Category: Mythology

Goghgobon and the Hermetic History of Giants

5/10/2025

Longtime readers will remember that back in 2018, I struggled my way through the Old Castilian of Alfonso X’s General Estoria—learning the language in order to read it—so that I could explore the Hermetic history of the Giants contained in it. As you may recall, this passage relates the story of Asclepius’s encounter with Goghgobon, the last surviving Giant, who tells him about the accomplishments of the Giants before the Flood and translates for him their book of star wisdom written in a forgotten alphabet. Very few scholars have analyzed this passage in any significant detail, likely because it had never been translated into English before I did so, and even the modern Spanish translation is very recent.

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Smithsonian Magazine Asks if Talos Was an Ancient A.I.-Powered Robot

4/22/2025

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Ancient myths and legends have a protean quality that makes them applicable to almost any current event, but that same quality has a downside: From the time of the euhemerists down to this very morning, there is a tendency to try to find the “real” story behind the myth by projecting today’s world back into the past. Earlier today, Smithsonian Magazine asked whether Talos, the bronze giant of the Argonautica, is in fact an early example of artificial intelligence. This question is, of course, patently absurd because Talos did not exist.

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A Christmas Mystery: Hancock, Bauval, and the "Three Kings of Orion"

12/20/2024

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An interesting little Christmas mystery, inspired by a recent post Graham Hancock made on social media praising his “great friend” Robert Bauval and his Orion Correlation Theory from the 1990s. Back in 1997, when Hancock and Bauval teamed up for The Message of the Sphinx (a.k.a. Keeper of Genesis), the two authors presented a variant version of the Christmas carol “We three kings” that replaced “Orient” with “Orion,” rendering the first line as “We three kings of Orion are.” They provided no source, and for a long time I wondered if they had just made it up.

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Review of "Karahan Tepe" by Andrew Collins

11/29/2024

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Karahan Tepe: Civilization of the Anunnaki and the Cosmic Origins of the Serpent of Eden
Andrew Collins | Bear & Company | October 2024 | ISBN: 9781591434788 | $26

I will confess that when I learned Andrew Collins had recently published a new book on Karahan Tepe, an ancient site of enclosures and statues similar to and coeval with those of nearby Göbekli Tepe (collectively, the Taş Tepeler peoples, after the region where the sites are located), I was not particularly excited about reviewing it. Collins’s books are never wild enough to be fun to discuss, but they also fall just enough outside of the scholarly consensus to make it a slog to work through his reams of information, mostly accurate but outstripping the evidence.

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Review of "Odysseus Returns," a PBS Quest to Find the Tomb of Odysseus

8/31/2024

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Promotional image for "Odysseus Returns" featuring Makis Metaxas (PBS)

This week, PBS presented Odysseus Returns, a documentary following the three-decade quest of “amateur historian” Makis Metaxas as he attempts to convince the world that Odysseus was real, that Homer’s island of Ithaca was in fact the neighboring island of Kefalonia in northwest Greece, and that he had seen both the tomb of Odysseus and the Greek hero’s bones. It’s a tall order for a ninety-minute film, and I was disappointed that the somewhat meandering documentary presents only one side of the argument, leaving the audience with the impression that not only is Metaxas right but that the Greek government and archaeologists are conspiring to prevent Odysseus’ tomb from being identified. So much does the film endorse Metaxas’s perspective that PBS affixed a disclaimer to the beginning of the documentary noting that the film’s claims are not the views of the Greek government. Typically, such as disclaimer says something like “not necessarily,” implying some wiggle room, but this one is simply “not.”

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Graham Hancock Defender Claims Proof of the Atlantis Myth's Egyptian Origin

7/18/2024

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In a posting on X today, Graham Hancock announced that “archaeologists aren't going to like” a new article Hancock posted to his website, implying that the argument convincingly challenges scholarly views. Written by Manu Seyfzadeh, a dermatologist who hunts for the Atlantean Hall of Records, the article seeks to prove that Plato drew on a genuine ancient Egyptian tradition of Atlantis when he ascribed the allegory of Atlantis to a story the Egyptians told his distant ancestor Solon in the sixth century BCE. However, Seyfzadeh admits to having no training in Classics or Egyptology, and his arguments are rather transparently ignorant of the broader context of Near Eastern cultures.

