way, natural selection can operate on the subsequent generations of the population, encouraging variety here, stamping it out there, etc.
This creates a big problem if you want to argue that people evolved from (ultimately) one-celled animals. Now, how one-celled animals reproduce is itself a beautiful, complex mystery, but it’s basically by subdividing, producing clones of themselves. In other words, it’s not sexual reproduction.
How did sexual reproduction come about through natural selection? It would call for a wildly improbable series of (already vanishingly rare) beneficial mutations to the genetic code of two different creatures of the same species, such that one ended up male and one ended up female, with their systems perfectly corresponding to each other for reproduction. And it would have to work perfectly the first time.
If you want several different populations of human species, then you need this miracle to happen not once but several times, in different places. If it only happens once, then you’re back to what Genesis describes, which is just one founding couple.
What I’m saying is that introducing evolutionary theory doesn’t make the believability problem smaller, it makes it bigger.
Stephen Meyer explains why beneficial mutations are mathematically impossible.
Back to Genesis Again
We’ve established that in the pre-Flood world, there was no taboo on marrying one’s sibling (or probably, cousin or niece either), and also no health cost to doing so. Also (probably) it would not necessarily mean marrying someone you had grown up in close proximity with, given the size of the families we are talking about.
Then we get the Flood, in Genesis 6 – 9 and also attested in numerous local histories worldwide. At the Flood, the human population of the earth, previously vast in genetic diversity, gets culled down to just four couples, and the men of these couples are all related to each other. It’s from these four couples (perhaps just three of them?) that all of us today are descended. (We are literally just one big family!)
Think about the implications of this. The most distant relationship that any of Noah’s grandchildren would have had to each other would have been cousin during that first generation. Perhaps they married their cousins, and then their second cousins and so forth, but there is nothing to indicate that the possibility of marrying siblings had been closed to them. In Gen. 9:1 -17, God makes a new covenant with Noah and his sons. He reiterates the command to increase in number and fill the earth. He gives them the animals to eat, institutes the death penalty for murder of humans, and promises never to send another worldwide flood. He does not mention any new rules about not marrying your sister.
Next, in Genesis 11 and 10 respectively, we get the Tower of Babel and the Table of Nations. Though the Table of Nations comes before the account of Babel, the fact that we are told which geographical areas these nations settled in hints that the Table of Nations is at least a partial elaboration of where people went when “the LORD scattered them over the face of the earth.”
In the Table of Nations, the peoples are sorted by father. We see the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japeth listed by a paternal line, and we see them scattering to found cities, kingdoms, and peoples. This implies, though it does not directly say, that they were having a lot of children per family, and that they were practicing in-group marriage.
Now we get to Abram, who was a Sumerian basically, or was living in that region of the world and in that culture area. As has been covered, he married his half-sister Sarai, whether because theirs was an aristocratic family or because it was still common practice in Mesopotamia at the time. Later, on two separate occasions (Gen. 12:10 – 20 and 20:1 – 18), he “lies” by telling a local ruler that Sarai is his sister. On both occasions, the local king understands this to mean that Sarai is not Abram’s wife and is fair game for his harem. This shows that, probably, most wives were not sisters at the time, at least in Egypt (Gen. 12) and southern Palestine (Gen. 20).
This would be about 2,000 B.C.
In Genesis 24, Abraham asks his servant to get a wife for Isaac from among “my own relatives.” The servant, guided by the LORD (!), finds Rebekah, the daughter of Abraham’s niece (Gen. 24:15). One generation later, Rebekah herself encourages Jacob to marry one of his cousins, daughters of her brother Laban. So by this time, we are practicing in-group marriage, but with cousins, not siblings.
Finally, in Leviticus 18, we get an explicit prohibition on marrying your sister.
Leviticus comprises the details of the giving of the Law, right after the exodus from Egypt, so about 1400 B.C. If you plop your finger onto Leviticus, it looks really early in the Bible. However, it’s 600 years after Abraham and a couple of thousand years after the Flood, so it is coming rather late from this blog’s perspective on ancient history.
The intended recipients of Leviticus are a large population of tribes who have just spent 400 years becoming culturally Egyptian. Since Moses’ parents were both from the tribe of Levi (Exodus 2:1), we can infer that they are still practicing in-group marriage.
Leviticus chapter 18 begins this way:
The LORD said to Moses: “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘I am the LORD your God. You must not do as they do in Egypt, where you used to live, and you must not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you. Do not follow their practices. You must obey my laws and be careful to follow my decrees. I am the LORD your God. Keep my decrees and laws, for the man who obeys them will live [i.e. find life] by them. I am the LORD.
“No one is to approach any close relative to have sexual relations. I am the LORD.”
Lev. 18:1 – 6
There follows a very comprehensive list of close relatives who are off-limits. This list includes everything you can think of, and some things that you perhaps haven’t. It ranges from very sick perversions, to this:
“‘Do not have sexual relations with your sister, either your father’s daughter or your mother’s daughter, whether she was born in the same home or elsewhere. (v. 9)
“‘Do not take your wife’s sister as a rival wife and have sexual relations with her while your wife is living.'” (v. 17)
Verse 9 gives us a clue of what types of family arrangements were possible among the Israelites of 1400 B.C. You might have a half-sister who was raised in a separate household. Verse 17 describes a behavior that Jacob famously engaged in with Rachael and Leah (additionally, both women were his cousins). In fact, the two women’s rivalry was how we got the twelve tribes of Israel. Marrying two sisters at the same time (not to mention their respective maidservants) was apparently something that was normal in the age of the patriarchs, but now, giving the Law 600 years later, God forbids it.
Leviticus 18:24 – 29 makes it clear that “all these things were done by the people who lived in the land before you,” but God considers them to be things that defile a land. I gather that this means the wide variety of disordered sexual relationships described in Leviticus 18 were not unheard-of, probably not just among the Egyptians and Canaanites, but among many or all of the many tribes in the surrounding areas.
We have God to thank for this taboo
So, now we know approximately when marrying your sister became taboo. 1400 B.C. And people didn’t come up with this on their own; God had to enforce it.
The overall picture is one where we start off with is marriages taking place among close family, in sort of a wholesome way, before and immediately after the Flood. Then, instead of branching out and marrying more and more distantly related people as the earth’s population increases, we see cultures in the Ancient Near East curving back in on themselves and coming up with more and more perverse ways to approach this. I gather from Lev. 18 that, once an ANE man had bagged a wife, he seemed to feel entitled, or at least have an eye out for the opportunity, for sexual rights to everyone related to her.
The time of the Israelite patriarchs, enslavement in Egypt, and Exodus also overlaps with the Minoan civilization on Crete, which gave us the legend (?) of the Minotaur, the offspring (allegedly) of Queen Pasiphae and a white bull. That gives us a clue that such horrifying practices were not confined to the Levant. “Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how that nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled.”
Here I am at Sage Wall, to give you some idea of the scale.
Sage Wall is a possible megalithic site near Butte, Montana. In this post, I am going to thoroughly embarrass my geologist husband by saying that Sage Wall looks manmade to me. But first, how did I come to visit Sage Wall in person?
Getting to Sage Wall
It’s on my bucket list to visit as many archeological sites as a I can, the older the better. Sage Wall was a no-brainer because it’s only a half a day’s drive from my house. It is also a good candidate to visit because looking at photos is kind of ambiguous. To really get a sense of whether it seems manmade or like a natural formation, I felt I had to be there in person.
We drove up into the beautiful Montanan Pioneer Mountains (Idaho has some as well), stayed the night in Butte, and the next day, made our way to Sage Mountain Center, where I had a reservation. We could not have asked for a more beautiful day, weather-wise. Early June in the Butte area is still basically Spring.
Chris and Linda are the property owners at Sage Mountain. About three decades ago, they wanted to move out to the middle of nowhere and build a sustainable house and retreat center. They were not looking for megaliths. Linda stumbled upon the wall on a hike one day, and Chris, who has a background in building, looked at it, said, “Yep. That doesn’t look natural. Well, let’s get back to our projects.” It wasn’t until years later, when they had established a sustainability-themed retreat center and had started to create some hiking trails for their guests, that other people started noticing the wall. Chris and Linda cleared the brush around the wall, roped it off, and had it examined by LIDAR and ground-penetrating radar.
Now, many people are coming to see the wall, seemingly to a point where it is almost becoming a problem. Sage Mountain Center is still on a wind-y, washboard-y dirt road, but now many people, seeking to get away from it all, have built new houses and cabins along that same road. Chris asked us, as we drove out, not to “go too fast past our neighbors. We’re trying not to bother them.” I got the impression that his main desire is still to just run a sustainability B&B in peace, but he’s been saddled with this danged wall.
What Would a Skeptic Say?
