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A Weird Argument about Oak Island, the Philosopher's Stone, and the Golden Fleece

9/28/2016

19 Comments

 
Yesterday Scott Wolter posted a new blog in which he attempted to make the case that he was shaken to his core by numerology when he discovered that the imaginary Megalithic Yard was almost but not quite the same number of American customary unit feet (2.72) as the York Rite Masonic sacred numbers 22 and 8 when divided arbitrarily one into the other (2.75). American customary unit feet are based on British feet that were not standardized until medieval times, and technically the current value only dates to 1959. Worse, the English foot was not recognized on the Continent, where Wolter’s French conspirators allegedly operated. But beyond this, earlier this week the bosom buddies behind Xplrr Media, LLC announced on social media that they were in the process of “vetting” an unspecified claim relating to the fringe theory that the Ark of the Covenant is hidden on Oak Island. In the process of reviewing this, I researched some of the previous fringe claims about the Ark on Oak Island and discovered a very strange claim that sort of gets at the heart of the failure of fringe types of think about challenges that come with dealing with real documents rather than pop culture fantasies.
My search for earlier claims about the Ark of the Covenant at Oak Island led me to the book Following the Ark of the Covenant: The Treasure of God by Kerry Ross Boren and Lisa Lee Boren. This turned out to have nothing helpful and instead reproduced verbatim a bit chunk of Steven Sora’s 1999 book The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar. That book, however, offered a bizarre claim that tried to link Oak Island to the legend of the Golden Fleece and therefore to alchemy (which is, of course, the secret art of the Watchers—as Zosmius of Panoplis maintained).
 
To set this up, Sora is describing a conspiracy theory spun by David Tobias, the owner of Oak Island in 1990s. Tobias believed that the island was the secret hideaway of Sir Francis Drake, and Sora suggested that Sir Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth I conspired to make Oak Island England’s secret American spy base. Sora cites part of his analysis to the 1973 book The God-Kings and the Titans by James A. Bailey, which was a rewritten Atlantis: The Antediluvian World that dispensed with Atlantis and proposed wide-scale transoceanic voyages by blond Aryans who seeded the globe with their Master Race civilization en route to mining the components for bronze around the world. I have never read the book and do not know how much of the following is Bailey’s idea and how much is Sora’s. Here Sora is discussing the book Sir Walter Raleigh composed in 1614, a history of the world that King James suppressed for “being too saucy in censuring Princes,” but which influenced Milton in the writing of Paradise Lost. Sora thinks the book was a conspiracy:
In it he declared the sea god of the Philistines, Dagon, to be the same god as the Greek Triton. Just why this was so important to him is unknown, but the god of Greek mythology has some significance to the Oak Island mystery. Triton was the god who came to the aid of the Argonauts in their search for the Golden Fleece. Raleigh also wrote of his belief that the philosopher’s stone, the hypothetical substance that medieval alchemists believed would convert base metals to gold, was the Golden Fleece sought by Jason and his argonauts (sic). Both Raleigh and Drake had pushed Elizabeth to pursue her rights to land in the New World. Since the Elizabethan court included magicians and alchemists like Dr. Dee, was there a prevalent belief that the philosopher’s stone, or the Golden Fleece, was in America?
Wow. Where to begin in unpacking this dumpster fire of half-understood information?
 
I suppose we should begin with the premise: In his Historie of the World, Raleigh did indeed write of Dagon and Triton. In Part I, Book 2, Chapter 12, sec. 3, on the life of Semiramis, he describes the biblical account of the collapse of the statue of Dagon before the Ark of the Covenant (1 Samuel 5:1-5), and then Raleigh offers his interpretation of Dagon, who was widely believed to be a man with a fish body. In fact, Raleigh explains that he learned that Dagon was a fish-man (“a mans face, and a fishes body”) from several of the Church Fathers, who so described him. I transcribe from the first edition, but forgive me for regularizing the use of “u” and “v” so the words are readable:
For my selfe, I rather thinke, that this Dagon of the Philistines was an Idoll representing Triton, one of those imaginarie Sea gods under Neptune. For this Citie being maritimate (as all those of the Philistines were, and so were the best of Phoenicia) used all their devotions to Neptune, and the rest of the pettie gods which attended him.
Raleigh added this as an afterthought at the end of the section. It was neither essential to the chapter nor particularly important to Raleigh, much less a secret code. He was simply following the then-common practice of equating various pagan divinities with their Latin equivalents, operating under the then-common understanding that the Greeks and Romans had already asserted that Phoenician deities were “really” Greco-Roman ones in disguise, such as Melqart actually being Hercules. Indeed, much of the early sections of his Historie attempt to equate Classical and Hebraic history in order to try to harmonize the Bible with the Classical writers—just as countless Renaissance historians of the era routinely did.
 
