I’ve noticed a trend among “alternative history” and “ancient astronaut” celebrities. They seem to be fixated on presenting themselves as Indiana Jones, probably because they assume that this is their target audience’s only brush with archaeology. Consider these publicity statements from the official biographies of three of alternative history’s top stars:
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Yesterday, I posted 5,000 words of reviews, so today I’m taking a breather. I’m going to share with you a little nugget from the medieval writer Isidore of Seville (560-636 CE), who was one of the very first to argue that fossils found atop mountains were “proof” of the reality of Noah’s flood. His claim appears in book 13, chapter 22 of the Origines (Etymologies). I have translated the section below, but if you would like to read the whole of chapter 22, you can find it on Google Books here.
Before I review America Unearthed S01E04 “Giants in Minnesota,” let me stipulate that in the course of the hour Scott Wolter uncovered no evidence whatsoever of giants in Minnesota, or the Norse visitors he ties them to. He admits this, so it is not just me saying it. This, sadly, means that there is little factual material to examine, leaving me to critique this show as a television performance. In that light, we can look at the episode as a triumph of editing in trying to make three pointless investigations add up to more than the sum of their parts through carefully cross-cutting among them and avoiding dwelling too long on the inevitable disappointments. The way the show subtly switches from the proposed topic to others designed to garner support for its star is masterfully executed but deeply manipulative.
The three belt stars of the constellation of Orion are among the most recognizable in the night sky, so bright and so prominent that they are among the few star clusters widely recognized as a constellation across cultures and across time. The meaning of the stars varies widely by culture. For example, among many others Orion represented a shepherd to the Babylonians, a hunter to the Greeks, a god to the Egyptians, a loom to the Norse, a rake to the French, and a line of game animals to the Seri of Mexico. The lack of agreement on the meaning of the constellation—or which stars beyond the three belt stars should be included in the constellation—clearly indicates that different cultures gazed up at the same night sky and picked out these bright stars for their brilliance, not because aliens came down and told everyone one earth to stare lustfully at Orion’s stars because the aliens came from Betelgeuse or Sirius or any other nearby star.
Now, this would seem logical enough to most of us, but we are not “ancient astronaut theorists” (AATs), in the parlance of Ancient Aliens. Show S05E04, “Destination Orion,” posits that the ancients were “obsessed” with Orion because of aliens. I suppose that fact that nearly all polytheistic cultures had deities for the sun and the moon also must therefore imply that the ancients were (a) obsessed with these heavenly bodies and (b) thought the aliens lived on them. What, then, does that imply about the widespread goddess of fireplaces? Turton, Lancashire was founded around the year 1212 near the site of what was once an ancient stone circle at Chetham’s Close, like Stonehenge but on a smaller scale. The famed circle there is about fifty feet in diameter, with stone that once rose a little more than four feet in height. This stone circle was partially destroyed in the 1880s by a tenant farmer who wanted to prevent tourists from coming onto his (rented) land to visit the stones. He broke up the circle and cleaved the stones into chunks. Two additional small stones (19 and 35 inches high) stood outside the circle at a distance. A much larger stone circle was later discovered nearby, buried underground. This one was 24 yards wide. Modern archaeological surveys identified earthworks as well.
Today, let’s talk a bit about the perils of copying. Alternative authors do it all the time, and like a game of telephone (also known as Chinese whispers), copying begets errors and changes meaning. As we’re going to see next month with Jim Marrs’s new ancient astronaut book, Our Occulted History, almost every alternative history text is cobbled together from lengthy quotes, endless paraphrases, and other direct borrowing from earlier alternative claims.
Many alternative writers claim that the Hopi have “ancient” prophecies that foretold the Euro-American settlement of the continental United States as well as its ultimate destruction by nuclear weapons. Such prophecies are often said to have come from a spirit being from Sirius known as the Blue Star Kachina, whom ancient astronaut writers claim is an extraterrestrial being, one of the creatures Robert Temple imagined served as the prototype for the Babylonian myth of Oannes.
This Friday, Ancient Aliens is going to go in search of the constellation Orion, rehashing the tired old claims that pyramids around the world were designed to mimic the shape of Orion’s belt. (Any three dots not in a straight line could pass for Orion’s belt—like, say, the state capitals of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.) In so doing, the program’s promotional spot promises to explore how Hopi villages (actually, both Hopi and ancestral Pueblo—i.e. Anasazi—sites of various types) were aligned to mimic the shape of the constellation Orion, as suggested by Gary A. David in The Orion Zone (2007), from David Childress’s Adventures Unlimited press. David provides this map:
I’ve been reading David R. Montgomery’s The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood (Norton, 2012), which, despite its creationist-baiting title, is actually a science book about the development of geology as a science. I concur with many other critics that this is a lively and engaging volume that dispenses scientific history along with a good dose of discussion about the changing way the Bible’s absolute truths have been continuously reworked over the years. But that’s not what I want to talk about today.
Yesterday, I published reviews of the latest episodes of both Ancient Aliens and America Unearthed, amounting to more than 3,000 words, so today I’m only going to post a short (well, relatively short) notice of a couple of interesting articles about historical memory and Ancient Greece. Both came to my attention via David Meadows, the “Rogue Classicist.”
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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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