Last month Scott Wolter accepted a made-up award from a controversial podcaster known for racially inflammatory statements for what the latter described as Wolter’s “pioneering” work promoting the “truth” about the early history of the white race in North America.
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Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading Irving Finkel’s The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood, an interesting exploration of the Near Eastern flood myth in its Mesopotamian context. Finkel’s book is deeply personal, unabashedly enthusiastic about its subject, and ultimately a little bit less than it could have been. Nevertheless, it offered compelling and fascinating insight into the development of the Flood myth and is an entertaining and informative read.
I am taking the day off today to get some work done. Please enjoy this reprint of a blog entry that first ran in May of 2012.
Digging through some boxes I found my old copy of Gunnar Thompson’s The Friar’s Map of Ancient America (1996), which I bought in 1997 at the gift shop at America’s Stonehenge (Mystery Hill) in New Hampshire—that collection of colonial cold cellars and foundations that generations have passed off as megalithic architecture. The pages are still reasonably white, but the cover has faded from its original electric orange to a dull rust. The book purports to demonstrate that the world map created by Albertin de Virga (c. 1414) actually depicts North America (as the blob to the northwest of Europe) and South America (as the island southeast of Asia) in the image below. (Note that southern Africa is marked as the site of the Garden of Eden!) The original map vanished into the private hands of an unnamed collector in the 1930s, and all that remains are photographs taken of it shortly before it disappeared. Fringe History Roundup: Jason Martell's Newest Company, "America Unearthed" in Utah, and More!5/8/2014 I’m sure many of you have heard about Satanists’ plans to erect a statue of Baphomet on the grounds of the Oklahoma State Capitol, taking advantage of rules that state’s legislature put in place to give legal cover to the erection of a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds. Last night Stephen Colbert did a segment on the statue, and he pointed out, somewhat inaccurately, that Baphomet was the pagan god worshiped by the Knights Templar. The name appears in the confessions of several Templars, extracted under torture, but with no clear consensus on who or what was indicated by the name. The famous image of Baphomet was actually created in the nineteenth century by Eliphas Lévi, who based the design on medieval depictions of the devil, eighteenth century Tarot designs, and elements of pagan deities.
Last month Intrepid magazine delivered another of Scott A. Roberts’s characteristically wordy articles, this time blasting Christian conservatives for failing to understand that the recent Noah movie took a significant part of its story from the variant forms of the Flood narrative given in the Book of Enoch, particularly its references to the sins of the Watchers, and the Book of Jasher, a very late apocryphal text in which Noah blames atheism for the Flood (6:19).
Have you been waiting patiently for Atlantis to be discovered? Are you tired of looking in places where Plato said it might be, such as beyond the Pillars of Hercules? If so, you might be interested in the latest news coming from Joseph Daniel Brady, an independent researcher who published Atlantis: The ReNamed (sic) Island in 2010. According to Brady, an unknown person or organization is systematically suppressing his evidence for the lost treasure of Atlantis, and he updated his book last month to reflect these shocking developments.
I have three brief topics for today: A competitor for my Jason and the Argonauts book, Giorgio Tsoukalos’s Bigfoot hunting adventure, and questions about the location of Noah’s Ark.
One of the reasons students of conspiracy culture and fringe history study the most extreme cases is because they demonstrate the ease with which bad ideas can drive out good ideas, and how political and social concerns can lead to the willful suppression of truth in favor of lies. The white minority government of Rhodesia put enormous political pressure on archaeologists to conclude that Great Zimbabwe had been built by anyone other than black Africans for obvious political and racial reasons. In fact, from roughly 1960 down to the end of white minority rule, the Rhodesian government engaged in official censorship.
Archaeologists made a fascinating discovery beneath the waters of Lake Huron. John O’Shea of the University of Michigan reported the discovery of large V-shaped stone walls that date back to a time before Lake Huron reached its modern levels—back during the last Ice Age. O’Shea believes that the structures were used as hunting blinds by the Paleoindians for hunting megafauna. O’Shea said that the stone walls are similar to hunting blinds found on Baffin Island but are much more complex and sophisticated. According to O’Shea, the structures were preserved only because they were underwater and they were likely commonly used across North America.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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