But here is where the argument Sora implies falls apart. Triton does not function as a savior in the standard version of the Argonaut myth. In Apollonius’ Argonautica 4.1537ff., written in the Hellenistic period, the Argonauts find themselves in the fictional Lake Tritonis, believed to be in modern Tunisia, and the god Triton appears in the guise of Euryplus in order to hand Euphemus, one of the Argonauts, a clump of earth, which will foretell the future of Euphemus’ descendants, who will colonize Libya from where the clod eventually washes up, on Thera.
 
Here is where things get weird: First, the older version of the story recorded by Pindar does not feature Triton but gives his role to another of Poseidon’s sons, Euryplus. The clod of earth here connects to the city of Cyrene, which Pindar was writing to glorify. About three decades later, Herodotus (Histories 4.179) recorded a still different version of the story, where Triton utters a prophecy about the future of Greeks in Libya and then shows the Argonauts the way to escape Lake Tritonis. (Apollonius combined both versions for his.)
 
In none of these versions did Triton help the Argonauts find the Golden Fleece. They already had it and were on their way back home. Sora is probably thinking of the movie Jason and the Argonauts (1963), where the filmmakers assigned to Triton Athena’s role in helping them pass the Clashing Rocks on route to Colchis. The bottom line is that the myth recorded by Apollonius, Pindar, and Herodotus is part of the founding legend of Cyrene and is only incidentally connected to the Golden Fleece, being almost certainly a later addition to the myth, following the founding of Cyrene in 630 BCE by colonists from Thera. Since the Jason story is much older than Cyrene (appearing in Homer and Hesiod), this must be a newer tale grafted on to an old myth.
 
It is true, however, that Raleigh wrote of the Golden Fleece and the Philosopher’s Stone. In Part 1, Book 2, Chapter 13, Sec. 6, after summarizing the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes and that of Orpheus, both then new to Renaissance literature, Raleigh attempts to rationalize the story by providing a wide variety of explanations proposed by others. One of these involves the Philosopher’s Stone:
Some there are that by this iourney of Jason understand the mysterie of the Philosophers stone, called the golden Fleece, to which also, other super-fine Chymists draw the twelve labours of Hercules. Suidas thinkes that by the golden Fleece was meant a golden booke of Parchment, which is of sheepe-skin, and therefore called golden, because it was taught therein how other metals might be transmuted.
You have to love the phrase “super-fine Chemists.”
 
Raleigh did not endorse this idea himself, writing of his belief that most of the story is a “Fable” and an invention of the poets; nor was any of this a secret. The claims Raleigh writes of are exceedingly ancient. Teasing that out is too complex to go into here (I cover it in my book Jason and the Argonauts through the Ages in detail). Suffice it to say that the Byzantine Suda writes of the Fleece that “it was a book written on skins, concerning how it is necessary that gold comes about through alchemy. Therefore, the men of that time naturally called the skin "golden", because of the function which arose from it” (s.v. Deras, trans. Jennifer Benedict). But it was merely reporting a claim made by Charax of Pergamum before 147 CE and preserved in Eustathius of Thessalonica: “Charax says that the golden fleece is a method for writing in gold on parchment, because of which, according to him, the Argo expedition was launched” (trans. Antoine Favre). John of Antioch and Eudocia Augusta both repeated the same claim in the early Middle Ages. Raleigh was not conveying a secret but merely summarizing newly available Greek literature, brought to the West after the fall of Constantinople.
 
