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Did Charlemagne Legislate against UFOs?

6/7/2013

11 Comments

 
In my review of Philip Coppens’s Ancient Alien Question, I noted that Coppens cited a 1670 French Rosicrucian novel as his source for the claim that in the time of Charlemagne aerial ships of aliens regularly trolled the medieval skies, prompting the emperor and his successor to legislate against their activities: “The people straightway believed that sorcerers had taken possession of the Air for the purpose of raising tempests and bringing hail upon their crops. […] The Emperors believed it as well; and this ridiculous chimera went so far that the wise Charlemagne, and after him Louis the Débonnaire, imposed grievous penalties upon all these supposed Tyrants of the Air” (Comte de Gabalis, Discourse V, sec. 127-128).

Coppens, of course, does not know the story firsthand but rather from material presented by Jacques Vallée in Passport to Magonia and later in Wonders in the Sky. My point was that a novel from 1670 is no proof of aerial visitors, but it did make me wonder whether there was a legitimate source behind the novel’s claims.

The story apparently traces back to the Archbishop Agobard, who wrote a treatise around 815 known as “On Hail and Thunder” which attempted to explain the popular superstitions of his time about weather-wizards from a magic cloud land called Magonia (hence Vallée’s book title). The treatise was lost for eight hundred years before being discovered and published in 1605. Here is Agobard’s discussion of the ship and its inhabitants. I don’t trust Vallée’s unnamed “translator,” so I substitute a standard translation for Vallée’s eccentric one:

We have seen and heard many who are overwhelmed by such madness, carried away by such folly, that they believe and assert that there is a certain region called Magonia, whence ships come in the clouds: the which bear away the fruits of the earth, felled by hail and destroyed by storms, to that same country; and these sailors of the air forsooth give rewards to the weather-wizards, and receive in return the crops or other fruits. Certain ones have we seen, blinded by so dark a folly, who brought into an assembly of men four persons, three men and a woman, as having fallen from the said ships; whom they held in bonds for certain days and then presented before an assembled body of men, in our presence, as aforesaid, that they should be stoned. Howbeit the truth prevailed, after much reasoning, and they who brought them forward were confounded. (trans. Reginald Lane Poole)

Picture
Woodcut illustration of Agobard's tale.
It’s important to recognize that this alleged evidence, as Agobard tries hard to make plain, has nothing to do with actual ships in the sky, nor did anyone actually see those poor souls about to be stoned fall from the sky. Such a belief, though, was apparently widespread in the medieval world of the early Middle Ages, with various claims that the weather-wizards worked for the devil, had ice palaces in the sky, and pelted the earth with hail to shake loose fruits that they could more easily collect from the ground. The belief that wizards had an icy city in the sky—a belief more than one scholar notes parallels Norse-Germanic conceptions of the heavens—lingered on folklore right down to the twentieth century. In 1891, Charles Godfrey Leland claimed that he encountered an old Italian woman who told him that hail was some of the stones from the wizards’ sky buildings. (Leland made up a lot of stuff and may have invented this story.)

We know, by the way, that these aerial sailors were good Christians, for in 1240 Vinsich reports in his History (30.138), as cited by Johannes Praetorius in Anthropodemus Plutonicus, that a large hailstone fell from the sky in the shape of a cross inscribed with the Latin words JESUS NAZARENUS, and it promptly cured a blind man of his affliction. 

Charlemagne, however, did not legislate against sky men as the Rosicrucians and Philip Coppens want us to believe. Instead, his Admonitio generalis of March 23, 789 (cap. 65 [older texts label this 63 or 64], citing Deut. 18:10) forbade superstitious behaviors, including the consultation of weather-magicians, called tempestarii: “Nemo sit maleficus, nec incantator, nec Pythonis consultor. Ideo praecipimus ut nec cauculatores et incantatores, nec tempestarii vel obligators non fiant, et ubicunque sunt, emendentur vel damnentur” (“Let no one among you be a wizard, nor an enchanter, nor a soothsayer. Therefore, we enjoin that there shall be neither prognosticators and spell-casters, nor weather-magicians or spell-binders, and that wherever they are found they either be reformed or condemned.”—my translation.*) Another reference occurs in his Capitulare missorum generale of 802 (cap. 40), repeating the same. Neither Coppens nor Vallée is aware of the text of Charlemagne’s law, though Vallée cites it secondhand and incorrectly, because neither took the time to look it up.

