Josiah Priest vs. Constantine Rafinesque: An Early Fringe History vs. Science Feud

​Last week, Garry Nolan, the team geneticist for Tom DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy of Science, published results of a DNA test conducted on the so-called “Atacama Humanoid,” a mummified twentieth century stillbirth from the Atacama region of Chile. Ufologists like Steven Greer had promoted the tiny corpse as a potential extraterrestrial for the past fifteen years, but the new study found that the body was fully human, though suffering from genetic diseases. Now the New York Times reports that the Chilean government has condemned Nolan’s study as unethical and is investigating whether the body was illegally exhumed and exported in violation of grave robbing and heritage laws. Nolan denied knowing that the body had been stolen, though it’s sort of hard to imagine how else a human corpse of recent vintage ends up on the UFO sideshow circuit. Few people will their bodies—much less their kids’ bodies—to ufology. That said, the Chilean government only started to care about the corpse when it was proved human; for the fifteen years UFO believer declared it alien, the government took no action. The lesson is pretty clear: Pretend bodies belong to space aliens, and you can do what you want with them. There might just be a market for black market “alien” kidneys, too…

​Last weekend I share with you an excerpt from the book I am working on about the mound builder myth. After reading some of the feedback on the chapter, I decided to see if I could start working on the book again. I sent off some additional queries to literary agents, which resulted in some quick rejections. One even responded on Sunday afternoon to ensure that I need not wait more than 24 hours for said rejection. In the meantime, I tried to pick up where I left off, and that’s when I remembered why I had stopped writing. I had hit a brick wall.
 
The main body of the book begins in the 1700s with colonial encounters with Native American mounds, a story I framed around Thomas Jefferson, the first to excavate a mound, and Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur, Jefferson’s friend and the French consul, who also happened to be a notorious fantasist. Subsequent to that, I proceed forward in time, framing each new period around some key figures to help keep a very complicated story relatively straightforward. For example, a subsequent section frames the debate over the origin of the mounds around the rivalry between Caleb Atwater and Constantine Rafinesque, who fought viciously and publicly over whether the mounds were the work of Hindus (Atwater) or Native Americans (Rafinesque), and another contrasts Joseph Smith’s use of the mound builder myth in Mormonism with Andrew Jackson’s use of it to support Indian Removal.
 
But having gotten all the way to 1833 using this method, I hit a wall. You see, at that time the most important work on the mounds was American Antiquities, a 400-page doorstop of a book by Albany resident Josiah Priest in which the unscrupulous author attempted to demonstrate that the mounds were not the work on Native Americans but rather of a lost white race whom the Natives had exterminated in their violent reign of evil. Oh, and that America was also where Noah lived after the Ark landed here, and the Vikings fought a war against Native Americans in the Finger Lakes, specifically near Auburn, my hometown. Don’t laugh—in the sequel he argued that Blacks were genetically inferior and condemned by God to be slaves in America because God had cursed Noah’s Black son Ham here in the U.S. of A. Priest’s American Antiquities is a monument to pseudohistory, and it is the template and model for all that would come after, instantly familiar to anyone who has read Fingerprints of the Gods or any of the 1960s mystery-mongering books.
 
Here is where the problem occurs. There is almost nothing one can say about Josiah Priest. You’d have thought that I’d have an easier time of it. I live in Albany, less than two miles from Priest’s old house, and the New York State Library has the largest collection of his works still extant. But Priest left virtually nothing in terms of letters, journals, memoranda, testimonials, etc. His friends and family said almost nothing about him that anyone thought fit to record. For a man who was so influential in shaping (wrong) beliefs about the prehistory of America, he is himself almost a void. It’s very difficult to frame a chapter around someone whose entire life story, in the most elaborate telling I could find, warranted a paragraph or two. Specifically, he is the subject of two academic articles. The first, by Winthrop Duncan, was published the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society in 1935. It is primarily a bibliography of Priest’s books, with a couple of paragraphs about his life attached. The second, by De Villo Sloan, was published in the Journal of Popular Culture in 2003 and makes no bones about the fact that all of the biographical details are drawn from Duncan’s article.
 
So, what was I to do? I couldn’t find an entry point that could fold Priest into my narrative with the same level of detail and incident as other important figures who left much more of a paper trail. The chapter sat there unwritten for a long time.
 
When I tried again this week, I finally found a piece of information that would let me frame the story the right way. It turns out that Priest got into a scuffle with Constantine Rafinesque, who had developed his own bizarre mound theory in the meantime, when Rafinesque had come here to Albany to give a lecture right at the same time that the second edition of American Antiquities came off the printing press. Rafinesque was horrified to discover that Priest had pirated a number of his articles and stuck them in his book without permission—and more importantly, without compensation—and Priest had painted Rafinesque in a poor light, all but accusing him of being a Satanist who was trying to “overturn the Scriptures.” This gave me the entry point I needed. I decided to frame the story around Rafinesque’s anger. Earlier in the book I describe his rivalry with Caleb Atwater, which degenerated into vicious accusations and the ruination of Rafinesque’s career. Here, in miniature, he made the same mistakes again.
 
Here’s a very rough draft of how I am approaching the incident:

Rafinesque, however, was not done with Priest. After a roundabout tour of upstate New York and ten days in New York City, he returned to Philadelphia in September 1833. Rafinesque’s rage had grown, and it apparently remained with him for a long time after. On January 5, 1835, Rafinesque composed a lengthy letter to Priest, which began with a facetious thanks to the author: “I have lately read the Second Edition of your Work on American Antiquities. I ought to be very grateful to you for the handsome manner in which you have mentioned and made use of some of my labors on American history; although I perceive that you have distorted a few of my remarks, to suit your own views.” He spoke of Priest’s arguments as “learned dreams” and pretended to omit the “ridicule and blame” he might heap upon the work.
 