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New Academic Paper Challenges Adrienne Mayor's Griffin-Protoceratops Link

6/24/2024

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A new academic paper is challenging folklorist Adrienne Mayor’s identification of the dinosaur Protoceratops as the inspiration for the legendary griffin of mythology. Mayor’s claim, first made more than thirty years ago and most famously outlined in her turn-of-the-century book The First Fossil Hunters, posits that Central Asian merchants observed the exposed bones of Protoceratops, some with their nests, and passed these tales on. As they traveled westward, the creature turned into a winged lion with an eagle’s head, resembling the beaked skull of the Protoceratops.

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Discover Magazine Reports 110-Year-Old News about Fossil Origins of Greek Myths

1/30/2024

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Something that fascinates me is how ideas percolate through culture and either do or do not become common knowledge. This week, Discover magazine ran a piece exploring the question of whether mastodon, mammoth, or other extinct elephant fossils influenced the Greek myth of the cyclops. An extinct elephant skull’s nasal cavity resembles a gigantic eye socket in the middle of the skull, suggesting the shape of a cyclops skull. The article by Sean Mowbray presents the claim as news, but it’s really, really not.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E16: "The Gods of Greece"

8/11/2023

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This month, pseudohistory writer Graham Phillips has a new article on Graham Hancock’s website, based on his new book, claiming that Doggerland, the sunken territory that connected Britain to Northen Europe nine millennia ago, was the home to an advanced lost civilization (sigh) and that the memory of it persisted in Celtic memory for nine thousand years. His evidence, however, is misrepresented. In the article he uses the unusual spelling “Tu-lay” to obscure the fact that he bases his analysis on Classical and post-Classical references to the island of Thule. However, in Classical literature Thule is not a sunken island but instead is described as a real and still-extant land north of Britain. To make the texts match Doggerland, Phillips purposely conflates them with wholly separate Irish legends about an unnamed sunken island, for which there is no historical evidence that the story is particularly ancient or that it is true. Sunken islands are a dime a dozen in ancient literature after all. For Phillips to be right, we have to accept that the Greek and Romans were completely wrong about all the important facts but nevertheless preserved correct information, while the Irish remembered the sinking of the island but forgot everything else about it, including the fact that Doggerland wasn’t actually an island.

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Adrienne Mayor Claims Talos as a Greek Myth of Artificial Intelligence

5/24/2023

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In Engelsberg Ideas, folklorist Adrienne Mayor has a new piece discussing the Greek myth of Talos as the original version of the “A.I. dilemma,” expanding on ideas from here 2018 book Gods and Robots. Artificial intelligence is all the rage this year thanks to the rapid emergence of A.I.-powered chatbots and image generators. I’ve always had a little bit of a problem with the effort to find in the story of Talos a precedent for robotics and A.I., mostly because the idea of Talos as a robot probably wasn’t original to the myth and likely developed gradually and incidentally.

There were, of course, ancient myths are were explicitly about androids and robots, such as the Chinese story of Yen Shih and his artificial human, which dates back at least to the fourth century BCE. I do not disagree with the concept that the ancients thought about robots. I disagree, though, with the idea that Talos was originally or primarily conceptualized as a robot in the modern sense.

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<<Previous

Goghgobon and the Hermetic History of Giants

Smithsonian Magazine Asks if Talos Was an Ancient A.I.-Powered Robot

A Christmas Mystery: Hancock, Bauval, and the "Three Kings of Orion"

Review of "Karahan Tepe" by Andrew Collins

Review of "Odysseus Returns," a PBS Quest to Find the Tomb of Odysseus

Graham Hancock Defender Claims Proof of the Atlantis Myth's Egyptian Origin

New Academic Paper Challenges Adrienne Mayor's Griffin-Protoceratops Link

Discover Magazine Reports 110-Year-Old News about Fossil Origins of Greek Myths

Review of Ancient Aliens S19E16: "The Gods of Greece"

Adrienne Mayor Claims Talos as a Greek Myth of Artificial Intelligence

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