From this point through about the ninth century we find a good number of references to the weather-wizards, and Agobard tells us that the peasants paid a tithe to the wizards to keep the storms at bay. What fascinates me is that this is an identical story to the tale of the Solomonari, the weather-wizards of Dacia (Romania) who rode on dragons and learned to control storms at the Devil’s School, the Scholomance, where Count Dracula allegedly studied. I have previously traced the Solomonari back to the priests of Zalmoxis, the Thracian and Dacian god, who appears in Herodotus as a culture hero. Now what is really interesting is that Zalmoxis, as chthonic weather god, has also been identified with Sabazius, the Thracian horseman sky god who entered Greco-Roman religion as a chthonic, resurrected Dionysus. This is interesting because the Rosicrucian author, in introducing the tempestarii in the Comte de Grabalis, cites Sabazius as the “most ancient of the Gnomes” and a chthonic guardian of the Mysteries!

This looks to be another case where the Church has diabolized pagan weather rituals. We can confirm this by looking at Greco-Roman weather magicians, like the philosopher Empedocles, who claimed control over wind and rain (oh, and resurrection of the dead), or the Digest of Justinian, which exempted weather-magic from a general prohibition on magic because of its importance for farming. When Hipparchus correctly predicted rain, he was hailed as almost a god (Aelian 7.8), and Ovid describes the witch Dipsas as controlling storms (Amores 1.8). Orpheus, as magician and (like Zalmoxis-Sabazius) a Thracian, used his shamanic, necromantic powers (born of his underworld journey) for weather-magic and influenced generations of Roman writers, who modeled witches after his powers. The Roman king Numa created thunder (Ovid, Fasti 3.285-398), and according to several authors, the Romans held rituals to pray for rain. A special rock, the manalis lapis, supposedly would make rain. And so on and so forth. Thus, there existed a class of people at one point who performed rituals to cause rain.

In any event, far from being confirmation of what Vallée described as belief in “a separate region from whence these vessels sailed, and about the possibility for men and women to travel with them,” Agobard’s story of the ignorant French peasantry reflects a decadent phase of weather magic dating back probably to the origins of religion itself, and one hardly extinct even today. Recall that Texas governor Rick Perry held a mass gathering to pray for rain in 2011, and Pat Robertson claimed in 1985 to be able to control Hurricane Gloria’s path through prayer, though he humbly gave credit to God for having the good sense to listen to him.

Thus, in focusing on whether the French peasants’ story was literally true, Vallée and Coppens missed a fascinating glimpse into the way pagan weather magic persisted into the Christian Middle Ages.




* Pythonis consultor is a rather obscure term that others have (albeit tentatively) translated as consult a Pythoness, taking consultor for a rare verb form and Pythonis for the Pythia of Greek religion; but I think pythonis was meant in the generic as the familiar or spirit who possesses a soothsayer, not the specific Python whose fumes the Oracle of Delphi sniffed, and consultor as noun, not verb, in parallel with the other elements of the list. Thus, the phrase would literally read the spirit's counselor or a demon-possessed counselor, which I take to mean something like a soothsayer or a psychic.
11 Comments
Robin Swope
6/7/2013 08:50:55 am

Once again great research! Thanks for the hard work!

Reply
Tara Jordan
6/7/2013 11:26:52 am

Jason,I don't know if you ever heard of "Recentism".It is a particular school of historical revisionism.Most publications & materials are written in French or Russian.Recentism remains largely unknown from mainstream academia.but it is worth getting into it, it is even more crazy than the Ancient Aliens narratives.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
6/7/2013 02:17:33 pm

I hadn't heard of it. Thanks for mentioning it. I'll have to look it up.