I want to give the skeptical geologists their due here. I think what they would say is this: “All these people who are saying Sage Wall is amazing megalithic structure are forgetting one thing: It is right in the middle of the Boulder Batholith! There are big granite rocks everywhere!”
source: formontana.net
They are not wrong. The mountains to the east of Butte, where Sage Mountain Center is located, are strewn with large granite boulders and outcroppings. These tend to fracture into shapes resembling worked blocks of stone.
Here are some pictures I took, on the way in, of natural granite outcroppings so you can see how they normally look and how they tend to fracture:
You can see that the fractures are often horizontal and strikingly block-like.
We also saw some pieces of granite that had very large quartz crystals formed in them, which stuck out like chips in a chocolate chip cookie:
And, just for fun, here’s a balanced rock:
I’m not sure whether this balanced rock is natural, but I’m leaning towards no. I’m thinking it was put there to mark the trail.
Anyway, the skeptics are correct that the presence of big, blocky rocks does not an ancient megalithic structure make. This is part of the reason I wanted to see Sage Wall myself. I did not take any videos of it, because I’m not good with video and didn’t have a script ready. But there are now many videos of Sage Wall online, including drone videos. I’ll try to embed some of them at the end of this post.
Why Sage Wall is Likely Man-Made in my Amateur Opinion
So no, the claim is not that this must be a megalithic structure because it is located somewhere that we would not expect rocks. It is definitely surrounded by rocks. However, it looks distinctly different from the more random rock outcroppings around it.
It is very long, and very straight. (The wall extends past the Sage Mountain Center property, but only their section of it has been cleared.)
Unlike what we see with other fracturing patterns, the wall consist of very big blocks laid out in what appear to be courses. To my (again, amateur) eye, when we see natural fracturing the blocks tend to fracture into smaller pieces where they are exposed.
In the pictures above (and in the one where I’m posing), you can see a hollow lower down in the wall where a block obviously fell out.
At three different places in the exposed section of the wall, there are gaps in the top similar to doors. Chris told us there had been a lot of speculation about these before researchers realized that they were simply places where boulders had fallen out. In fact, you can see the boulders below them, almost completely buried in dirt and pine duff.
On the picture above, you can also see the remains of a triangular shape. The left side of the triangle is made with shaped blocks, and the right side is incised into the megalith. The triangle happens to frame the gap where a block fell out.
According to Chris, the geophysicist who examined the wall with ground-penetrating radar found that it goes down into the ground about another 20 feet. At the bottom was something that reflected the radar, as it might be a floor or stone foundation.
All of this research is shortly to be posted on the wall’s website, here or possibly here.
Parallel to the wall are the fallen remains of what appears to be another wall. You can see that it is “fractured” in the same way, and these other blocks also have some of the nub and cup features that we’ll talk about below.
Here’s a bit of the second wall, seen end-on.
Behind the Wall
Here’ a view behind the more intact wall. Chris and Linda have installed a rope that allows visitors to climb up behind the wall. As you can see, the wall is not just part of a cliffside, but it does have earth and rocks filled in behind, either as terraces/a retaining wall, or the ravages of time.
From behind the wall, we look out through a gap left by a fallen stone across the avenue at the remains of the second wall.
Getting close to the top of the wall allows us to see what might be nubs and cups.
Nubs and Cups
Stone nubs and cups (not necessarily corresponding to each other) are sometimes features of megalithic architecture in other parts of the world.
“Cup and ring” markings are apparently found all over the world, but especially in Northern Europe. Here are two articles about them.
Here are some nubs found on top of the intact wall.
They are not the same as the pieces of quartz sticking out of the natural stone that we photographed earlier.
Because the wall is so weathered, some of them are not certain.
Note the possible incised lines above this last nub.
Here are some other things we saw on the back of the wall:
Incised straight line
Suspiciously square fracture line
On the fallen wall as well, we found some things that look like nubs, and some possible cups. As a nod to the skeptics, yes, these “cups” do look like they could have been caused by water erosion. This would be especially true if they were found under a waterfall or a persistent drip, which they are not, as far as I can see. Some of them are also suspiciously round.
Very round “cup” in which someone has placed some fresh lichen
Some also have very straight lines incised near them. My son suggested they could be a water feature.
Looks like a cup with a spout
False Nub Alarm? Or Another Part of the Complex?
As we hiked away from Sage Wall, I took care to photograph natural rock formations for comparison. Not very far from the walls, I saw something that also looked like nubs.
Did this mean that such nubs are a natural feature of the way granite weathers? Or could this be another part of the same complex as the wall? The formation on which I spotted these nubs certainly looks like the remains of a constructed passage.
A Post-Flood Megalithic Culture
After I left Sage Wall, my husband asked, humoring me, what I thought its purpose had been. My answer is that I have no idea. It is way too old, weathered, and partially buried for me to speculate. (This does not bother Julie Ryder over at Montana Megaliths, so if you want to see some people speculate very confidently, you can visit there.)
What I can say is that, granted this is not a natural formation, it most reminds me of Sacsahuayman and other sites in Peru. You have the same dry stone construction with megalithic blocks that are shaped, but are not in uniform sizes or in a regular pattern. And, of course, you have the nubs. As for scale, it appears that if Sage Wall were excavated down to its foundation, it would be thirty or forty feet high.
Another similarity is that both Sage Wall and the Incan or pre-Incan complexes are built at very high elevations (the Continental Divide runs near Butte).
This suggests to me that they partake of the same culture area.
Sage Wall, of course, has been abandoned much longer than any of the impressive Incan complexes, some of which Europeans got to witness still in use. Consequently, it’s much more weathered, run down, and filled in. But it looks like the same sort of thing.
So, it appears that Sage Wall and any other structures we might find in association with it were built by a group of people who knew how to build with megaliths, and who then had to abandon this site for some reason. It was before recorded history in North America, but that doesn’t mean it was before recorded history was happening elsewhere. Then, they or their descendants or people who partook of the same megalithic culture, moved on towards South America and continued their building there.
I believe there is plenty of evidence–not from Sage Wall, but from other sources–that human dispersion happened very quickly after the Flood, and that when people spread out, they took a megalithic culture with them. Dolmens, pyramids, cities, and inexplicable megaliths have been discovered all over the world. In many cases, as with the Bosnian pyramids, they have been abandoned for so long that they are not immediately recognizable as the work of human hands. You have to know what you are looking at before you can see it. The Bosnian pyramids, first thought to be extremely regular hills, were confirmed as artifacts only when a team dug into them and found tunnels. It looks like something similar happened with Sage Wall.
Immediately after the Flood, the earth would have entered an Ice Age. The climate was in a tailspin: temperatures were low, precipitation at an all-time high. Much of that precipitation quickly got locked up in glaciers. Sea levels fell around the newly configured continents. There were land bridges all over: in Beringia, in Doggerland, in Sundaland. People took advantage of all this newly revealed, very humid land and scattered. But the Ice Age was short, and as glaciers melted, there were sudden catastrophic local floods. People had to abandon their sites. Many of their cities, camps, and settlements are now hidden under water along our coasts. In some cases, such as Gobeklitepe and the Vinca cities, they burned, buried, or otherwise destroyed their sites before moving on. Some of these sites might have been built very quickly and inhabited for only a short time before they were abandoned. Other things being equal, archaeologists tend to overestimate how long it took to build something, and how long ago it appeared. But even very recent sites can be quite mysterious. They have had trouble re-constructing Woodstock, for example.
How Did They Build It?
I don’t know. Obviously they were purty smart. Probably an argument is going to be made that Sage Wall must be a natural formation because “we know” that people in the Stone Age didn’t have the ability to make things like this, despite constant evidence being discovered to the contrary. Or they will argue that “we know” that there were no advanced civilizations in North America, despite Sage Wall itself. Such arguments tend to be self-re-enforcing.
I do know that we do not, currently, have the ability to build with megaliths … at least, not so easily that we consider them our first choice in building material. We might make a monument or a gravestone, but we wouldn’t attempt to build an entire house or city out of megaliths. The effort would just not be worth it. This suggests that the ancients may have had ways that were easier than our current methods.
It is worth noting that there is a well-established oral tradition of giants living in North America. There have also been giant skeletons discovered. In Peru, meanwhile, there is the tradition of the Viracochas, bearded, godlike culture-bringers. No, I’m not suggesting aliens. I do think we should take a closer look at the worldwide oral traditions of apocalypses, floods, gods, and giants, and that we should pay attention to myths that suggest that civilizations were “advanced” right from the beginning. If you want to dig into this more than you already have (and if you are reading this, I assume you already have!), please feel free to look at my page The Research Behind the Books for a suggested reading list.
I have edited the question about the age of the earth extensively to reflect changes in my thinking.
