In his interview with Skeptiko host Alex Tsakris last week, Ancient Aliens Debunked filmmaker Chris White discussed his beliefs about Noah’s ark, the Great Flood, and the beings that lived before the Flood, whom he considers to be supernatural beings from another dimension that interbred with humans and gave rise to a hybrid race, which the Flood destroyed. These are the Nephilim of Genesis 6, the “sons of God” (literally: sons of the gods) and their children, the “mighty me of old, the men of renown.” Here’s part of what he told Tsakris: …I think when you go back into anthropology you see a consistent profile of these beings. They’re summoned the same way; they’re consistently referred to as evil, deceptive, very, very intelligent, have an agenda of sorts, seek and accept worship. But I think the deceptive thing is really what comes so clear from Sumerians forward. These things will tell you what you want to hear. White also explained that myths and legends support his views about the universal nature of these beings since their description does not vary across time or cultures, though only Christian myth preserves the complete story. He explained that skeptics have failed to challenge the existence of such myths: Now, that’s the philosophical situation that we’re in and until somebody starts to stop saying that they don’t exist and admit that they do, then we can start having a rational discussion with skeptics and everybody else. But at this point we’re at really the Dark Ages of people owning up to it. Nobody’s challenged me on this. They’ve only said, “All you’ve cited on this were Christian Apologist sites and I can’t look into that because it’s a Christian Apologist site.” All right, I’ll take the bait. I will say that there is no consistent myth of super-intelligent evil beings who lie and deceive for personal gain. Nor is possession “always negative.” T. K. Oesterreich—a German philosophy professor and believer in the reality of possession and psychic powers—compiled a massive study of possession in 1921, Possession: Demoniacal and Other (English trans. 1930), which details in excruciating detail the many and varied forms of possession experienced by peoples across time and space, which differ greatly in their details. Oesterreich, however, saw possession as being remarkably consistent across time and space, agreeing fundamentally with the account given in Mark 5:2-10 (parallel to Matthew 8:28-34 and Luke 8:26-39). The evidence he marshaled, though, belies the fact that possession is not typically the thrashing, violent usurpation of the soul typified by The Exorcist. (Exorcist author William Peter Blatty used Oesterreich’s book in writing his novel.) In truth, leaving aside whether such possessions have objective reality outside the mind, these possessions are rarely “negative” but are frequently welcomed by the possessed and play an important social role in the cultures that experience them. To take but the most famous example: The Greek Oracle of Delphi experienced possession by the god Apollo, and this was considered a very good thing. It is primarily in the Christian tradition that possession is considered negative, because monotheistic faiths by definition view interactions with beings other than the singular god as threatening to that deity’s supremacy. In traditional cultures, possessions can be positive, negative, or neutral. Christians are welcome to view the oracles as negative and manipulative, but those who created, employed, and experienced them did not. But this isn’t really getting at the heart of the matter, is it? White’s primary claim is that the beings described in Genesis 6, the “sons of God” and their children, the “men of renown,” were real trans-dimensional beings and their hybrid children. Here is the relevant passage from Genesis (6:1-4), the entire of the Biblical narrative of them: And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. Non-literalist scholars read this as the Biblical authors’ acknowledgement of a hero mythos among the Jews parallel to that of the Babylonians and other Near Eastern peoples, including the Greeks. I’ve written about these before. The typical story is that the gods bore children to humans, who became semi-divine supermen. Obvious examples include Gilgamesh, Perseus, and Heracles. As I noted before, explications of this biblical passage by later Jewish authors, as in the Book of Giants, make explicit the parallel, counting Gilgamesh among the “hybrid” giants
Insofar as hybridization goes, there is again no consistency across cultures. Julius Caesar claimed Venus as his divine ancestor, while Native groups across the Americas speak of talking animals as their ancestors. Where gods are invoked as ancestral beings, they are the ancestors of still living groups and therefore the “hybrids” are what we would call “humans.” Among the Greeks, the Great Flood killed off people who were the offspring of the men Prometheus made from clay and the woman Hephaestus fashioned, Pandora. The age of the “hybrid” heroes was much later, and the ancient Greeks counted those “hybrids” among their direct ancestors. Sure, you could argue they got things in the wrong order, but then you’re rewriting myths to conform to a preconceived narrative. You might also try to squeeze the first man and Pandora into the “hybrid” mold, but to do so would condemn Adam and Eve to the same fate, since Adam was also made from clay and Eve fashioned later by (a) God/god(s). Among the Maya, the Flood killed off most of the men of wood—not hybrid god-creatures—and modern humans arose later. But even these