Category: Mythology

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

8/11/2023

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.

10 Comments

Adrienne Mayor Claims Talos as a Greek Myth of Artificial Intelligence

5/24/2023

6 Comments

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.

6 Comments

Author Claims Ancient Sites and Myths Connect to Global Bird Cult

4/6/2023

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Two centuries ago, the clergyman and antiquary John Bathurst Deane published The Worship of the Serpent (1830), which attempted to explain the entirety of non-Abrahamic religions worldwide as a unified, prehistoric serpent cult descended from the first idolaters, who worshiped the Serpent from the Garden of Eden, i.e. Satan. To make the claim, Deane took an exceedingly common motif—serpents, after all, can be found everywhere and appear regularly in myths and art as a result—and abstracted from it a unified faith that didn’t exist.

5 Comments

The Jerusalem Post Recycles Old Claims about Goliath's Skull at Golgotha

11/2/2022

7 Comments

The Jerusalem Post ran a story this week claiming that the Bible giant Goliath’s skull is located under the land occupied by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre because its biblical name, Golgotha, sort of sounds like “Goliath of Gath.” The Post did not clearly explain to readers that its article was a near-verbatim copy of a 2017 tabloid story from Britain’s Daily Star, itself recycling Evangelical chatter from the early 2000s, nor did the Post disclose that the “author” of their story, “Walla! Tourism,” had apparently produced the piece to draw Christian tourists to Israel.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E19: "Secrets of Inner Earth"

9/9/2022

2 Comments

The idea of a subterranean realm is an ancient one, a mixture of real-life experiences of caverns and caves and ancient mythological ideas about planes layered above the flat earth and below it. The Zohar, an ancient Jewish mystical text, follows this old idea, positing seven planes of existence and claiming that some of the creatures below the surface have such bizarre traits as lacking noses or having two heads. In 1692 Edmund Halley—who also invented the claim that a comet strike destroyed the antediluvian world—proposed that the interior of the Earth featured concentric spheres moving at different speeds, an early scientific version of Hollow Earth theory that soon merged with stories colonial explorers brought back about various peoples’ belief in subterranean ancestors. A great deal of nineteenth century nonsense and twentieth century exploitation eventually gave rise to this episode of Ancient Aliens, culmination and refutation of Hollow Earth Theory.

2 Comments

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

3/11/2022

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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.

10 Comments

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

2/18/2022

20 Comments

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

1 Comment

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.

1 Comment

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

4/5/2021

15 Comments

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.

15 Comments

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

2/16/2021

52 Comments

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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<<Previous

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

Adrienne Mayor Claims Talos as a Greek Myth of Artificial Intelligence

Author Claims Ancient Sites and Myths Connect to Global Bird Cult

The Jerusalem Post Recycles Old Claims about Goliath's Skull at Golgotha

Review of Ancient Aliens S18E19: "Secrets of Inner Earth"

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

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

Triumph of the Shrill

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

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

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