This week’s episode of Expedition Unknown: Hunt for Extraterrestrials was really boring. It involved host Josh Gates listening to a group of Zimbabweans describe a mass UFO sighting that occurred in 1994, followed by a trip to Rendlesham Forest to listen to yet another iteration of the same routine set of mystery-mongering interviews with the UFO profiteers who have made a thirty-year career out of an alleged encounter with a spacecraft that has been debunked over and over again. We saw this a few months ago on Ancient Aliens (not to mention several times before), and the Science Channel, and Destination America, and some online articles, and practically everywhere UFOs are sold. Gates added nothing to the discussion except to give far too much credence to some fairly dubious claims, to the exclusion of reasonable explanations.
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Nephilim theorist L. A. Marzulli has always been creepy with his weird combination of Christian extremism and recycled rightwing talking points, but he is slipping farther and farther into the realm of utterly, irredeemably paranoid. In his latest radio broadcast, he was unable to handle the fact that the Las Vegas mass shooter, Stephen Paddock, who killed more than 50 people last weekend, was a wealthy old white male. Because he didn’t fit Marzulli’s preconceptions about what a violent person should be (brown or black, Muslim, etc.), he proposed that Paddock was the victim of CIA mind control experiments, or else that there was a vast conspiracy fomented by the media to frame him. Marzulli turned the subject to himself and added that he is himself a former drug user who consumed copious amounts of LSD and other mind-altering substances, and he claims that the drugs he did before the age of 30 opened him to “the lower astral” where demons live. He then turned his radio show into a lengthy diatribe about the way the U.S. government is feeding drugs to mass shooters in order to take control of them and use them to shoot up America. He added that Islamic State has a “zombie drug” that removes free will, and he speculates that any conservative can fall victim to mind control from liberals, spy agencies, or Muslims.
Quality standards have never been high among fringe historians, but you’d think that someone calling himself a journalist might have had at least a little bit of research skill. Armando Mei (whom we have met before) is an Italian investigative journalist who fell down the rabbit hole and fully embraced the Graham Hancock model of history. In fact, he became one of Semir Osmanagich’s coauthors in writing about the Bosnian mountains mistaken for ancient pyramids. Anyway, Mei’s big idea is that alchemy was invented in ancient Egypt and encoded in the Great Pyramid around 36,000 years ago. You will immediately recognize this as the Arab-Islamic medieval pyramid myth, and he does nothing to confirm it except to accept it at face value.
Last month, three authors, two of whom are well known to us, paid a Chinese publisher to review and publish an academic article claiming that the Sphinx predates dynastic Egypt based on a word and a hieroglyph. Before we examine the article itself, it’s worth saying a word about Scientific Research Publishing, a Chinese-owned mass-producer of more than 200 low-quality academic journals such as Archaeological Discovery, in which this article appeared. Scientific Research Publishing of Wuhan, China uses bulk email to solicit academic articles, which it then charges the authors to publish. While this is not, strictly speaking, unethical (some respected open access journals charge publication fees), the company’s business model is essentially to make huge profits by charging fees for every article published while exercising minimal quality control. According to published accounts, the company has reprinted articles from other journals without permission, named scholars to its editorial board without their knowledge or consent, and even accepted an article created by a random text generator. One title’s entire editorial board resigned over ethical concerns.
I mention this because it explains a bit about why the article we are about to consider seemed to lack the quality one would expect in a peer-reviewed academic article. Now here is an odd thing. I discovered that one early Freemasonic source attributed the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx to Mizraim, the son of Ham, rather than to any of the usual suspects from mythology or history. Our example comes to us from a bizarre bit of popular culture, the Harlequin Free-Mason, a 1780 piece of commedia dell’arte pantomime by Charles Dibdin which concludes with a pageant depicting the history of Freemasonry from the Flood to the eighteenth century. The Gentleman’s Magazine considered it “the richest and most intelligent spectacle” in English theatrical history, and according to them, it was also the best attended in living memory. So much for the Masonry’s “secrets.” But anyway, in response to the popularity of the pantomime, guides to its imagery were published, and it is rather astonishing to see the Western Enochian view of history on full display.