wooden men still exist, as New World monkeys, and I doubt anyone would try to explain that monkeys are hybrids from another dimension. As for the claim that traces of the “Watchers” from the Book of Enoch can be found in world myths, I confess that I am at a loss. The Greeks had no evil “Watchers” on the order of those of the Book of Enoch, unless you count the Fates, who “watch” what people are doing but are not evil. The closest I can come are the Titans, the former race of gods who were condemned to Tartarus; their leader, Kronos, served as an oracle of the dead. (This was the view of occultist Richard Cavendish.) But this hardly seems the same, and at any rate the story is derived from Near Eastern models which also influenced the Enochian account, so they are not completely independent. Nor do the Norse have Watchers, though Odin had two ravens who told him everything that occurred on earth each day. I don’t think that the ravens were quite what White had in mind. Really, the only way to stretch the concept of Watchers to cover most mythologies is to adopt the idea of the early Church Fathers that pagan gods are themselves demons, so therefore all pagan mythologies are really demonologies of various Watchers and other infernal cliques. On the authority of St. Peter (Ephesians 2:2 with 6:12), Christians identify Satan with “the air” (in the KJV; “the unseen world” in other translations) and therefore demons with the air and other natural elements; from this, they see Watchers in pagan nature spirits, but I am at a loss to find any who answer to the Watchers of Enoch. The best I can do is suggest that White is referring to the widespread Near Eastern myth of the succession of the gods, in which an older race of gods is dispossessed by the younger and banished; but this is no means universal outside the Near East. Where there are similarities in otherwise unrelated myths, it is on the structural level, and these similarities need no demons or Watchers to explain them. White mentions ayahuasca, the hallucinogen that South Americans use to access the spirit world. As I have repeatedly discussed, David Lewis-Williams (in The Mind in the Cave and Inside the Neolithic Mind) has carefully examined how altered states of consciousness, acting on specific neurological pathways in the brain, produce identical “visions” across time and space, which are then filtered through the cultural expectations of the people seeing them. If you wish, like Graham Hancock (see his Supernatural), to believe that the brain is channeling another dimension, that is your business, but it doesn’t imply the flesh-and-blood existence of beings capable of hybridizing with human females.
42 Comments
Jesus myth
1/25/2013 01:05:03 pm
I'm curious as to what you think of Earl Doherty and the Christ-mythicist claims that Jesus never existed. It sounds to me to be of the ancient aliens variety but since you have some expertise in ancient history I wonder what you think. Do you believe in a historical Jesus or a mythical one?
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1/25/2013 01:41:49 pm
The evidence I've seen tells me there was a historical Jesus (the Romans, including Tacitus, knew of him), though obviously one who was much embellished into the god-man of modern myth.
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Thomas Whitmore
1/26/2013 02:53:44 am
Embellished by whom, Jason? Paul, who has arguably the highest 'Christology' of the writers of the New Testament, was almost certainly writing before the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, and there is a fragment of Mark's Gospel that dates into the 1st century AD. It's very hard to claim it was 'embellished' by anybody but the people who were writing about his life almost immediately after his death. And if some of them were contemporaries or interacted with contemporaries, that should tell you something. It's an extraordinary thing to have documents whose ran so close to the original events. 1/26/2013 04:03:24 am
Surely you won't tell me that all of the stories of Christ or Christian myths can be found in the canonical Gospels? The story as given in the Gospels was much embellished later, including but not limited to the extra-Biblical tale of Christ's harrowing of hell, an important part of medieval theology.
Thomas Whitmore
1/26/2013 04:41:37 am
No, but surely that was not what you were asserting. The point was that the conception of him as "god-man" is an early one, further and ridiculous elaborations notwithstanding. 1/26/2013 05:48:42 am
You're right; I wrote my initial response too quickly. There is a fine theological point between the attested belief that Christ was fully human but also the son of God and the later embellished version of a superhero. That said, we know that ancient writers were not terribly wedded to truth, and we have the testimony of Lysimachus in Plutarch that even ancient historians (let alone polemicists) embellished, rewrote, and fabricated material at will, during the lifetimes of those involved. Lysimachus listened to a book about himself and quipped, “Why and where was I then?”
terry the censor
2/6/2013 06:25:07 am
> it makes very little sense to undergo serious torture and execution for a knowing work of fiction. 1/25/2013 03:25:09 pm
An anthropologist I know says that any statement that starts "all cultures have" or "all cultures believe" is almost certainly bullshit. In the alternate history crowd, the most common is everyone has a flood myth. Except most of Sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for almost half of the cultures on Earth.