I have also added some information about my next book.
Also, you will see some more breathless quotes added to my home page (outofbabelbooks.com) from volunteer reviewers who gave The Strange Land and The Great Snake three or four or five stars.
They are making a really cool movie that is due to come in out 2026.
No, it’s not based on my books in any way, but it has all the themes of my series, turned up to 11. I mean to say, if you click on the link above, you will see that their web site features American Indians fighting a dinosaur. Things do not get cooler than that, and as it turns out, they also do not get better historically supported.
Here is a quote from their FAQs section:
The Walam Olum or “Red Record,” which is central to our movie, is very much not alone from multiple Native American historical narratives that provide a clear and consistent telling of giants—especially giants associated with the mound builders and earth works, of which there are tens of thousands in America. The Lenni Lenape’s account of the Nephilim is central to their history (see the “snake people” and the makowini, translated “big men” that existed before and after their Flood account, were part of the reason for the Flood, matching our Bible history). See the Glyphs in Book 2 and Glyphs 1-2 in Book 3. Several other historical documents also mention giants affiliated with tribes around the Lenni-Lenape people.
In other words, these people are kindred spirits, which is why they wanted to buy my url in the first place.
My little url is all grown up, and I couldn’t be prouder.
Still buy my books, I mean. They have their own peculiar charm. But by all means, go and see this movie too.
Over the past several years, my research and reading has led me more and more to the conviction that the entities that people often call the old gods were not “mere mythology.” They were and are real.
Several threads of my thinking have re-enforced each other in coming to this conclusion.
First of all, as a Christian, I reject the Enlightenment-era, materialist notion that there is no spiritual world, that matter is all that really exists. I reject both the strong version of this, in which not even the human mind is real, and the weak version of it, in which we accept that human beings exist as minds, but we try envision as them as “arising” out of matter, and we disbelieve in any other spiritual beings, whether spirits, angels, demons, ghosts, or the one true God. This view, the one I reject, has held sway for most of our lifetimes. Even people such as myself who would not call themselves materialists will lapse into this sort of thinking by default, looking for a physical or mechanical process to explain what is “really” going on behind any claimed spiritual phenomenon.
Another thread in the tapestry has been my interest in the ancient world. Anyone with a passing familiarity with archaeology quickly comes to realize that ancient people were much smarter than they have gotten credit for, at least during the Golden Age of Scientific Triumphalism, the late 1800s and early 1900s. All the good, old-fashioned scientific materialists from this era took it as an axiom that human beings started out as apelike hunter-gatherers, and slowly “ascended,” developing shelter and clothing, “discovering” fire, slowly and painfully inventing various “primitive” tools, and then finally moving on to farming, language, and religion. By hypothesis, ancient people were stupid compared to us now.
Genesis, my favorite history book, tells a very different story. It shows people being fully human from the get-go, immediately launching into writing, herding, weaving, art, music, and founding cities. And in fact, archaeology confirms this. Every year, we discover a more ancient civilization than the evolutionists told us existed. Some recent examples: the Antikythera mechanism is an ancient computer. The Vinca signs are an alphabet that pre-dates Sumeria. Gobekli Tepeis a temple complex that uses equilateral triangles and pi, and dates to “before agriculture was invented” (as is still being claimed). The Amazon basin turns out to have been once covered in cities.
Evolutionists’ dogmatism about early man being stupid has allowed them to ignore all the data that ancient history presents us about the existence of a spirit world. Why should we believe claims (universally attested) about heavenly beings that come to earth to visit, rule over, and even mate with humans? These are primitive people’s attempts to explain purely scientific phenomena that they didn’t understand. But if, as a Christian, I choose to respect ancient people and take seriously their intelligence, then I also have to grapple with their historical and cosmological claims.
Moving on to the third thread. The Bible itself confirms that there were entities called gods (“elohim”), some of whom, at one point in very ancient times, actually came to earth and reproduced with human women, creating a race of preternatural giants, “the heroes of old, men of renown” (Gen. 6:4). The story is told in Genesis ch. 6, but it is assumed and referenced throughout the rest of the Bible and in Hebrew cosmology. This idea is also attested in oral and written traditions worldwide, which universally have gods and giants. A Bible-believing Christian can take seriously the bulk of pagan history, cosmology and myth, whereas a strict materialist evolutionist has to reject it all as primitive superstition.
Part of the Biblical understanding of the gods is that they are created entities who were supposed to help the one true God rule the cosmos. In the course of redemption history, the fallen gods were first banished from appearing physically on earth (in the Flood). At Babel, the gods were each given a nation of men as their “portion” to rule over (Deut. 32:7 – 8), which they did a pretty poor job (Psalm 82). Then God called Abram to make a people for Himself, with the ultimate goal of making all the nations His portion (Ps. 82:8, Ps. 2, Matt. 4:8 – 9). When Christ came, He began to drive the gods out of their long-held territories (Mat. 12:28 – 29). Whenever a region was Christianized, the old gods would first fight back, then become less powerful, and eventually go away altogether. Sometimes, their very names were forgotten. This disappearance of lesser spiritual entities from more and more corners of the earth is the only reason any person could ever seriously have asserted that there is no spirit world.
As a Christian, I am immensely grateful to have grown up in a civilization from which the old gods had been driven. It has been a mostly sane civilization, in which everyday life is not characterized by spooks, curses, possession, temple prostitution or human sacrifice.
This, then, is the background that I brought to Cahn’s book. This mental background helped me to accept many of his premises immediately. If you do not have this background – if you are, for example, a modern evangelical Christian but still a functional materialist – Cahn’s book might be a bit challenging. He dives into the deep end right away. He moves fast and covers a lot of material.
Who is Jonathan Cahn?
In his own words,
Jonathan Cahn caused a worldwide stir with the release of the New York Times best seller The Harbinger and his subsequent New York Times best sellers.
n.b.: I had seen The Harbinger on sale, but I assumed it was fiction in the style of the Left Behind series and avoided it.
He is known as a prophetic voice to our times and for the opening up of the deep mysteries of God. Jonathan leads Hope of the World … and Beth Israel/the Jerusalem Center, his ministry base and worship center in Wayne, New Jersey, just outside New York City.
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From page 239 of this book
In other words, Jonathan Cahn swims in the dispensational or charismatic stream of Christianity. He calls himself a prophet. That’s a red flag to me, as a Reformed Christian. I believe that the prophetic age ended with John the Baptist (Matt. 11:11 -14). The prophets and apostles were the foundation of the church, and they died out with the first generation of Christians (Eph. 2:19 – 22). This exegesis of Scripture finds confirmation in daily life. I have met Christians who sensed God speaking to them (and have experienced it myself), but I have never met anyone who claimed to be a modern-day prophet, receiving authoritative words from God, who wasn’t a charlatan.
To make matters worse, Cahn asserts that he can “open up the deep mysteries of God” and that we can “find out about his over two thousand messages and mysteries.” This is a direct claim to have exclusive spiritual knowledge that is not available to all in the already-revealed Word of God. If he were just talking about knowledge already found in the Bible, he would call it “exegesis” or “Bible teaching,” not “messages and mysteries.” This claim reveals him to be part of the Gnostic or Hermetic stream of Christianity. Yes, I am using the words “Gnostic” and “Hermetic” loosely. They are big terms with somewhat flexible definitions. However, both are characterized by an emphasis on secret or esoteric knowledge which can only be accessed through a teacher (or, in this case, a prophet) who has been enlightened somehow. To see my posts about Hermeticism and why it is it antithetical to orthodox Christianity, click here,here, here, and here.
What was my approach to this book?
I knew when I picked up this book that Cahn was dispensational, a “prophet,” and therefore fundamentally a false teacher. So, I approached the book not as I would an exegesis by a trusted or mostly trusted, orthodox teacher or scholar like Michael Heiser or Douglas Van Dorn, but rather with curiosity. My interest in the topic of the old gods is such that I can’t ignore what anyone claiming the name of Christ had to say about it. I already knew there was a resurgence of interest in this topic in the Reformed world, and now I wanted to see what the Dispensationalists were saying. I picked it up prepared for anything up to and including rank heresy, but as it turned out, the most heretical thing in the book was the “About Jonathan Cahn” section that I just showed you. The rest was, for someone with my cosmology, mostly pretty hard to disagree with.
The Parable of the Empty House
Cahn spends four very short chapters (Chapters 2 – 5; pages 5 – 22) establishing the ideas I attempted to establish above: that the gods of the ancient world were real spiritual entities who ruled over nations and received their worship. He demonstrates briefly that this was assumed in the Bible and in Hebrew cosmology. He uses the word shedim, a Hebrew word for demon or unclean spirit, which is sometimes used in the Old Testament to describe the gods. He doesn’t get into the idea of elohim, Watchers, or other different names for spiritual entities, or many details of how they fell. Entire books can be (and have been) written about this (see Michael Heiser). However, Cahn wants to move on and see what is going on with these entities in the modern day.