Reply
Dave Lewis
6/7/2013 07:41:18 pm

Any chance we could finagle the Devil's School story to include Dr Frankenstein, the Wolfman, Paganini, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Holder?

I guess I could try my hand at writing a book including those elements but I fear that Jason would debunk it before it sold a million copies.

Dave the Debonair

Reply
Paul Cargile
6/8/2013 12:29:29 am

The League of Extraordinary Men II?

Reply
Tara Jordan
6/8/2013 09:32:45 am

I thought I needed to explain why I brought the issue of Recentism revisionism in this thread.According to Recentist historians,Charlemagne never existed.

Reply
John Amabile link
3/16/2018 08:28:45 pm

Macaulay wrote an idea called 'whig history.' Macaulay felt that as long as the Whig's ran England life gradually got better (technology, money, peace, population growth, etc). Western civilization holds this idea (though few remember macualay). There is an idea called 'presentism' where we project modern views on the past. Sometimes this is good, sometimes not, more often it is a structure for debate. A subject like Thomas Moore saying that 'one day people will think it strange that we (16th century English) did not educate girls' is an example of presentism. Presentism is a very reasonable analytical framework (people with 'present' values in historical times are held as heroic, such as abolitionists, suffragettes, or pro-democracy groups in western countries). Presentism is not about re-writing history, it is about using modern values to look at history. Perhaps Napoleon was good because he instituted free trade and abolished serfdom (modern values). Perhaps he was bad because he waged war on countries and appointed his relatives to their thrones (something bad, in modern western values). To re-write history as recentists are doing is absurd. There is more evidence that Charlemagne existed then there is that all of the recentists combined exist right now.

Reply
John McKay link
6/8/2013 03:54:59 pm

Tara are you referring to Anatoly Fomenko and that whole group who say history is much shorter than "they" tell us? Several of them say Charlemagne never existed. Fomenko is the most extreme in saying almost nothing before 1500 really happened, it's all a retelling and retelling of the greatness of Russia, which dates all the way back to 1200. Before that was the stone age.

Reply
Tara Jordan
6/8/2013 06:54:03 pm

John.Yes indeed.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
6/8/2013 11:24:40 pm

Oh, well in the case, I wrote an article about Fomenko about a decade ago that was published in Skeptic. You can find it in my Articles section under "Who Lost the Middle Ages."

Jim
10/14/2017 01:10:03 am

I know I'm a few years late but this article was excellent. I was listening to a podcast when the Charlemagne claim came up and I was a little incredulous. I began to research where this claim came from and quickly found you already did all my work for me. Thanks.

