On the advice of Mike Heiser, I read Amar Annus’ “On the Origin of Watchers” from the Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 19 (2010), and it was a fascinating look at the deep background of the Watchers’ myth in the Seven Sages, or apkallu, of Mesopotamia, best known to most readers from the myth of Oannes (Uan-Adapa) in Berosus—the amphibious fish-man Robert Temple said was a space alien from Sirius. These sages, like the Watchers, descended from heaven to bequeath civilization, angered the gods with their sins, begat gigantic semi-divine apkallu on human women (Gilgamesh being one of their last giant descendants), and were condemned to the underworld. Also interesting was Annus’ footnotes, which noted the similarity with Ugaritic and Phoenician sources (Sanchuniathon) and noted at transfer of motifs between Syria and Mesopotamia to the extent that the mountains of Anti-Lebanon, where Sanchuniathon places the giant sons of the gods and 1 Enoch houses the Watchers, were also the domain of the Anunnaki in the Old Babylonian version of Gilgamesh.
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In the world of American television, ancient mysteries inevitable descend into efforts to prove that the Bible is literally true. You could choose to read this as pandering to the audience, or you might see it as part of a society-wide convulsion over the decline of traditional Christian religion (which often embraced symbolic, or at least nuanced, interpretations) and the rise of secularism and biblical literalism in oppositional tandem. The underlying theme of all the documentaries that explore such topics is the same: If we can prove the small details of the Bible true, then the larger narrative must be true, and you are warranted in planning for life everlasting. “And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (1 Corinthians 15:14).
The Universe: Ancient Mysteries Solved S04 “Star of Bethlehem” is about what you’d expect from a documentary that wants to combine astronomy with the most famous appearance of a star in ancient literature. The documentary opens by asking if the Star is “faith, fable, or fact,” which already puts it a cut above most H2 documentaries. Nevertheless, the promised question of whether the Star of Bethlehem “will return” makes me a bit uneasy. This gets into some strange theological territory that seems a bit beyond an astronomy documentary. In time, the show will debunk this claim, but it will go on to endorse another that is not without its problems so that it, too, can conclude that the Bible is true not just spiritually but factually and historically. Before I get into today’s topic, I thought I’d share this letter to the editor a Minnesota zooarchaeologist wrote to the Star Tribune complaining about the uncritical and fawning profile of Scott Wolter that ran in the paper was the subject of my blog post yesterday.
I also want to let you know that I received a review copy of a major new academic anthology on The Watchers in Jewish and Christian Traditions, which promises to be a fascinating look into mainstream ideas about the semi-divine beings so beloved by ancient astronaut theorists, lost civilization scholars, and Nephilim researchers. I can’t wait to read it. Actress Megan Fox recently told US Weekly that she is reading the Book of Enoch because of her favorite TV show, Ancient Aliens, “and this book describes angels in a way that sounds extraterrestrial.” The passages she refers to are among those that I’ve included so far in the collection of ancient texts cited by ancient astronaut and fringe history writers that I’ve been working on. It sits alongside the passage that the late Ancient Aliens talking head Philip Coppens frequently called the “best” evidence for ancient astronauts, the Babylonian priest Berosus’ discussion of the magical fish-man Oannes and his fishy friends, who rose up from the sea to teach humankind the art of civilization.
The Telegraph has an interesting article published yesterday by scholar Dominic Selwood, author of a 1999 academic study of the Knights Templar as well as a new novel about them, pondering why the medieval order of warrior monks has captured the modern imagination. His conclusions are more or less exactly what I’ve taken so much criticism for pointing out. Selwood, who holds a PhD in medieval religious warrior orders, sees in the Templars a convenient focus for two distinct threads of alternative thought, which are not completely severable.
I’m a bit worn out after yesterday’s marathon review of America Unearthed, so today I have a few short items to discuss.
In this edition, we move forward to Part Two of Graham Robb’s The Discovery of Middle Earth, in which the author attempts to make the case for advanced Druid science, and in so doing he comes to within striking distance of the wackiness of the Atlantis theorizers and ancient astronaut crowd.
Chapter 6 opens with the Antikythera Mechanism, the Greco-Roman geared planetarium, which Robb celebrates as a fraction of ancient wisdom that has escaped the “priestly editors” who created a “polished” corpus of ancient texts that canonized our view of Classical history. He then describes the voyage of Pytheas of Massalia to Britain c. 330 BCE, known from fragments of his work, On the Ocean, preserved by Strabo, Pliny the Elder, and Diodorus Siculus. He does this by way of introducing the idea that the Greeks were not able to calculate accurate longitude, and their idea of the same was necessarily off by as much as six degrees when figuring which cities stood along the same north-south axis. He wants us to believe that the Greeks, or, better, a pre- or non-Greek people, could have used the gear-works like those of the Antikythera Mechanism to make clocks capable of figuring longitude. I’ve completed reading Part One of Graham Robb’s The Discovery of Middle Earth, and it goes a ways toward rehabilitating some of the claims presented less convincingly in the preface and Chapter 1. At times, the remaining chapters of this part are fascinating, and at times they are infuriating. And out of nowhere, at the end of the section, Robb presents evidence that is actually interesting and somewhat compelling--maybe. There are a lot of caveats.
Although I have not yet read Graham Robb’s new book The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts, which was published in the U.K. as The Ancient Paths, the book’s major claims straddle the border of alternative history and deserve a mention, even if it might take me a while before I get to reading the book. The information below comes from a number of reviews of the books published recently.
Tonight Ancient Aliens is going in search of “The Satan Conspiracy” and will attempt to argue that Satanists have it right, that Satan is misunderstood, and that he was a heroic alien freedom fighter trying to help humanity against the evil Yahweh-Elohim-Anunnaki. This will be quite a trick to pull off since Satan traditionally leads the Fallen Angels, whom the show christened evil gods just two weeks ago. But at least it goes toward proving my point that the ancient astronaut theory is intimately tied to religion.
This, in turn, brings me to today’s topic: A bizarre religious documentary about ancient aliens and how they are really fallen angels who are hiding in our DNA. |
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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