Moving at treetop level, he reviews how the coming of Christ progressively drove the gods out of more and more regions of the earth, in a process that took centuries. He describes civilizations as being “possessed” by the gods they serve. I don’t think he means that every person in a pagan civilization is demon possessed, but as a group, their thinking and behavior is shaped and to some extent controlled by whatever god they serve. As someone who has studied the Aztecs, I can’t disagree. Cahn also points out that it was common, indeed routine, for priests, priestesses, and prophets of the pagan gods to experience actual possession, such as the Oracle of Delphi, the girl with the “python spirit” in Acts 16, or worshippers going into a “divine frenzy.”
Having introduced the concept of possession, Cahn moves on to a parable Jesus told about the dynamics of possession in an individual.
When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, “I will return to the house I left.” When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation. Matt. 12:43 – 45, NIV
Typically of Jesus, this parable works on three levels. The house which is cleansed, left empty, and then re-occupied stands for a person who has been demon-possessed, has been delivered, and then ends up in a worse state than before. And the person, Jesus says, can stand for “this wicked generation.”
Cahn takes this parable and applies it to entire civilizations. He has already established that pagan civilizations were possessed, sometimes literally, by a variety of old gods, to their sorrow. When the Gospel came to them, Christ showed up in person, delivered and cleansed them, and lived in their house. Now, says Cahn, what might happen if a civilization rejects Christ, drives Him out? The house (the post-Christian civilization) has been “swept clean and put in order” by its centuries of Christianity, but it is now “empty,” having driven out Christ. It is now a very attractive vessel for “seven other spirits more wicked than the last.”
I honestly don’t think this is an abuse of Scripture. Cahn seems to be applying the parable in one of the senses in which Jesus meant it. Furthermore, he is not the first to point out that the many wonderful benefits of modern Western civilization are an aftereffect of about 1500 years of Christianity. Some commentators have said that “we are living off interest.” Others have compared us, as a society, to someone sawing off the branch he is sitting on. Doug Wilson has mourned that “we like apple pie, but we want to get rid of all the apple orchards.”
A post-Christian society, say Cahn and many others, for various reasons is vulnerable to much greater evils than a pre-Christian one. In the rest of the book, Cahn will show how the old gods have indeed come back. His focus is on the United States, because he’s an American, but also because the United States has a been a major exporter of culture to the world, and in recent years that culture has been of the demonic variety. Cahn’s book is so persuasive because he is not, as “prophets” often do, sketching a near-future scenario and trying to convince us of it. Instead, he is describing what has already happened.
Which gods, though?
When Cahn first started talking about “the gods” coming back, it occurred to me to wonder, “Which gods?” When Americans or Europeans become openly neo-pagan, I’ve noticed they often go for the gods their ancestors worshipped. So, many people research the Norse gods and cosplay as Vikings … except it’s not just cosplay. Other people are more attracted to the Celtic pantheon. These are the Wiccans. Interestingly, in S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse series, we have a very literal return of the gods when technology vanishes from modern society. Creative anachronists suddenly find that their skills are useful. A Wiccan busker becomes the leader of her own little witch community. Other people get into reviving the Norse religion. It’s a neopagan’s fantasy.
But there are a couple of problems with this. For one thing, neopagans’ version of the ancient religion often looks very different from the actual beliefs of the ancient pagans (many of which have been lost to history). Also, modern neopagans are happy to mix elements of different traditions from opposite sides of the globe: wicca, Tibetan Buddhism, or their kooky version of American Indian religions (probably also not very authentic). I once commented to a neopagan friend of mine (back when we were still friends) that her religion resembled a “personal scrapbook”. And she happily acknowledged this as one of its good points. A DIY paganism, popular with modern individualists, is not the sort of the thing that can become the state religion of a whole society. Finally, actual, hardcore neopagans are not small in number, but they are nowhere near the majority in the United States. Neopaganism does not appear, at this moment, to be the manner in which an entire postChristian society comes under the control of the old gods. And, in fact, that’s not exactly what Cahn has in mind.
America is not made up of any one ethnicity or people group but many, almost all. In many ways America is a composite and summation of Western civilization. So then what gods could relate not to one nation or ethnicity within Western civilization but to all of them or to Western civilization as whole? … The faith of Western civilization come from ancient Israel. The Bible consists of the writings of Israel, the psalms of Israel, the chronicles and histories of Israel, the prophecies of Israel, and the gospel of Israel. The spiritual DNA of Western civilization comes from and, in many ways, is the spiritual DNA of ancient Israel. … The gods, or spirits, that have returned to America and Western civilization are the same gods and spirits that seduced ancient Israel in the days of its apostacy. … If a civilization indwelled by Israel’s faith and word should apostacize from that faith, it would become subject to the same gods and spirits of Israel’s apostacy.
ibid, pp. 34 – 35
The dark trinity
I have a feeling that Cahn, coming from the worldview he does, is setting up this principle as a hard-and-fast rule, and I don’t feel he has really established it as such from Scripture. However, I’m open to it as speculation. Though it’s not, in my opinion, closely argued, his line of reasoning becomes more convincing when we see the gods that he identifies as having returned to America.
He calls them the “dark trinity”:
Baal (“the lord”): the god of rain in the Ancient Near East, he was often portrayed as riding on a bull and brandishing a thunderbolt. Controlling the rain meant that Baal controlled crops, and hence fertility, wealth, and prosperity. Thus, he was the god of power and wealth, and was a ruler.
Ishtar/Ashera (Sumerian Inanna): goddess of sex, alehouses, and the occult. Among the Canaanites, Ashera was considered the consort of Baal and “Ashera poles” were the site of orgies.
Moloch/Molech: The dark god of human sacrifice, particularly child sacrifice. His name means “king.”
Once these gods are identified, we can see that it does not seem so arbitrary that they should be the ones to return. For one thing, they and the God of the Israelites were personal enemies, as it were, battling for control of the same territory, for many centuries. But secondly, these pagan gods come close to being universal.
Baal is your basic male sky god. His name means “lord,” and his essence is basically that of taking power for oneself, rebelling against the Creator. Once we look at him this way, we can see that every pantheon has a Baal. In Ugarit, an ancient Semitic civilization, Baal was understood to be the Creator’s chief administrator over the earth, head of the divine council (credit: Michael Heiser). Baal was actually translated as Zeus in Greek and Jupiter in Rome.
Ishtar, a dangerous female sex goddess, shows up as Inanna in Sumer, one of the most ancient civilizations whose records we can actually read. Cahn spends much of the book delving into Inanna’s characteristics and history, for reasons that will become clear. But, through a process of cultural exchange, she showed up as Ishtar in ancient Babylon (leading to the words Ostara and Easter), Ashera among the Phoenicians (a.k.a. Canaanites), and Aphrodite among the Greeks (Venus among the Romans).
Molech was called Chemosh in Moab. Greek historian Diodorus Siculus translates his name as Kronos (Saturn), the god who devoured his own children. Many many cultures throughout the world have practiced infant sacrifice.
These three gods, then, not only show up by different names in nearly all the cultures of the Ancient Near East right down to Christian times; they not only are the types of entities that show up in nearly every pantheon worldwide, even in the Americas; they also appear to date back to ancient Sumer, which is still a source that is sought by modern neopagans and Hermetic believers. They are not, unfortunately, out of date or obscure. Suddenly, it no longer seems as if they are irrelevant to modern America.
How it went down
Briefly, Cahn argues that cultures (not just America) first let in Baal, who ushers in Ishtar, who ushers in Molech. And he argues that in our culture, this has already happened.
Baal represents the motivation for rebelling against the one true God that seems reasonable. Human beings want prosperity, they want security, they want to do their own thing. They want a god who can reliably make the rain come, the crops grow, the city flourish. They want to have independent, personal power, and not have to humble themselves before or depend upon the Creator. Baal is the god of prosperity, money, and success. Cahn says that America first welcomed Baal. He points to the actual bronze statue of a bull at Wall Street as a literal, though unintentional, idol to Baal, right in the financial center of arguably the most powerful and influential city in our nation.
Once you have Baal, he ushers in his consort, Ishtar. Ishtar is a much more unstable character. As the prostitute goddess, she likes people to engage in sexual chaos. In her instantiation as Inanna, she is emotionally unstable and vengeful, notorious for taking lovers and then killing them (which is why Gilgamesh tried to turn her down). As the patron of the alehouse, she is also the goddess of beer. And she presides over the occult, and with it, drugs. So, Ishtar’s influence began to surge in the 1960s, with sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, accompanied by a rising interest in the occult and a rising sense of rage. Cahn will have more to say about Ishtar.