According to one such explanation, the procession commenced with Enoch, with two men bearing the pillars of stone and brick from Flavius Josephus’ account of the run-up to the Flood of Noah. Following the appearance of Nimrod, here identified following apocryphal accounts as the builder of the Tower of Babel, there came Mizraim, the son of Ham and the first king of Egypt. I give here the full description: A few days ago, I discussed a bit about the mysterious Arabic manuscript of Abenephius, or the Rabbi Barachias Nephi, which the Renaissance polymath Athanasius Kircher claimed to have had in the 1630s. Suspicion has long lingered over the claim, especially since Kircher never let anyone see more than one page of the text, and his story about who wrote it and what it contained changed over time. When I discussed this the other day, I mentioned that Daniel Stolzenberg believes that the fragments of Abenephius quoted by Kircher in his three major works of Egyptology, Historia Obelisci Pamphilii (1650), Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652-1655), and Sphinx Mystagoga (1676), contain enough evidence of an Arab-Islamic origin (despite claims of Jewish authorship) that he believes the fragments to be the genuine remains of a lost medieval Arabic manuscript treating this history of the hieroglyphs and Egypt.
When I discussed Ibn Wahshiyya’s book on hieroglyphics yesterday, I briefly mentioned that there is some evidence that the text might be a forgery, and that evidence came from Athanasius Kircher, the eccentric Renaissance polymath whom you will remember as the man who investigated reports of giant human skeletons, among other oddities. Kircher wrote several books on Egyptology, and in researching his failed attempt to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics I encountered the fascinating but bizarre question of Abenephius, an Arabic-language writer whom Kircher relies upon for information about ancient Egypt but whose very existence is in doubt. What’s infuriating is that his reality would help solve a vexing problem in pyramid mythology related to the question of the origins of Surid, the alleged builder of the Great Pyramid before the Flood in Islamic lore.
Today I thought I would do something a little different. When I wrote earlier this week about the medieval pyramid myth, I realized that the discussion must be a little confusing for those who have not been following along for years, and it is a really complicated story. So, I put together an article in which I have explained the development of the story in a rather bare-bones chronological way that I think will save a lot of time in the future by creating a resource to point to. This article covers only the pyramid myth, and even then only the most basic details. A lot of ancillary material, including the legend of Philemon and his relationship to Noah, or the involvement of the Islamic angels Harut and Marut, was just too complicated to add here. Perhaps in the future I can do further timelines for the Watchers and the Pillars of Wisdom to flesh it out more. At any rate, this took a long time to put together, so enjoy.
As regular readers know, I have a special interest in the medieval pyramid myths that arose in Arab-Islamic Egypt because these stories are foundational for all later pyramid mysticism, from the occult mysteries of Giza to the claim that a lost civilization was responsible for their construction. The stories, told in three major variants, attribute the construction of the monuments of Giza variously to Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary king Surid (possibly a fictionalized version of Khufu), or the fictitious giant Shaddad ibn ‘Ad, the builder of Iram of the Pillars. In most versions, one of these men erected the pyramids to preserve scientific knowledge from the coming of Noah’s Flood, having seen the Flood coming thanks to prophetic dreams and astrological signs.
A few days ago, my longtime semi-nemesis Giorgio Tsoukalos gave a rare interview to Jimmy Church of Fade to Black radio to promote the return next week of Ancient Aliens for its twelfth season and ninth calendar year on the air. Tsoukalos more or less conceded that the whole Ancient Aliens series is merely an outgrowth of the two-hour original pilot, to which its 120 hours have added little, and that the pilot, in turn, was developed as a knockoff semi-tie-in to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, itself an ancient astronaut movie. According to Tsoukalos, executive producer Kevin Burns created the show as “a love letter to Chariots of the Gods.” That seems about right.
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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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