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      • Chariots of the Gods at 50
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    • Collection: The Lovecraft Legacy >
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          • W. Scott-Elliot >
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        • Fragments on Giants
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        • Old Mythology in New Apparel
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        • Devil Worship in France
        • Maspero's Review of Akhbar al-zaman
        • Arabic Names of Egyptian Kings
        • The Holy Grail as Lucifer's Crown Jewel
        • The Mutinous Sea
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        • Fabulous Zoology
        • The Origins of Talos
        • Mexican Mythology
        • Chinese Pyramids
        • Maqrizi's Names of the Pharaohs
      • Extreme History >
        • Roman Empire Hoax
        • America Known to the Ancients
        • American Antiquities
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        • England, the Remnant of Judah
        • Historical Chronology of the Mexicans
        • Maspero on the Predynastic Sphinx
        • Vestiges of the Mayas
        • Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel
        • Origins of the Egyptian People
        • The Secret Doctrine >
          • Volume 1: Cosmogenesis
          • Volume 2: Anthropogenesis
        • Phoenicians in America
        • The Electric Ark
        • Traces of European Influence
        • Prince Henry Sinclair
        • Pyramid Prophecies
        • Templars of Ancient Mexico
        • Chronology and the "Riddle of the Sphinx"
        • The Faith of Ancient Egypt
        • Remarkable Discoveries Within the Sphinx (Hoax)
        • Spirit of the Hour in Archaeology
        • Book of the Damned
        • Great Pyramid As Noah's Ark
        • The Shaver Mystery >
          • Lovecraft and the Deros
          • Richard Shaver's Proofs
    • Alien Encounters >
      • US Government Ancient Astronaut Files >
        • Fortean Society and Columbus
        • Inquiry into Shaver and Palmer
        • The Skyfort Document
        • Whirling Wheels
        • Denver Ancient Astronaut Lecture
        • Soviet Search for Lemuria
        • Visitors from Outer Space
        • Unidentified Flying Objects (Abstract)
        • "Flying Saucers"? They're a Myth
        • UFO Hypothesis Survival Questions
        • Air Force Academy UFO Textbook
        • The Condon Report on Ancient Astronauts
        • Atlantis Discovery Telegrams
        • Ancient Astronaut Society Telegram
        • Noah's Ark Cables
        • The Von Daniken Letter
        • CIA Psychic Probe of Ancient Mars
        • CIA Search for the Ark of the Covenant
        • Scott Wolter Lawsuit
        • UFOs in Ancient China
        • CIA Report on Noah's Ark
        • CIA Noah's Ark Memos
        • Congressional Ancient Aliens Testimony
        • Ancient Astronaut and Nibiru Email
        • Congressional Ancient Mars Hearing
        • House UFO Hearing
      • Ancient Extraterrestrials >
        • Premodern UFO Sightings
        • The Moon Hoax
        • Inhabitants of Other Planets
        • The Fall of the Sky
        • Blavatsky on Ancient Astronauts
        • The Stanzas of Dzyan (Hoax)
        • Aerolites and Religion
        • What Is Theosophy?
        • Plane of Ether
        • The Adepts from Venus
      • A Message from Mars
      • Saucer Mystery Solved?
      • Orville Wright on UFOs
      • Interdimensional Flying Saucers
      • Poltergeist UFOs
      • Flying Saucers Are Real
      • Report on UFOs
    • The Supernatural >
      • The Devils of Loudun
      • Sublime and Beautiful
      • Voltaire on Vampires
      • Demonology and Witchcraft
      • Thaumaturgia
      • Bulgarian Vampires
      • Religion and Evolution
      • Transylvanian Superstitions
      • Defining a Zombie
      • Dread of the Supernatural
      • Vampires
      • Werewolves and Vampires and Ghouls
      • Science and Fairy Stories
      • The Cursed Car
    • Classic Fiction >
      • Lucian's True History
      • Some Words with a Mummy
      • The Coming Race
      • King Solomon's Mines
      • An Inhabitant of Carcosa
      • The Xipéhuz
      • Lot No. 249
      • The Novel of the Black Seal
      • The Island of Doctor Moreau
      • Pharaoh's Curse
      • Edison's Conquest of Mars
      • The Lost Continent
      • Count Magnus
      • The Mysterious Stranger
      • The Wendigo
      • Sredni Vashtar
      • The Lost World
      • The Red One
      • H. P. Lovecraft >
        • Dagon
        • The Call of Cthulhu
        • History of the Necronomicon
        • At the Mountains of Madness
        • Lovecraft's Library in 1932
      • The Skeptical Poltergeist
      • The Corpse on the Grating
      • The Second Satellite
      • Queen of the Black Coast
      • A Martian Odyssey
    • Classic Genre Movies
    • Miscellaneous Documents >
      • The Balloon-Hoax
      • A Problem in Greek Ethics
      • The Migration of Symbols
      • The Gospel of Intensity
      • De Profundis
      • The Life and Death of Crown Prince Rudolf
      • The Bathtub Hoax
      • Crown Prince Rudolf's Letters
      • Position of Viking Women
      • Employment of Homosexuals
    • Free Classic Pseudohistory eBooks
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