Finally, Ishtar ushers in Molech. In the early 70s, after the worship of money and immediately after the Sexual Revolution, American’s highest court legalized the killing of infants. This practice has been defended with religious fervor by its followers ever since. Just as with the Phoenician worshippers of Molech, killing babies has been called not just a necessary evil but a moral good, and opposing this killing has been called a moral evil. Just as when Molech reigned in the Ancient Near East, babies have been killed in their thousands and then in their millions.
We started out just wanting to get ahead, and now here we are, in the darkest place imaginable. But unfortunately, with the gods things can always get worse.
Now, here is where it gets weird
So far, Cahn’s claims have presented themselves to me as insightful, not completely new. Adjusting for his dispensational worldview, what he says makes good sense to anyone who has a passing familiarity with the Old Testament and modern American history. To someone who has had a special interest in the ancient world, they make even more sense. Everything that he has said so far has been hard to argue with, though of course it is still a terrible sight.
Now, however, we are moving into the part of the book that caused me to put Mind: Blown in the title of this post. Cahn spends a good half of the book (pages 115 – 207, out of 240 total) delving into Inanna/Ishtar, and how precisely her characteristics map onto the social changes that have recently been taking place in the United States.
I can’t go into detail about this, but quickly, here are some characteristics of the Sumerian goddess Inanna and her cult. I’ll let you make the applications yourself:
Inanna had the power to metamorphose and transform: people into animals, men into women and vice versa. (She was obviously not the only old god with this ability.) She liked to blur the boundaries between kinds.
As a female goddess, she behaved like a fierce male warrior and could also manifest as a young man. Her female followers carried swords. She was known for being bloodthirsty rather than nurturing.
She could curse human beings by making their men behave like women and their women behave like men.
But this was sometimes considered a good thing. She had several different kinds of cross-dressing priests, who would curl their hair, tie it up in colorful cloths, dance, and sing in the female dialect.
In some places, such as in her cult in Turkey, male worshippers would work themselves up into a frenzy and the castrate themselves in her honor. (My note: this may be what the Apostle Paul, who grew up in Tarsus in modern-day Turkey, had in view when he said he wished the Circumcision fanatics would “go the whole way” [Gal. 5:12].)
Inanna was associated with the rainbow, “stretching herself like a rainbow across the sky.”
She wanted absolute submission. When spurned or disrespected in any way, she would fly into a rage and seek to destroy the one who had not submitted to her.
In the ancient world, it was common for gods to be honored with annual festivals. Inanna’s took place in the month of Tammuz, which roughly corresponds to June. It consisted of a large parade, starting at the gate of the city and proceeding to her temple. These parades would feature music, dancing, multicolored cloths and of course her cross-dressing priests and priestesses.
Mind even blown-er
Cahn spends nine chapters (pp. 143 – 172) arguing that the infamous Stonewall riot was, in many ways, the exact night that Ishtar battered down the gates of America. In June 1969 a crowd outside Stonewall, a gay bar in New York City, turned on the police who had raided the place. The police eventually withdrew into the bar, and the crowd, ironically, was now trying to get inside, battering at the doors and even trying to set it on fire. Symbolically, they were trying to get in, just as Inanna famously insisted on being let in to the gates of the underworld. They threw bricks, just as she stood on the brick wall of the city of Uruk to unleash her fury on the whole city because of Gilgamesh.
Cahn argues that New York City is symbolically the gateway of America. As the gay crowd battered at the door of the Stonewall bar, Inanna was simultaneously battering to be let in. As they felt enraged at not being considered mainstream, Inanna too was enraged at, for many centuries, having been driven out.
“If you do not open the gate for me to come in, I shall smash the door and shatter the bolt, I shall smash the doorpost and overturn the doors.”
Myths from Mesopotamia, quoted in ibid, p. 166
Cahn is trying to cover a lot of ground, so he goes over all this at treetop level. I particularly would like to have heard more about the details of the Sumerian sacred calendar, how it relates to the month of Tammuz celebrated by the Israelites, and how its dates in relation to the modern calendar are calculated. Cahn finds significance, for example, in the date June 26, which was the date of the Supreme Court decisions Lawrence vs. Texas (2003), which legalized homosexual behavior; United States vs. Windsor (2013), which overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, and Obergefell vs. Hodges (2015), when the rainbow was projected onto the Empire State Building, Niagara Falls, the castle at Disney World, and the White House, in a clear statement that our nation had declared it allegiance to Inanna. Cahn asserts that June 26 has significance in the commemoration of Inanna’s lover Tammuz, who was ritually mourned every year.
In 1969 the month of Tammuz, the month of Ishtar’s passion, came to its full moon on the weekend that began on June 27 and ended on June 29. It was the weekend of Stonewall. The riots began just before the full moon and continued just after it. The Stonewall riots centered on the full moon and center point of Tammuz.
ibid., p. 170
The day that sealed Stonewall and all that would come from it was June 26, 1969. It was then that deputy police inspector Seymour Pine obtained search warrant number 578. … On the ancient Mesopotamian and biblical calendar, [the warrant] took place on the tenth day of the month of Tammuz. Is there any significance to that day? There is. An ancient Babylonian text reveals it. The tenth of Tammuz is the day given to perform the spell to cause “a man to love a man.”
ibid, p. 171
This does seem really striking at first blush. Note, though, that in the typical manner of esoteric gurus, if the date June 26 doesn’t fall on exactly the beginning of the Stonewall riots, Cahn takes something significant – or that he asserts is significant – that happened on a date near by the riots, and points to that. Why are we considering the obtaining of the warrant to be the event that “sealed” the riots? Because otherwise, the dates don’t work out quite right.
The timing of the Supreme Court decision had nothing to do with the timing of Stonewall … it was determined by the schedule and functioning of the Supreme Court. And yet every event would converge within days of the others and all at the same time of year ordained for such things in the ancient calendar… So the ruling that legalized homosexuality across the nation happened to fall on the anniversary of the day Stonewall was sealed. The mystery had ordained it.
ibid., p. 203
I must say, if Graham Hancock were covering this subject, he would devote several lengthy chapters to the calendar aspect of it. Whole books have probably been written about this. It did make me want to study in more depth ancient Sumeria, with the same terrible fascination with which I have scratched the surface of studying the Aztecs and the Mayas. I’m not super good at the mathematical thinking required to correlate calendars or unpack ancient astronomy, though I do enjoy reading other people’s work.
Not being a dispensationalist, I am less concerned with exact numbers and dates being the fulfillment of very precise prophecies, and more concerned with the general, overall picture of nations turning toward or away from God. I don’t think we need the repeated date of June 26 to match up with the Sumerian calendar perfectly in order to see that America has rejected heterosexuality, and indeed the whole concept of the normal, in a fit of murderous rebellion against the Creator, and that this is entirely consistent with the spirit of this particular goddess.
Nevertheless, I have only named a few striking parallels between the Stonewall riots and the myths and cult of Inanna. Cahn weaves it into a compelling story, and hence the title of this blog post.
Now, about times and seasons I do not need to write you
I’m also a little concerned with the amount of power that Cahn seems to be granting here to Inanna, and to the whole Sumerian/Babylonian sacred calendar. I have no doubt that this ancient entity would prefer to bring back her worship in the month it used to be conducted, around the summer solstice every year. I realize that every day in the Babylonian calendar was considered auspicious or inauspicious for different activities, due to the labyrinthine astrological bureaucracy that the gods had set up. No doubt, the gods would prefer to bring back as much of that headache-inducing system as possible. However, this does not mean that they are always going to get their way. It is not “ordained” in the same sense that the One God ordains things by His decretive will. He is in charge of days, times, and seasons, and of stars and solstices. He is the one who made these beings, before they went so drastically wrong.
Then Daniel praised the God of heaven and said,
“Praise be to the name of God for ever and ever; wisdom and power are His.
He changes times and seasons; he sets up kings and deposes them.
He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to the discerning.
He reveals deep and hidden things; He knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with Him.”
Daniel 2:19 – 22
To his credit, Cahn, after scaring the pants off anyone who is not on board with bringing back full-on Sumerian paganism, gives a nice, clear Gospel presentation at the end of his book. His last chapter, The Other God, points his readers to Yeshua:
Even two thousand years after His coming, even in the modern world, there was still none like Him among the gods. There was none so feared and hated by them. … He was, in the modern world, as much as He had been in the ancient, the only antidote to the gods — the only answer. As it was in the ancient world, so too in the modern — in Him alone was the power to break their chains, pull down their strongholds, nullify their spells and curses, set their captives free.