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Tara Jordan
1/25/2013 06:33:00 pm
Jason,I wonder why you never mentioned the Hyperborean mytho, which served as the founding stone for most Eastern & Western esoteric esoteric schools. The Ancient Aliens - Ancient Gods synopses are also directly influenced by the Hyperborean mytho.It is found throughout classical & modern esoterism, mysticism & metaphysics. Many Science fiction writers like Lovecraft & Robert Charroux also relied on it ( Erik Von Daniken who plagiarized much of earlier writings on ancient astronaut race by Robert Charroux )
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1/25/2013 10:37:50 pm
Because my blog was long enough and Hyperborea isn't in the Bible!
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Mila
1/25/2013 09:28:06 pm
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1/25/2013 10:40:05 pm
If you seriously believe that entities from other dimensions have an objective reality and enter into human bodies, there isn't much I could possibly say to you.
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Mila
1/26/2013 08:30:36 am
LOL! It were you who tried to argue that not all possession were negative. Well, you may reject the work of famous occultists and magicians who openly talked about demons. You may reject the fact that necromancy was well known in ancient Greece, for example. I am not going to waste my time to quote ancient historians but let’s look at C. Jung and S. Freud.
Mila
1/26/2013 08:46:28 am
It is the end of my previous post. 1/26/2013 09:06:04 am
That's your definition of magic, following Western conventions. Other societies do not see it that way.
Mila
1/26/2013 09:59:26 am
1/26/2013 10:06:03 am
All of those are Western authors. Traditional societies (i.e. the animistic cultures of the Amazon, sub-Saharan Africa, etc.) have a radically different view.
Mila
1/26/2013 10:50:18 am
Mila
1/26/2013 05:02:13 pm
Your blog is quite inspiring I must say. From Emanuel Swedenborg to Jan Potocki, a Polish nobleman, ethnologist, linguist, traveler, known for his novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. I watched his movie yesterday and I started reading his novel. Interestingly enough, it is the same theme of erotic dream with two Persian women as in Swedenborg’s Journals of Dreams. I don’t know if Potocki was influenced by Swedenborg. Dominique Triaire wrobe about J. Potocki but I haven’t read it. Manuscript touches on all things supernatural. The Cabbala, geomancy, and magic in and far between.
Tom
1/25/2013 11:01:10 pm
"In traditional cultures, possessions can be positive, negative, or neutral. Christians are welcome to view the oracles as negative and manipulative, but those who created, employed, and experienced them did not."
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tubby
1/26/2013 03:08:39 am
I think what they're trying to say is that even if the Greeks thought possession by Apollo was a good or neutral thing that it in 'fact' was not, and that Apollo did not jump into the room with his oracle and give his advice and orders directly rather than through possession because he was unable to.
Tom
1/26/2013 11:37:31 am
Yes, that was the way I'd interpreted his/her ramblings as well. Seems they've already accepted that there are real entities from other dimensions and occultists with magical powers (as well as the evil 'LOL!' demon)
tubby
1/26/2013 03:14:10 pm
I thought believing in a selection of additional supernatural beings came with the deity territory. All those visions of Marys, angles and saints come to mind.
Mila
1/26/2013 03:51:51 pm
I guess you were speaking about yourself and your problems with understanding. Projection can be painful. lol I am not going to waste my time to answer it as I have written a few posts but you refer to my first post. BTW, Apollo and Delphic tripod was a joke. Too bad that you can’t even understand a joke.
Tom
1/26/2013 09:49:29 pm
Everything after your first post was irrelevantly block quoted from Wikipedia with a few words about what you find interesting about it. No argument, no point, just some rambling about erotic dreams and occultist magic philosophy with lots of 'LOL!' hardly worthy to construct any counter-arguments from.
