Category: Mythology

Review of Ancient Aliens S18E09: "Decoding the Dragon Gods"

3/11/2022

The classic dragon is a bit of a late invention, a case where a range of previously unrelated creatures got thrown into the same category and started influencing one another. In the European tradition, dragons were originally envisioned as large snakes, as ancient Greek art attests, and Indo-European linguistic studies find that the most ancient Indo-European speakers thought of them as being in the category of worm, not reptile. Only much later did medieval Europeans start to assign the wings and feet. By contrast, the dragons of East Asian lore originated in fantasy combinations of a variety of animals, and may have originated in stories of extinct types of crocodile. The point is that there is no universal “dragon” myth, nor any consistency to dragon stories.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E06: "Secrets of the Star Ancestors"

2/18/2022

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This week, Wired magazine gave Jacques Vallée the glamour treatment, with a glossy profile praising the aging deacon of ufology for his six decades of failure to find the answer to UFOs. Vallée made some mouth noises about “the phenomenon” being too smart for humanity, claiming that the entities purposely embrace humor and absurdity in order to break down humanity’s rational mind. At a certain point, it stops being anything even science-adjacent and instead becomes an expression of philosophy and faith. Vallée admits that his UFO obsession originated in an adolescent interest—but of course—and Wired treated far more respectfully than you’d think his bizarre claim from last year that the U.S. government recovered an avocado-shaped UFO staffed by miniature space aliens in 1945. His image makeover as grand master of science and worthy future recipient of government patronage is a rather amazing turnaround from a man denounced as dotty and past-his-prime by his own ufology colleagues just last year.

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Triumph of the Shrill

4/21/2021

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Over on Substack, I reviewed the three-hour conversation between Michael Shermer of Skeptic magazine and controversial Canadian academic Jordan B. Peterson. You can read my thoughts here.

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Roundup: Pharaohs' Curse on "Today," Greek Myths in the Bronze Age, and More

4/5/2021

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The following was cross-posted in my Substack newsletter.

This week, I am experimenting with a newsletter format, featuring a longer piece of writing divided into shorter articles rather than separate posts. In this issue, we’ll look at the Today show’s promotion of the curse of the pharaohs, a new article about ancient Greek mythology’s connection to the Bronze Age, and we’ll review a historical piece by a famous writer linking American mounds to Atlantis.

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Was Mexico's Pyramid of Cholula Related to the Biblical Tower of Babel?

2/16/2021

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Ancient Origins ran a piece recently arguing that indigenous oral traditions from North America are related to the biblical Tower of Babel story. The author seems to have lifted his understanding of the parallel myths from the Tower of Babel’s Wikipedia page, but even so, it is at least mildly interesting to review what are indeed parallel stories in order to understand where author Mark-Andrew Carpenter went wrong. The short version is that he heavily discounted the influence of the Bible on post-Contact America and among the missionaries who recorded—and revised—Native stories.

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Australian Astrophysicist Claims Pleiades Myth Is 100,000 Years Old

2/3/2021

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My computer's hard drive died, so I am working, slowly, from a backup machine while I shop for a new computer, since the other parts, like the keyboard, the monitor, and the touch pad, aren't working so well either. The last time this happened, last year, I received a one-year warranty on the hard drive, and it lasted ten whole days past the end of the warranty before crapping out. Anyway, on to today's issue...

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Did Lucian Parody the Book of Revelation in His Satirical "True History"?

9/1/2020

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Classicist Peter Gainsford made an interesting case on his blog that the humorous ancient Greek science fiction satire of Lucian called The True History includes a close parody of the New Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation. I can definitely see Gainsford’s point, but my gut instinct is that Lucian wasn’t directly drawing on the Christian text in imagining the fantastical paradise on the Isle of the Blessed where the heroic dead reside. Let’s take a quick look at what Gainsford says in order to puzzle out whether he’s right and whether Lucian had it in for Christianity’s most psychedelic text.

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Ambrose Bierce and the Myth of the Simurgh

6/18/2020

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Many, many years ago I read Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary and was quite taken with a story Bierce told about an “Arabian” myth of an all-powerful entity that held all the power in the universe on the condition that it never use that power:

RABBLE, n. In a republic, those who exercise a supreme authority tempered by fraudulent elections. The rabble is like the sacred Simurgh, of Arabian fable—omnipotent on condition that it do nothing. (The word is Aristocratese, and has no exact equivalent in our tongue, but means, as nearly as may be, "soaring swine.")

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Review of Forbidden History S06E05: "Search for Noah's Ark"

5/19/2020

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Since I was able to obtain episodes of the current season of Forbidden History, which airs on a channel not included in my cable package, I am going to devote some of this week to picking up on reviews of episodes I haven’t seen yet. Today I plan to review the May 3 episode investigating Noah’s Ark. The search for the Ark that saved life from the Flood is older than the Abrahamic faiths. According to the most ancient authorities, the peoples of Mesopotamia believed that the Ark used by the Mesopotamian flood-hero (variously Atrahasis, Ziusudra, Xisuthros, Utnapishtim, etc.) had come to rest on a mountain and could still be seen in historic times. They wrote that there had been an active trade in wood from the Ark, which was collected to be used in magical amulets. This belief carried over into Jewish and Christian practice, and it inspired the hunt for Noah’s Ark. Forbidden History sees it a bit differently.

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Review of Rob Riggle: Global Investigator S01E01/E03 "Pirate Booty"

4/2/2020

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Rob Riggle: Global Investigator failed hard in its first two outings in a plum Sunday night timeslot on the Discovery Channel, attracting only around 650,000 viewers, half the audience of its lead-in. The half-baked comedy fringe history pseudodocumentary series was a bust with viewers, so Discovery pulled it from the schedule for a month. The network attempted to relaunch the show, at least to burn off the remaining episodes. Sadly, COVID-19 may have thrown this disappointing failure an undeserved lifeline as homebound viewers turn to cable for entertainment options. Ratings are up across the board, but it remains to be seen if Riggle’s misbegotten effort yields results.

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