What are these extra fishbone looking thingies on the side of the t-rex’s neck?
Look, this little guy has them too.
And so does this sauropod.
Are we sure we have these attached at the correct angle? Is it possible the dinosaurs could swell out their neck like a grouse or something? Should we be reconstructing them more like birds, with thicker, sleeker appearances?
Speaking of which… that’s basically a chicken foot, right?
Also … I’m not an expert, but I am weirded out by how big of a shoulder blade t-rex seems to need for his tiny hands. Were there possibly wings attached to these?
Basically chickens, amirite?
The chicken status of dinosaurs has been confirmed. They ate gastroliths, which are stones that help an animal digest, just as hens do.
Basically a moose .
A huge, terrifying moose.
I’m sure he looked better with skin on.
Speaking of what we call things, how are we supposed to keep up with prehistoric animals if they keep changing their names in this manner?
Now let’s look at some really cool petrified “wood.” Some of the specimens actually look like modern hardwood grain, but this one looks as if, when alive, it had the texture of a giant celery.
This one had some really disturbing strawlike structures inside that are creeping me out. Cork perhaps?
This one has the ghost of the tree trapped inside, going “Heeeelp meee!”
And these last two…. what the heck? I’m guessing the first one is a giant lichen and the second one is petrified slime mold or something like that.
What parts of this dinosaur are not made up? The ones in red.
Ah, my old friend, the iguanodon! I remember you from the dinosaur book I loved when I was a kid, published in the 1970s. My iguanodon back then looked like the guy on the far left. In case you can’t read the sign, it says, “These are all models of the same dinosaur.”
Next question : Triceratops. I always took its appearance for granted, ever since that same beloved dinosaur book, but now I am asking myself, What in the world did it need that huge expanse of bone for? Wasn’t it heavy? Are we sure it was all made of bone? Or was it cartilage or something lighter? Was anything attached to it … like even more expansive flaps of skin, or feathers?
This is the “death pose.” Here are some more:
Per this sign, evolutionists’ best guess about the death pose is that it’s caused by ligaments constricting as the animal begins to decay. Of course, animals that get a chance to decay don’t generally become fossils. You have a much better chance of becoming a fossil if you are suddenly buried in an anaerobic environment, such as under a giant tsunami of mud during, say, a cataclysmic worldwide flood. Which might also smash you in this position.
These different-sized femurs belong to a large herd of allosauruses (allosauri?) who were apparently all buried together.
This is pretty cool: There’s such a thing as a “brain cast” when a dinosaur’s brain gets “pickled” in peat.
Finally: Trilobites. I knew this guys existed, but I was thinking of them as basically glorified pillbugs.
I had no idea their spines were so … um … 3-D.
Will I ever be comfortable knowing these guys existed? No. No, I will not.
Thanks to the George C. Eccles Dinosaur Park in Ogden for an enjoyable afternoon feeling dwarfed by chickens and other horrors, in their pleasant air-conditioned museum!
This is a repost. These past weeks have been busy, what with wrapping up the school year, many family events, and illness. (I have a fever right now, and it’s making my online comments amazing.) So I give you this, one of my most-often-viewed posts of all time.
Disclaimer
Like most sane people, I hate Internet debates. Love/hate, that is. Even in real life, I’ve always found it hard to let a debate go. I’ve sometimes stubbornly backed positions that later turned out to be false, and on the other end of the spectrum I’ve gotten scared by ad hominems and conceded stuff I didn’t need to concede. Almost no matter how the debate goes, I end up feeling like an idiot.
I don’t want this site to become a debating site. But a few weeks ago, I posted a wild historical theory and invited you guys to critique it. Benjamin did, in the comments, here. So, for the integrity of this site, I’ve got to respond to the critique found in the link. If you don’t like Internet debates, please please skip this post.
The link that Benjamin posted to is
to a site called Bad Archaeology. The
site has two guys’ names on it, but at appears to be mostly written by one guy.
(At least, he is the one who responds to comments.) Let’s call him KFM. I am not posting his full name here nor am I
linking to his web site, because I don’t want to attract his attention because
I hate Internet debates! However, you can easily find his site by
Googling it.
The site exists to debunk “Bad Archaeology” (caps in the original), which mostly means various wild theories like the ones we’ve been discussing about lost civilizations, aliens, etc. It calls proponents of these theories Bad Archaeologists and it fights them with facts, with mischaracterization of their positions, and sometimes with mockery. And by capitalizing its references to them. Always fun.
Summary of the Refutation
KFM’s main arguments against
Hancock’s idea that the Piri Reis, Orontius Finaeus, and Buache maps come from
an older source are as follows:
-Piri Reis SAID he got his data for
the New World part of his map from Columbus. This is confirmed because he faithfully
reproduces some of Columbus’s errors, such as
showing Cuba
as part of the mainland.
-Most Bad Archaeologists
consistently spell Orontius Finaeus’s name wrong. (Oronteus.)
This shows they don’t know what they’re talking about.
-There are major errors in Reis’s
and Finaeus’s depictions of Antarctica. So we cannot claim that a supposed older
source map was accurate. (More on this
in a second.)
-Only one version of Buache’s famous map exists that shows Antarctica. It is in the Library of Congress. Other versions of the same map just show a big blank space there.
-Buache was an accomplished geographer who had a theory that there must be a landmass at the bottom of the world. He also theorized that within it, there must be a large inland sea that was the source of icebergs. So, if the map he supposedly drew is not a hoax and was in fact drawn by him, then he just made it up out of pure speculation. In fact, he wrote “supposed” and “conjectured” all over it.
-He also shows ice and icebergs all
over it. This renders ridiculous the
idea that it is a map of Antarctica before the
continent was covered in ice.
-Buache’s and Finaeus’s maps don’t match Reis’s or each other, so clearly they cannot have come from a single source map, let alone an accurate one.
The Strong
KFM’s arguments look, at first glance, super convincing. Some of them are dead on.
The strongest part of KFM’s argument is this:
“[Charles]
Hapgood, [Hancock’s source for this theory], assumed that the original source
maps, which he believed derived from an ancient survey of Antarctica at a time
when it was free from ice, were extremely accurate. Because of this, he also
assumed that any difference between the Piri Re‘is map and modern maps were the
result of copying errors made by Piri. Starting from this position, it mattered
little to Hapgood if he adjusted the scales between stretches of coastline,
redrew ‘missing’ sections of coastline and altered the orientation of
landmasses to ‘correct errors’ on Piri’s map to match the hypothesised source
maps …. Hapgood found it necessary to redraw the map using four separate
grids, two of which are parallel, but offset by a few degrees and drawn on
different scales; a third has to be turned clockwise nearly 79 degrees from
these two, while the fourth is turned counterclockwise almost 40 degrees and drawn
on about half the scale of the main grid. Using this method, Hapgood identified
five separate equators.”
This is pretty damning to the theory. It’s not necessarily fatal to the idea that Reis used an obscure ancient source among the 20 that went into his map. After all, copying errors do happen, especially when we are trying to compile a bunch of maps from different eras of places we have never surveyed ourselves. But that’s an unfalsifiable claim, so let’s leave it. Regardless, Hapgood’s shenanigans certainly are fatal to the idea that this ancient map, if it existed, was astonishingly accurate in latitude and longitude.
The Not So Strong
But
alongside this excellent argument, KFM also includes a bunch of inconsistent
ones:
“All
in all, the Piri Re‘is map of 1513 is easily explained. It shows no unknown
lands, least of all Antarctica, and contained errors (such as Columbus’s
belief that Cuba
was an Asian peninsula) that ought not to have been present if it derived from
extremely accurate ancient originals. It also conforms to the prevalent
geographical theories of the early sixteenth century, including ideas about the
necessity of balancing landmasses in the north with others in the south to
prevent the earth from tipping over.”
So, the map does not show Antarctica, but one sentence
later it does show Antarctica, but Antarctica was only put there because contemporary
geographical theory demanded it. Also,
note the assumption that the ‘extremely accurate originals’ are supposed to
have included all of the Americas
as well as Antarctica. That’s not my understanding of Hancock’s
claim.
It’s also not clear whether KFM is claiming that all the data for Reis’s map came from Columbus. If he is, this inconsistent with both Hancock’s claim (and KFM’s own showing) that Reis said the map was compiled from 20 others, including among them a map whose source was Columbus.
Similarly, KFM shows errors on Orontius Finaeus’s map, although he admits that “There are fairly obvious similarities between the general depiction of the southern continent by Orontius Finaeus and modern maps of Antarctica.”
The Buache Map Shows an Archipelago
For the Buache map, KFM contends that Buache essentially made up the entire map to satisfy a geographical theory he had, namely that there must be a land mass at the bottom of the world to balance the land at the top (this was a popular theory at the time), and that it probably had a large inland lake in it with two major outlets leading to the sea (this was Buache’s own brilliant guess, and he thought this lake must be the source of the icebergs that navigators encountered in the southern sea).