Mila
2/21/2013 03:18:52 am
Thomas Whitmore
1/26/2013 03:25:11 am
I'd also like to comment, Jason, that the translation you're using is probably not the most optimal. The interpretation of the beings referred to in the passage as being 'giants' belongs to the tradition of the Septuagint, rather than the earliest Hebrew sources, not subject to the filtering of Alexandrian scholars who were familiar with Greek and Hebrew traditions. It is probably more faithful to the original interpretation to refer to them as 'angels' and so forth.
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1/26/2013 03:53:57 am
This is a point of contention, and a controversy I know all about. Mike Heiser has on his website a very long and detailed discussion of why the original text best supports "giants" rather than "Fallen Ones," and I found that argument to be compelling.
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Thomas Whitmore
1/26/2013 04:16:38 am
Not to be a bother, but if you accept Heiser's thesis, you must abandon a parallel between Near Eastern myth and Genesis, in that Heiser's argument depends entirely on his translation of "ha nachash" meaning 'shiny one' and not 'serpent'. Leaving aside the validity of that interpretation, that deprives one of drawing a parallel between Jewish Garden of Eden myth in having a serpent present in the garden and the serpent which steals Gilgamesh's herb. 1/26/2013 04:26:27 am
I was referring to his discussion of the origins of the term "nephilim," which I don't recall having anything to do with the serpent of Genesis, or Gilgamesh's serpent.
Thomas Whitmore
1/26/2013 04:40:13 am
Heiser's entire interpretation of how the term means 'giants' depends on them being the descendents of the "ha nachash". Their physical characteristics and so forth being derivative not of serpants (how else could they be giants?) but something else entirely. He supports the meaning of the term in large part because of how he interprets "ha nachash". The relevance is therein: if "ha nachash" means "shiny one" as he says, it can't be a serpent, and your (again repeated) claim of antecedence must take a corresponding hit. If it doesn't mean "ha nachash" then 'giants' isn't an appropriate translation. 1/26/2013 06:45:39 am
Heiser's argument was entirely linguistic and has nothing to do with shiny ones or snakes. As you can see, his paper on the subject says nothing about any of that: http://www.michaelsheiser.com/nephilim.pdf
Jeff
1/28/2013 06:02:22 am
Hello Jason: I was quite surprised to read that Chris White in his interview with Skeptiko host Alex Tsakris put forth this bizarre idea about trans-dimensional race of hybrid beings? After watching the Chris White film Ancient Aliens Debunked I figured he was grounded in reality. What gives with him? His movie was absolutely great but is he just partially bonked or what?
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1/28/2013 06:27:08 am
I obviously can't speak for Chris White, who in my albeit limited conversations with him has always been nothing but kind, polite, and intellectually engaged. That said, he is a devout Christian and interprets evidence in that light, and is therefore looking for rationalizations that would support a literal interpretation of Genesis 6:1-4. In that sense, he seems to view the ancient astronaut theory as a rival to Biblical literalism.
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Jeff
1/29/2013 04:54:43 am
#1 Personally I think Chris White is trying too hard - Ha!
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1/29/2013 11:45:31 am
Thank you for your interest in my books. My only two books that are directly about ancient astronauts are my first book, "The Cult of Alien Gods" (2005), and my "Critical Companion to Ancient Aliens" (2012). However, if you want a (free!) overview, you can read online and/or download my free ebook "Origin of the Space Gods."
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Jeff
1/30/2013 04:06:44 am
Ordered the "The Cult of Alien Gods" from Amazon - it should be a good read on my upcoming trip to Singapore.
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Jeff
1/30/2013 04:07:19 am
Ordered the "The Cult of Alien Gods" from Amazon - it should be a good read on my upcoming trip to Singapore.
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Jeff
1/30/2013 04:07:44 am
Ordered the "The Cult of Alien Gods" from Amazon - it should be a good read on my upcoming trip to Singapore.
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Jeff
1/30/2013 04:08:14 am
Ordered the "The Cult of Alien Gods" from Amazon - it should be a good read on my upcoming trip to Singapore.
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Jeff
1/30/2013 04:08:52 am
I ordered the "The Cult of Alien Gods" from Amazon - it should be a good read on my upcoming trip to Singapore.
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jeff
1/30/2013 04:40:00 am
Sorry for the duplicates - the site kept telling me I had a spelling error on the Logical Fantasies website and that I had to resend it.
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