Is there any evidence that John Dee thought that the Philosopher’s Stone was the Golden Fleece? Not really. His diary for 1588 shows him visiting Thomas Sowthwell on August 17, and the latter showed him his “lump” of the philosopher’s stone “as big as his fist.” This certainly was not the Fleece. On August 6, 1600, he had a dream about working on the philosopher’s stone, and no Fleece was indicated. I was unable to find any reference to John Dee speaking of or referring to the Golden Fleece. Perhaps Sora is thinking of Cornelius Agrippa’s Golden Fleece, which was more clearly equated with the Philosopher’s Stone? At any rate, Dee did have a fascination with America, but he thought it was Atlantis and a colony of the Welsh Prince Madoc, not the repository of the Golden Fleece. He certainly wouldn’t have thought that the Golden Fleece was in America if he saw part of it at Sowthwell’s house and seemed certain that Sowthwell was correct that his philosopher friend held the rest.
 
If Sora were even a little bit better at researching beyond fringe books, he’d have discovered that there actually was a widespread belief that the Golden Fleece was in America, but it wasn’t John Dee’s, or even the English’s. The Spanish—the great rivals of Elizabethan England—routinely equated Peru with the Colchis of myth and speculated on whether Incan statues of llamas made of gold were the origin for Jason’s mythic Fleece. Since their bosses, the Habsburgs, used the Fleece as a symbol of their power, there was motivated reasoning for such claims. England, if anything, had every reason to ignore them. This is the background that led Raleigh to discuss the Continental alchemical literature on the Fleece as an interesting folly, one he considered wrong. 
That which is most probable is the opinion of Dercilus, that the story of such a passage was true, and that Iason with the rest went indeede to rob Colchos, to which they might arrive by boate. For not farre from Caucasus there are certaine steepe falling torrents which wash downe many graines of gold, as in many other parts of the world; and the people there inhabiting use to set many fleeces of wooll in those descents of waters, in which the graines of gold remaine, and the water passeth through, which Strabo witnesseth to be true. (1.2.13.6)
And thus we see that Raleigh agreed with Strabo’s (wrong) belief (Geography 1.2.39; 11.2.19) that the Golden Fleece was a rag used to pan for gold. Anyway, Raleigh betrays no secret knowledge of a conspiracy to locate the Fleece in America, nor does he buy into the alchemical connection. Everything Sora thinks he knows about Raleigh is based on mistaken (probably secondhand) misunderstanding of Raleigh’s literature review and Renaissance rationalism.
 
Just because I am rather bothered by any reference that confuses me, I will finish up with a brief clarification on the weird name “Dercilus,” or rather Dercylus, presumably the historian and reviser of the Argolica of Agias cited by Callimachus, who also wrote about the Argonauts in a work that does not survive. Raleigh borrowed what he knew of Dercylus from Natale Conti’s Mythologiae 6.8: “Nor however do I disregard those who say, among them Dercylus, that the Argonauts set sail to capture the Golden Fleece, or alternately to rape the wealth of Scythia” (my trans.). Dercylus’ name appears close to a discussion of Jason in Book 1 of Clement’s Stromata, so we can assume that Dercylus might have had something to say about the time period in question. While I can find no surviving mention of Dercylus commenting on the Argonauts, it is not impossible that he is mentioned somewhere in the Greek scholia. But Conti is unreliable, and he may equally well have been mistaken. 
19 Comments
Joe Scales
9/28/2016 11:06:00 am

Wolter's Masonic/KRS numbers scheme is riddled with error. He tries to claim the numbers from the KRS follow a number sequence in the York Rite Ritual. It is simply not the case if you bother to read the text from the York Rite Ritual (http://www.stichtingargus.nl/vrijmetselarij/r/iowasm_r.html). True, there is a spot where amongst all of the many number sequences you will fine an 8 and 22 together, but you won't find the rest as he sees them as set forth in his July "paper" (http://scottwolteranswers.blogspot.com/2016/07/kensington-rune-stone-inscription.html).

Take a look at the passage in question:

"There were employed on the other eight Arches, twenty-two men from Gebal, a city of Phoenicia, together with Ahishar and Adoniram, all of whom were well skilled in the arts and sciences generally, but particularly in sculpture. Their hours of labor were from nine at night till twelve, the time when prying eyes are closed in sleep."

As you will see, the numbers that follow the 8 and 22 are actually 9 and 12. To get to Wolter's 2, 1, 1, 10, 10 and 14, you have to not only skip the 9 and 12, but you have to do some creative interpretation in jumping around looking for the numbers he seeks to fit his sequence. When manufacturing another sequential aberration, Wolter even has the audacity to claim that the 9 and 12 appear in a "short paragraph" as if these two numbers didn't appear in the exact same paragraph as the 8 and 22, and in fact the very next sentence!

