First we had pop singer Katy Perry and movie starlet Megan Fox going bonkers for Giorgio Tsoukalos and Ancient Aliens. Now we can move a bit down market and witness the bizarre effort of former Baywatch star Donna D’Errico to raise $10,000 via Kickstarter to finance a documentary chronicling her upcoming expedition to Mount Ararat in Turkey to search for the physical remains of Noah’s Ark.
Yes, Noah’s Ark. Again. Worse: Like every alternative and fringe writer, she calls her quest “a modern-day, real-life Indiana Jones adventure.” Paging David Childress and Scott Wolter…
18 Comments
Yesterday I wrote about Peter Martyr’s description of the discovery of a “giant’s” thigh bone in Mexico. When I discussed it yesterday, I provided a Spanish language version of the story as well as the standard 1912 English translation. What I did not have was the original Latin, from which the many later translations were made. That would be because it did not occur to me that some libraries (as well as Google Books) have the Latin version listed under the Italian name of Peter (Pietro Martire), not his Latin name or English name, which they use for MacNutt’s translation! Sigh. This is not as simple as it seems since some of Peter’s Decades were first published in Italian and some in Latin, and getting to the original is a pain in the neck. I dug up on Google Books the first published edition of the complete Decades, which provides the Latin text of Decade 5, Book 9, where the relevant passage occurs.
Update: See follow-up here.
Regular readers will recall that I’ve been looking over some of the evidence that the Spanish conquistadors encountered giants in the Americas. Today, let’s look at another piece of the evidence for an alleged giant. Today’s story comes from Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, Count Palatine, an Italian historian commissioned by Charles V to write the history of New Spain. In the fifth of his Decades, published in 1523, Peter described the conquest of Mexico, and in so doing he related the explorations of Diego de Ordaz, a conquistador most famous for his failed search for El Dorado across the northern areas of South America. That was still in the future, and at the time Peter Martyr wrote Ordaz had just finished his explorations of what is now Oaxaca and Veracruz, the onetime Olmec heartland, after having explored the region around what is now Mexico City. Here’s what Ordaz found, as related in Decades 5, Book 9. I cannot seem to find the original Latin, [update: I found it] but I will give a Spanish version is first, followed by the standard 1912 English translation of papal chamberlain Francis Augustus MacNutt from which many alternative historians work. Hint: Be wary of this English translation. The Providence Journal ran an article July 6 discussing the controversy over the Narragansett Rune Stone (NRS), a rune-covered rock that had been located for many years off the coast of Rhode Island before vanishing last year. It was the subject on an episode of America Unearthed. The rock was recently recovered, and now it is undergoing testing to determine the age of its carvings, which include the variant-A rune in the shape of an X with a little bar perpendicular to the upper right stave that forensic geologist Scott Wolter has termed “The Hooked X®” and registered as an official trademark.
I’m going to take a break from the search for giants in America to discuss an interesting fact Michael Shermer brought up in his recent Scientific American column (reprinted in Salon) on Ancient Aliens and how ancient astronaut speculators and creationists share a similar desire to find a “god of the gaps” to explain away all uncertainties. I’m sure you’ll remember my frequent discussions of the same theme in my reviews of the show. Shermer mentions a shocking fact also reported in last year’s Pseudoscience Wars by Michael Grodin: The last-published edition of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods, published by Berkeley Books in 1999, contains a surprising disclaimer. The publisher claims the whole book is fiction!
If there is one recurring theme we’ve encountered time and again on this blog, it’s the propensity of researchers of all stripes to keep on copying from one another without recourse to primary sources. As promised yesterday, I’ve been looking into more claims that the Spanish conquistadors encountered giants in North America. Today, I started looking into the claim made here that in 1519 Alvarez de Pineda found “a race of giants from ten to eleven palms in height” at or near the coast of modern Texas, which is presented as though it were a direct quotation from Pineda. It appears as the words of Pineda’s “report” in Charles DeLoach’s Giants: A Reference Guide from History, the Bible, and Recorded Legend (Scarecrow, 1995). It’s not a quote from Pineda; it’s a quotation from Woodbury Lowery’s The Spanish Settlements within the Present Limits of the United States (1901), which gives no source.
Thanks to the holiday, I’m flooded with work today, so I’m going to keep this short and sweet. Making the rounds on the internet again (for some reason) is the wild claim that the Conquistadors ran into various races of giants in Mexico. (See here, copying verbatim from here with additions.) Among the “evidence,” which I will examine in more detail in a future post, is this little number from José de Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590), an early work that tried to tie Native groups to Israel and Atlantis. Here Acosta reports the discovery of the remains of a giant:
As we here in the United States celebrate Independence Day, I’m taking the day off. So, in honor of the holiday, I’m honoring American independence with links to articles on my website about the Founding Fathers and other patriotic topics:
And from my Library:
And be sure to pick up a copy of my book Unearthing the Truth, packed with great information on strange beliefs about the early history of the United States! The U.S. broadcaster ABC formed a joint partnership with Univision to launch a new news network, which will be called Fusion, and which will target English-speaking Hispanics. If the ABC News-Univision story on ancient astronauts that ran on the ABC News website yesterday is any indication, the Disney-owned network and the Spanish-language broadcaster seem to think that their shared audience isn’t interested in truth. The news organization blatantly declared ancient aliens real—and coming for your gold!
A recurring theme in historiography has to be the fact that very few writers actually go back to primary sources before repeating some wacky claim or another. We saw this yesterday with the frequently repeated claims about the books open on Einstein’s desk at his death—claims made in spite of the fact that documentary evidence exists showing exactly what was on his desk. We’ve also seen it in Classical scholarship, where a typo made centuries ago can affect scholarship today because no one bothers to check sources.
So it is not without interest that I read Jody Forest’s recent column on “Machinery of the Gods” in The River Journal, which gets off to a bad start by misusing the theatrical phrase deus ex machina (“god from the machine,” describing the contraption used to lower an actor playing a god onto the stage; thus, metaphorically, a convenient contrivance) to describe “machinery of the Gods,” which would be apparati deorum. |
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
Enter your email below to subscribe to my newsletter for updates on my latest projects, blog posts, and activities, and subscribe to Culture & Curiosities, my Substack newsletter.
Categories
All
Terms & ConditionsPlease read all applicable terms and conditions before posting a comment on this blog. Posting a comment constitutes your agreement to abide by the terms and conditions linked herein.
Archives
April 2024
|