But the heart of the letter was a challenge that Rafinesque offered, doubtless to secure a measure of publicity for himself on the back of the more successful work that built on his own: “Therefore I offer you a fair chance by wishing to debate with you the matter either privately or in print, or in public, as you may deem best. If you are not afraid to sustain in public the popular theory which you adopt or modify, I tender you my assistance by offering to debate in public with you, any matter relating to American History & Antiquities, &c, before any public audience in Albany, Troy, or Lansingburgh, at any place you may select or procure, and at any time during next summer.”
 
To “help” Priest to prepare for the debate, he offered a list of forty errors in American Antiquities, ranging from (1) the true location of the Garden of Eden to (9) whether the wooly mammoth boarded Noah’s Ark to (23) whether all Black people descended from Ham and (31) whether the Egyptians taught mummification to the ancient Andean peoples. Rafinesque likely thought these errors to be matters of science, but far too many—at least 24 of the forty—revolved around the interpretation of the Bible, and the question of whether the Mosaic account of history might correctly be located in the continental United States. Rafinesque denied this last point, but, like Priest, accepted that the words of Moses, “provided we translate them word for word correctly,” are inerrant. He also, in an effort to humiliate Priest, whom he knew to be uneducated, demanded that their discourse on Biblical truths refer only to the Hebrew text, “because Moses did not speak English to the Jews.”
 
Evidently satisfied that he had created a spectacle that would lay Priest low, he mailed the letter to the Daily Whig of Troy, N.Y., only a few miles from Priest’s home in Albany. The publisher, James M. Stevenson, received the letter that week and rushed it into print, placing it in the paper’s January 13 edition. That day, Amos Eaton sent a letter of support that appeared in the next day’s paper, reminding Troy residents of the “amusing eccentricity” of Rafinesque’s 1833 lecture and promising education and amusement should the lecture occur.
 
Priest read Rafinesque’s letter eleven days after it was published, when the Troy newspaper had made its way down the Hudson to Albany. The letter did not move Priest into an unwinnable debate, citing a scheduling conflict that rendered the entire summer of 1836 “not compatible with my engagements,” but it did prompt Priest to compose an immediate response to what he apparently saw as an affront to both his faith and his honor. But Priest did not let his annoyance show, and instead he attempted to take the high road, claiming it a great “honor” that no less an authority that Rafinesque had confirmed that at least fifteen facts in his book were true, “a compliment unlooked for,” and which he judged an aid to the 17,000 in sales he had already made. But the complimentary air was only bait to lead the reader to the more biting lines. Priest demanded to know by what right Rafinesque declared him uneducated, “for how do you know what I have or have not read?” And he fell back on the essential unknowability of history, claiming every man had the right to his own opinion about the past, adding that Rafinesque was wrong to take his book as a factual history, for his aim was not factual accuracy but “to arouse the public attention to the fascinating subject of American Antiquities,” an aim justified entirely by the number of sales such an effort might produce. “I have been compelled to wander widely in the field of conjecture,” he admitted, but he noted that Rafinesque was himself guilty of wild conjecture on all things Biblical. He issued a challenge to Rafinesque: If he knows for certain all the supposed errors in the English edition of the Bible, he should make them public and “acquire to himself the title of benefactor of mankind.” Homing in on Rafinesque’s key error of predicating his criticisms on the Mosaic creation, Priest cleverly concluded his letter by alleging that the whole of American Antiquities was an explication of the Mosaic account of creation and therefore the only point of true debate is whether Rafinesque would oppose the Word of God. He turned the argument back on Rafinesque: “But in my present state of feeling and condition of information, I cannot subscribe to opinions which go to unhinge, and overturn all the foundations to which the morality of the christian world is at present moored, and consent to float up with you into the interminable ocean of, I know not what; based on your better knowledge of the Hebrew which to me appears quite incredible, unless we are to suppose that all ages have agreed to keep up the delusion of the Bible errors, as it now reads, and that you are the only man who is honest and courageous enough to face the immense billows of the popular belief, and also to pour contempt on the talent, the research and the honesty of all other men who have not made these discoveries in the Hebrew Bible with yourself.”
 
He finished by attacking Rafinesque’s considerable ego, promising that he had no problem with Rafinesque’s attempt to ascertain the truth, but took exception to his implication that a mere writer like Priest ought not dare to question his betters, “as if your sentiments are not to be molested.” He declared such thoughts to be unpatriotic—“such illiberality is not the manner of writers in free America, nor of its free press”—alluding in a subtle way to Rafinesque’s European origins, an air of hated foreignness that had followed him for decades.
 
Rafinesque, who sought to argue facts, once again found himself bested by emotion, rhetoric, and an unscrupulous self-promoter’s facile appeals to nationalism and to faith.

​There was a little good news for Rafinesque, however. Priest realized he could be sued, so he dropped Rafinesque’s articles from subsequent editions of American Antiquities, and he got out of the ancient mysteries business. He turned his literary talents to new subjects. Thereafter, he would write about why Blacks were racially inferior and why Native Americans were evil, bloodthirsty monsters. I need not point out that these propositions were hardly disconnected from his belief in a lost white race of mound builders.
 
This brings me to my final subject: American Antiquities is one of the most important fringe history books ever written, and I’d love to add it to my Library. However, I haven’t the time or the patience to transcribe (or proofread the OCR for) the text. I see that someone has transcribed about one-third of the book on the Oliver Cowdery website, but that still leaves 100,000 words to go. If anyone has good ideas for how we might get the book transcribed to make the text available online, I’d be interested to hear.