I
take KFM’s word that Buache had this theory, and that his map shows ice and
icebergs on Antarctica, which KFM says “makes the claims that Buache’s map
shows an ice-free Antarctica all the more
bizarre.”
Well,
sort of. But actually, Hancock’s claim
is that the source map Buache used shows Antarctica
early in the process of icing over. Also, given Buache’s theory, it would not be
surprising if he had added ice and icebergs to any other data that he may have
had.
“Over several parts of the southern continent, Buache writes conjecturée (conjectured) and soupçonnée (suspected).” KFM thinks this is conclusive proof that Buache basically invented the interior of Antarctica on his map, based purely on his own theory. That could be. But I have to say, if it is, he did a great job! He does not just draw a round mass, attach the few islands and promontories that he knows about (New Zealand, which he took for a peninsula, and the Cape of the Circumcision), and then draw a lake in the middle. Instead, he has a waterway offset between two unequal land masses. It corresponds surprisingly well to the shapes of the ranges of mountains and low areas that we now know Antarctica has.
The “Well, I’ll Bet You Didn’t Know About … This!” Argument
Besides these arguments, KFM includes a lot of interesting history about the biographies of these cartographers. Almost half his page about Finaeus is taken up with the cartographer’s biography, even though it has little to do with claims about his map (beyond boosting his credentials, which I would think Hancock would also want to do). Similarly, with Buache we are given: “The claims of Bad Archaeologists about Buache’s map ignore a crucial fact: he was the foremost theoretical geographer of his generation, whose published works include hypotheses about the Antarctic continent.” I’m not sure why Buache’s eminence is supposed to be a devastating blow to any claims about his map, but again we are treated to a long and interesting biography before KFM finally gets to Buache’s theories about a southern continent.
This style of argument reminds me of people
who think they have shown the Bible is not divinely inspired merely because
they can show that it happened in a particular historical context and is
expressed in a particular historical idiom.
They will trot out some tidbit of historical context that they assume is
complete news to some Bible scholar who has been studying ANE history his whole
life. Their line of argument is based on
a misunderstanding of what divine inspiration is claimed to be. They assume that if something is claimed to
be the Word of God, it must have come to humanity in an abstract, context-free,
propositional and not literary or historical form. (They also assume that it must cover all
knowledge in the world, e.g. so that the discovery of North
America was supposed to somehow shake our faith in the Bible.)
KFM’s argument about these maps is exactly the same kind of argument. He gives a bunch of historical context about these cartographers and thinks that refutes Hancock’s claims. It’s as if Hancock had been arguing that Piri Reis, Finaeus, and Buache were born of virgins, went through life without interacting with anyone, and then one day, without any context whatsoever, this complete, easy-to-interpret map from an ancient civilization dropped out of the sky into their hands. Well, that certainly isn’t the argument that Hancock makes in his book. His argument is (or was; he has apparently retracted it) that there were several source maps, made over centuries or millienia, which traced the progressive growth of the Antarctic ice cap. He does not claim that these were complete, accurate world maps or even that they showed the Americas. “Someone who knew what they were doing once mapped Antarctica.” That’s the basic claim.
When We Think We Don’t Have Preconceptions
It turns out that there is a more than
coincidental similarity between the way KFM caricatures Hancock’s claims and
the way that some people caricature claims about the Bible. KFM, in fact, classes Biblical Archaeology as
a subset of Bad Archaeology. The
following quotes should give you a sense of his general attitude:
“Some Bad
Archaeology is just so outrageously Bad that it can only be examined charitably
by assuming that its proponents are slightly confused. How else can you explain
the complete lack of critical judgment, the belief in ancient fairy stories,
the utter absence of logical thought they display? Either that, or they have a
particular agenda, usually driven by a religious viewpoint.
Biblical Archaeology, which has
been described as excavation with a trowel in one hand and a Bible in the
other, is a specialised branch of archaeology that often seems to ignore the
rules and standards required of real archaeology. Conducted for the most part,
by people with an explicitly religious agenda (usually Christian or Jewish), it
is a battleground between fundamentalist zeal and evidence-based scholarship … If we can’t find evidence for Solomon’s
glorious empire, it must be that we’re not interpreting the archaeological data
correctly and that a big discovery is just around the corner (the ‘Jehoash
inscription’ leaps to mind in this context). If contemporary Roman documents
don’t mention Jesus of Nazareth, why here’s an ossuary that belongs to James,
his brother… It’s all very much centred around contentious objects,
poorly-dated sites and great interpretative leaps that the non-religious may
find astounding.”
Got that? If you believe in a historical Solomon or
even a historical Jesus, you’ve just been dubbed a Bad Archaeologist. Welcome to the club, friends.
I mention this attitude not because it’s off-putting, but because it tells us something about KFM’s mindset and about what it would take to convince him that something is “good” archaeology. I’m guessing that any evidence of advanced civilizations older than about 4,000 BC is going to be dismissed out of hand. As will any evidence showing that humanity might have declined, rather than slowly progressed, over our history.
Conclusion: Inconclusive
Going back to the maps, what has been shown here? I would say it’s inconclusive. The maps are less accurate than Hancock claims and far less accurate than I made them sound in my original post, because I was going over Hancock’s theory at treetop level and didn’t bother to get off into the weeds when he discusses the details of the maps. (As I still haven’t done in this post. I would like to, but my time is limited.)
On the other hand, I think the Finaeus and Buache maps especially are more accurate than we would expect of maps that had been drawn out of pure conjecture, without any source at all. It looks like more was known about Antarctica in the 16th century than we previously assumed, whatever the source of that knowledge.
So it’s not a case of “Lost civilization proven!” but neither is it “Nothing to see here.” The most we can say is that something strange is going on, but we don’t know what. To paraphrase Andrew Klavan, KFM isn’t wrong to think Hancock and Hapgood are wrong; but he is wrong to think that he himself is right.
About the theory of earth crust slippage, I feel the same way. On the one hand, it’s a pretty hard theory to swallow on geological grounds. (For example: if a big section of the earth’s crust pivoted around the North American plains – even granted that this could happen – shouldn’t there be some kind of seam where the edge was?) On the other hand, clearly something weird happened, or we wouldn’t have Siberia being ice-free when Canada was ice-covered. Nor would we have flash-frozen tropical plants and baby mammoths.
So, in conclusion, nobody knows
anything, boys and girls. Let us eat,
drink and be merry.
Today’s post comes from chapters 4 and 5 of this book.
Originally Posted as, “Writer: The World’s Third Oldest Profession”
Writing is a human practice.
Of course it is possible to have a human society without writing, but the impulse to devise a writing system, looked at historically, may have been the rule rather than the exception.
This is counter-intuitive, of course. “Symbolic logic” seems like it ought to be unnatural to humans, especially if we are thinking of humans as basically advanced animals, rather than as embodied spirits. But if we think of mind as primary, everything changes. It’s telling that reading and writing are one of the learning channels that can come naturally to people, in addition to the visual, the audio, and the kinesthetic. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Welcome to the third post taken from Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age by Richard Rudgley. Call this the writing edition. This post hits the highlights of Rudgley’s chapters 4 and 5, pages 58 through 85.
Nah, Ancient People Didn’t Write, They were Barbarians!
The idea of writing as an exception in human history has become dogma:
The proposition that Ice Age reindeer hunters invented writing fifteen thousand years ago or more is utterly inadmissible and unthinkable. All the data that archaeologists have amassed during the last one hundred years reinforce the assumption that Sumerians and Egyptians invented true writing during the second half of the fourth millennium. The Palaeolithic-Mesolithic-Neolithic progression to civilisation is almost as fundamental an article of contemporary scientific faith as heliocentrism. Writing is the diagnostic trait … of civilisation. Writing, says I.J. Gelb, ‘distinguishes civilised man from barbarian.’ If the Ice-Age inhabitants of France and Spain invented writing thousands of years before civilisation arose in the Near East, then our most cherished beliefs about the nature of society and the course of human development would be demolished.
Allan Forbes and Thomas Crowder, quoted in Rudgley, p. 75
Of course, the demolishing of our most cherished beliefs about the course of human development is exactly what, Rudgley is arguing, is going to have to happen.
In the last few chapters I have selected only a small number of the complex sign systems that have been preserved from prehistoric times. My concentration on the Near East and more particularly on Europe should not be taken to imply that such systems did not exist elsewhere in the prehistoric world. Far from it; investigations of numerous collections of signs are being undertaken in places as far afield as the Arabian peninsula, China and Australia. Millions of prehistoric signs across the continents have already been recorded, and more and more are being discovered all the time. … It no longer seems sufficient to retain a simplistic evolutionary sequence of events leading up to the Sumerian [writing] breakthrough some 5,000 years ago.