How can he even attempt to fool people with this idiocy and blatant inaccuracy? Oh, that's right... he's been doing this sort of thing for some time now.


Reply
Only Me
9/28/2016 12:23:20 pm

Numerology never made sense to me, but I don't have to be an expert in it to know it doesn't help Wolter's arguments. Fringe ideas supported by more fringe ideas does not equal science. Ever.

For the rest of the post...nice job following the trail. Personally, I think it would have been hilarious if Raleigh had called them "stupid fly chemists", but that's just me.

Reply
Kal
9/28/2016 12:39:21 pm

This type of seeing patterns or numbers where there might not be can be a mental condition. Not saying SW has it, but it certainly seems so. (I've said he had it before, but cannot confirm those findings).

The whole argument, hypothesis, or whatnot, as he has it, is flawed for a very obvious set of reasons.

It boils down to the Oak Island mystery the KRS and this fake megalithic yard as all being fakes.

He just wants to hoodwink people into buying into his PT Barnum style crockery.

"If you eliminate the impossible, the improbable, no matter how unlikely, must be true, ergo, if this numbers thing is impossible, which it likely is, it is false.

Reply
Shane Sullivan
9/28/2016 01:28:28 pm

"His diary for 1588 shows him visiting Thomas Sowthwell on August 17, and the latter showed him his “lump” of the philosopher’s stone “as big as his fist.”"

And we're certain that's not a euphemism? Because I think I remember something like this allegedly happening with Clarence Thomas.

Reply
David Bradbury
9/28/2016 01:48:32 pm

From the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Ancient History:
Agias and Derkylos
Greek Historians of uncertain date. Likely dated to the 4th or 3rd centuries C.E. their extensive interest in mythography of the Argolid made them a natural choice for Hellenistic historians and poets looking to include early mythographic entities in their work. Agias and Derkylos (FrGH 305) Ancient Greek mythographers who worked between the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C.E. Agias and Derkylos were commonly glossed together by Hellenistic scholars. The fragments of their works cited together are found in scholia to Antimachos (T 1a; F4), Callimachus (T 1b; F8; F8b), Pindar (F9), Euripides (F7, and in the text of Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 1.21.104. 1-2 (F2), and Athenaeus of Naucratis, Deipnosophists 3.32.86 (F3). The sources that cite from either author individually do not offer enough information to establish any characteristic difference between the two. To judge from the scholia that cite from them, Agias and Derkylos were preferred sources for erudite Hellenistic poets writing on the Argolid, and in particular were used extensively by Callimachus in his Aetia. Both authors’ works appear to be titled Argolika, but the exact number of books each contained is uncertain. (F1; F2; F3). As is to be expected from ancient local histories, the quotations of their works show that the authors had an intense interest in Argive myth, geography, cult, and chronology. The ancient citations of the two authors, however, obscure the natures of their works and their relative chronological positions. See also: Mythography, Argos, Geography, Greek Historiography Bethe,E. 1912. ‛Hagias’, RE 14, col. 2205. Cassio, A.C. 1989. ‛Storiografia locale di Argo e dorico letterario: Agia, Dercillo ed il Pap. Soc. Ital. 1091’ , Rivista di Filologia 117, 257-75. Engels, J. 2014 "Agias and Derkylos (305)." Brill’s New Jacoby. Ian Worthington. Ed. Schwartz,E. ‛Derkylos (2)’ , RE 9, col. 243.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
9/28/2016 02:19:37 pm

I wonder if Natalis Comes misread the Pindar scholia in this instance the same way he misread them to create the "true" name of Jason, Diomedes.

Reply
David Bradbury
9/30/2016 01:09:57 pm

As far as I can tell, neither the scholia to Pindar's Pythian Odes, nor to Apollonius' Argonautica, make any reference to Agias and/or Derkylos, so we can't rule out the possibility that Conti had access to another text, now lost, which quoted Derkylos.

Kathleen
9/28/2016 05:54:52 pm

In SW's blog he mentioned a 366 degree circle. Where did this measurement come from? Does it have a historical source?

