Did Stone Age Freemasons Encode Cult Secrets in Gobekli Tepe, the Irish Language, and Spanish Plays?

It’s been many years since I regularly visited Graham Hancock’s website, but I try to check in now and then to see the articles that his network of contributors put up. They are often a good barometer of what’s going to be hot in fringe history at any given time. I’ve been busy and haven’t been by in a couple of months, so I have only now seen a bizarre piece by Trebha Cooper that ran in late June. If I read the piece correctly, Cooper is arguing that the Neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe directly influenced Celtic Gaul and medieval France due to a secret cult of Freemasons. Somebody call Scott Wolter!

That said, it was a bit difficult to follow Cooper’s argument because of the volume of grammar, spelling, and syntax errors in the obviously unedited piece. Cooper seems to say that there is a connection between Göbekli Tepe, built around 9,000-7,000 BCE and Graham Hancock’s proposed date for the lost civilization at 10,500 BCE. It isn’t quite clear, but Cooper seems to have confused the late 10th millennium BCE (late 9000s BCE), with 10,000 BCE, like the way many confused the nineteenth century and the 1900s.

Cooper then makes a rapid-fire series of ungrammatical claims, given here with the original spelling:

That there was a catastrope, there can be no doubt, under the mask of Tirso de Molina, Francis Bacon wrote the play Tamar, now those aware of the book by Henri Boudet called "The True Celtic Language." In it he says the key is the Irish language....Now with Tamar, we get Ar Tam, this means " Our Trauma" we are suffering from the repeated trauma of wars and the lie of Heaven and Hell, compounded by the tragedy of comet impact, so it is not surprising that this site was buried to preserve it....If you need proof of this it is preserved in "The Revelations of St John," this is not about the future but a graffic account of that cometery impact...

Try to parse that: First, she asserts a catastrophe, probably a comet impact, ended the Neolithic, for which there is no evidence. Then she offers a conspiracy theory involving Francis Bacon (1561-1626) secretly authoring the plays of Tirso de Molina (1579-1648)—in Spanish! This conspiracy is apparently unique to Cooper; Bacon must have been exhausted after also allegedly authoring all of Shakespeare’s plays as well, as Ignatius Donnelly—that early proponent of a lost Ice Age civilization—once claimed. Tirso de Molina wrote more than 300 plays! The play in question here seems to be La Venganza de Tamar, a Biblical play about the rape of David’s daughter Tamar by his son Ammon (2 Samuel 13). 

Cooper cares nothing about the play itself except for the potential to look for an Irish anagram in the title of a Spanish play about Hebrew characters—an anagram allegedly inspired by a quack French abbot’s early nineteenth century book of Celtic material that later became associated with Rennes-Le-Château because the abbot knew the abbot over at Rennes-Le-Château. I fail, however, to see any connection between La Venganza de Tamar and the burial of Göbekli Tepe 10,000 years earlier, even if you accept the bizarre idea that the Biblical figure Tamar represents trauma in Irish.

Cooper finishes this bizarre set of conspiracies with the claim that all of this is somehow proved by the book of Revelation, which “really” described an ancient comet, presumably the star Wormwood (8:10-11), rather than a future event. That’s a lot of conspiracies and fringe claims to pack into a few sentences!

The meat of the article, such as it is, claims that Göbekli Tepe and Celtic France may be connected because both carved thin, stylized hands on their stone human figures using the principle of “looks like; therefore, is.” Somehow this is also connected to the Lost Tribes of Israel—though without explanation of how—as well as the megalithic yard of Alexander Thom.

i love it when the evidence is in stone and it goes to prove Alexander Thom correct in having measured the stone circles of the U.K. Ireland and Brittany came to the conclusion that there had to have been a central school of initiation....I have found that place and how it connects with modern masonry and goes to prove the 1717 date a complete lie...

Yes, the Freemasons! They apparently date back to the Stone Age and are part of a wide-ranging global cult devoted to (and I wish I were making this up) the worship of the alphabet (!) as the origins of the universe and consciousness (!!)—proved by Cooper with a lengthy quotation taken from the press materials for the 2011 book The Alphabet That Changed the World by Stan Tenen (North Atlantic Books).

The article concludes with the claim that Jerusalem is really an “Irish” word and that it originates in “Eru-Sa-Lehm,” Irish words for “Ireland My Reading.” Despite this making no sense, Cooper concludes that it proves that before Noah’s Flood (but of course!) Ireland included everything from the current island to the Levant, including the “British Atlantis” of Doggerland. Is there anything Cooper is not able to fit into an overarching conspiracy?

So, to recap: Creationism, alphabet mysticism, Celtic supremacism, Lost Tribes, Freemasons, secret playwrights, catastrophism, and Bible prophecy—and all in just a few sentences! It is truly amazing, and made more so by the fact that Graham Hancock (or an assistant) read and approved this crazy quilt of conspiracies to appear as a published article on his website—unreadable syntax, poor spelling, and all! It shows, though, how the acceptance of one fringe claim can quickly lead to an ever-expanding universe of fringe claims, piling one atop the other with little to no evidence to support them outside of other fringe claims.