Rudgley, p. 81
Let’s look at these complex sign systems that Rudgley has mentioned.
The Vinca Signs
I was an adult before I ever heard the phrase “Old Europe.” I was doing research for a planned book, and I was surprised to learn that in southeast Europe (between the Balkans and the Black Sea), as early as 4,000 or 5,000 BC, there were not only cities but a writing system (undeciphered) known as the Vinca signs. It turns out that these cities and this writing system were probably part of a culture that obtained over much of Europe before the coming of the Indo-Europeans, which is called Old Europe. This is the culture that Marija Gimbutas believes was “the civilization of the goddess.”
Just as a reminder, these dates for the Vinca culture are before the very first human cities and writing are supposed to have arisen, in Sumeria in Mesopotamia, about 3,000 BC.
Perhaps I didn’t hear about the Vinca signs in school because they were only discovered in Transylvania 1961. (I was born in 1976, but we all know how long it takes new archaeological findings to get interpreted, integrated into the overall system, and eventually make it into school textbooks.) After being discovered, the signs were assumed to be derived from Mesopotamian cultures such as Sumer and Crete, because it was accepted dogma that writing was first invented in Mesopotamia. Later, the tablets on which the Vinca signs were discovered were carbon-dated and found to be older than the Mesopotamian writing systems. This led to a big disagreement between those who wanted to believe the carbon dates, and those who wanted to believe the more recent dates for Old European archaeological sites, which were then conventional.
Then, in 1969, more, similar signs were discovered on a plaque in Bulgaria and dated to be 6,000 – 7,000 years old. By this time, archaeologists were beginning to accept the carbon dating of these Old European sites. But since they still did not want to admit that writing might have been invented before Sumer, most of them decided “[the signs] could not be real writing and their apparent resemblance was simply coincidental.” (Rudgley p. 63)
An archaeologist named Winn analyzed the Vinca signs and while he is not willing to go further than calling them “pre-writing,” he concludes that they are “conventionalised and standardised, and that they represent a corpus of signs known and used over a wide area for several centuries.” (Rudgley 66)
Meanwhile, Marija Gimbutas and also Harald Haarmann of the University of Helsinki both feel the Vinca signs are true writing and that they developed out of religious or magical signs, not out of economic tallies like the Sumerian alphabet.
Haarmann notes that there a number of striking parallels between the various strands of the pre-Indo-European cultural fabric – especially those related to religious symbolism and mythology. Among these common features is the use of the bull and the snake as important religious symbols. In the case of the snake it is a form of the goddess intimately intertwined with the bird goddess motif in both Old European and later Cretan iconography. The bee and the butterfly are also recurrent divine attributes, and the butterfly is represented by … the double ax. Haarmann sees the goddess mythology of Old Europe echoed in these motifs that also feature prominently in the ancient civilisation of Crete. He then traces the links between the Old European script – as found in the Vinca culture – and later systems of writing, particularly those of Crete.
Rudgley, pp. 68 – 69
Rudgley’s Figure 15 (p.70). On the left are the Vinca signs, on the right is Linear A from Crete.
Ice Age Signs
There are quite a number of symbols that appear on artifacts or are associated with paintings from the Neolithic and even the Palaeolithic period. These include crosses, spirals, dots, “lozenges” (ovals), and the zigzag, which is very common and seems to have been used to represent water. (By the way, note the zigzags among the Kachina Bridge petroglyphs.) “The discovery in the early 1970s of a bone fragment from the Mousterian site of Bacho Kiro in Bulgaria suggests that the use of the signs may date back to the time of the Neanderthals. This fragment of bone was engraved with the zigzag motif …” and apparently on purpose, not accidentally in the course of doing some other repetitive task. (Rudgley 73)
“The single V and the chevron (an inverted V) are among the most common of the recurrent motifs in the Stone Age.” (Rudgley p. 74) Gimbutas, of course, interprets the V as a symbol for the female genitals and/or Bird Goddess, but it could be just … you know … a symbol.
Archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan has interpreted the many signs found at various Palaeolithic cave art sites not as a form of hunting magic (contra previous interpretations), but as a symbolic system. “Leroi-Gourhan admitted to us shortly before his death, ‘At Lascaux I really believed they had come very close to an alphabet.’” (Rudgley p. 77)
Rudgley’s Figures 16 – 18 (p. 78). Top paragraph: some of the Franco-Cantabrian (Stone Age) signs. Middle paragraph: a – hieroglyphic determinatives; b – Sumerian pictoral writing; c – Indus Valley; d – Linear A; e- Linear B; f – Cypriote; g – Proto-Sinaitic; h- Phoenician; i – Iberian; j – Etruscan; k – Greek (Western Branch); l – Roman; m – Runic. Bottom paragraph: some of the signs found on oracle bones in very ancient China.
But Can You Prove It’s Writing?
Every time some symbols are discovered that are so ancient they strain belief, anyone who doesn’t want to accept them as writing can easily go in to a number of calisthenic moves to cast doubt on this. If the item the signs are found on is in poor condition, they can question whether the marks were even intentional. Perhaps they were accidental scratches, the product of some other activity. If the marks are undeniably made by people, they can be dismissed as doodles. The Vinca signs, when first found, were speculated to have been copied randomly from Mediterranean signs by people who believed these things had mysterious power, but did not understand their meaning. Rudgley also notes that the Old European signs have been interpreted as purely magic symbols, as if a magical intent were to make them non-writing.
In short, any time we are presented with a complex system, there are always a million ways to get out of attributing it to a mind. This is doubly true if we aren’t able to interpret its meaning, but you will even see people do this with messages that they ought to be able to understand. Of course, it can also work the other way, where people see meaning in complex patterns where it wasn’t intended. Often what it comes down to is whether we want there to be a meaning there. Do we, or do we not, want to be in contact with another mind? If for whatever reason we don’t, we can always find a logical way to avoid that contact.
So in the case of apparent writing systems that we haven’t cracked and probably never will, our attitude towards them is going to depend heavily on what we believe about ancient people’s minds. Were they basically like ours, or were they different, animal? We will see more writing systems if we are expecting that they came from people. If we are not expecting to encounter people, then nothing is going to convince us that these are writing systems.
Was Adam a Writer?
My mind was blown, while taking an Old Testament Backgrounds course years ago, when I read an essay that asserted that Adam was able to write and in fact had left a written record for his descendants.
This idea seems completely loony on the face of it … until you realize that the only reason it seems loony is that we are assuming that writing is a recent, unnatural development, the product of tens of millennia of human cultural evolution, and not a characteristic human activity that is, so to speak, wired in.
The essay interpreted the early chapters of Genesis in this way. There will be a short historical record, followed by the phrase “the book of [name],” indicating that the passage immediately preceding was by that author.
Passage
Recounts
Closes with
Genesis 1:1 – 4:26
Creation (in poetry), fall, Cain and Abel, some of Cain’s descendants, Seth
Gen. 5:1 “the book of Adam”
Gen. 5:1b – 6:8
Recap of creation of Adam, Seth’s descendants up to Noah and his sons, Nephilim, God’s resolve to wipe out mankind, God’s favor on Noah
Gen. 6:9a “the book of Noah”
Gen. 6:9b – 11:9
Building of the ark, the Flood, emerging from the ark, the Table of Nations, the Tower of Babel
Gen. 11:10 “the book of Shem”
Gen. 11: 10b – 11:26
Genealogy from Shem to Terah and his son Abram
Gen. 11:27 “the book of Terah”
Gen. 11:27b – 25:18
Terah moves his family to Haran, Terah dies, a whole bunch of stuff happens to Abram, death of Sarah, Isaac finds a wife, Abraham dies, genealogy of the Ishmaelites
Gen. 25:19 “the book of Abraham’s son Isaac”
Gen. 25:19b – 37:1
Jacob’s entire life, death of Isaac, genealogy of Esau
Gen. 37:2 “the book of Jacob”
In Genesis, the author’s name comes after the notes he left.
I realize this might be a lot to accept. It’s just food for thought. It does explain why it says “the book of _________” (or, in my NIV, “this is the account of __________”), after the bulk of that person’s story.
Get it? Get it?
(By the way … for those wondering about the title of this post … prostitution is referred to as “the world’s oldest profession.” Erma Bombeck, mother and humorist, has published a book hilariously titled Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession. The title of this post references those two, because the post is about the fact that writing is very, very old. I don’t mean to imply that a writer’s life has any necessary connection to the other two professions, although of course this does invite all kinds of clever remarks.)
Out of Babel Books 