Reply
Jason Colavito link
9/28/2016 06:27:00 pm

No, it's a made-up thing from Alan Butler. Here's how I described it back in 2004: "They link the MY [Megalithic Yard] to the rotation of the earth, asserting that the ancients viewed circles and the earth as having 366 degrees, six more than today. This 366 is the number of rotations the earth makes during one revolution of the sun (the difference between this and the 365 solar days is due to earth’s forward motion around the sun) and because the moon’s circumference is 3.66 times smaller than earth’s (a neat but meaningless coincidence for people who lived before zero and decimal places). The authors believe a lost civilization understood these facts and used them as the basis of their measurements, handing them down."

Reply
Titus pullo
9/28/2016 06:59:54 pm

At least the Newport tower didn't come up with John dees.

Reply
Brian
9/28/2016 07:09:32 pm

I don't think Strabo was saying the Colcheans used fleece to pan for gold. Fleece are (or were; some homesteaders still do it) routinely submerged in fast-moving streams in order to wash out the lanolin prior to spinning. Free-floating gold might then catch in the fibers. So this seems to be a back-formation reasoning to explain how a fleece could be golden.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
9/28/2016 08:52:10 pm

Strabo specifically claimed that the Colchians used the Fleeces to line the troughs in which they filtered water to collect gold: "In their country the winter torrents are said to bring down even gold, which the Barbarians collect in troughs pierced with holes, and lined with fleeces; and hence the fable of the golden fleece" (11.2.19, trans. Horace Jones).

Reply
Jim
9/28/2016 11:45:37 pm

Give them some time. Twiddle dee and Twiddle dumber will probably find the Ark of the Covenant but forget to take off the Made in China sticker.

Reply
bkd69
9/29/2016 12:56:39 am

Just out of curiosity, does anybody have any idea of how much fringe interest there was in the Ark before Raiders was released? In scanning wikipedia's In Search Of episode list, they never touched it, even in the 2002 revival, though they did go Old Testament adjacent a couple of times.

I'm sure there must have been some interest, but nothing like what came after Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Reply
nomuse
9/29/2016 01:19:42 am

Interesting. Thriller writers Preston & Child's "Riptide" (1998) is set on Oak Island with the serial numbers filed off. The big discovery (spoiler warning) is "St. Michael's Sword," a highly radioactive relic with a storied past. Now that you mention it, slaying multitudes when uncovered before a hostile army sounds a heck of a lot like those Ark stories...

Reply
Tom
9/29/2016 08:43:36 am

I find it troubling that more and more European history is being appropriated by fringe American writers( and others) apparently to obscure the factual millenia long native American history of America, which seems in their weltaschauung to be beneath contempt.

Reply
E.P. Grondine
9/29/2016 10:42:08 am

Hi Tom -

See:

http://www.danieljglenn.com/the_podcasts/Stelle/Documentation/He%20Walked%20Among%20Us%20Part%201.pdf

For theosophism's roots in Augustus and Alice LePlongeon's salon.

The Native American oral and written histories are pretty much ignored by modern North American archaeologists. In doing so they are pretty much following in the footsteps of the first European colonists and antiquarians.

Reply
John
10/2/2016 07:38:34 pm

Native American oral histories are not ignored by archaeologists, and the only native written information comes from the Maya. That information is also not ignored. Sometimes the archaeological evidence disagrees with history in the same way that archaeological evidence sometimes disagrees with the history seen in ancient books like the Bible. This is not surprising given the nature of folklore.

corsair9 link
10/3/2016 06:07:24 pm

I communicated with Scott Wolter some while back about James Bailey's book - The God-Kings and the Titans - and how it might tie in to his theory about ancient copper mining around the Great Lakes. Instead, aparently Wolter felt his destiny was to prove that Christ was not crucified... etc.
Bailey's book is a worthy read - IMHO. I wrote a review on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/God-Kings-Titans-World-Ascendancy-Ancient/dp/0312330057/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475531691&sr=1-1&keywords=The+God-Kings+and+the+Titans
so I won't repeat it here. The whole subject of ancient commerce is cloudy and out of focus... but, for example, we now know livestock raised in southern Egypt at Nabta Playa about 6-8k years BCE were traded in Mesopotamia, perhaps a thousand miles away. The idea that humanity was simply hunter-gatherers until Sumer exploded out of the desert about 3500 BCE is coming under dissolution.

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