EUHEMRISM- Mythology as Symbolically Glossed History

Well, we each can read it any which way we like but I try to "read" mythology the way it wants to be read - "So-and-So, begat whoever." " 'Mr. A" did this to 'Miss B'." If one puts aside the fantastic it reads like a simple narrative of events."

Modern mythographers are too extreme for me. It amazes me how 1000's of ancient cultures could "invent" similar stories and then pawn them off on to their children as their traditional history. So many lies? I believe the "believed" mythology to be history. It is only modern times that we "tagged" these oral traditions as "myths." If we all could go back to the days of the earliest Greeks, vedic people, Chinese, etc., and ask them what they thought of their past, we would get the stories we have today. Would they say their myths are mental "art forms" and "archetypes" and "conscious interpretations of unconscious communications?" I would think by the fact that many ancient patriarchs claimed descent from certain "gods" tells us that there is more historicity to mythology than we want to believe.

Something tells the modern mind to disallow the historical in favor of some psychological aspect- they fear and avoid something. That something is exactly what we have in our research of 3000+ pages. It's "unbelievable" to them and so they prefer to believe in some other "fantastic" theory more unbelievable than mythology. It is another mythology itself but this time purely fictional. At least ancient mythology has some consistency over modern evolutionary theory. Darwinianism, Anthropology, and modern Geological theory hate a literal Genesis 10.

 

Welcome, and I must say your presentation is ambitious.

What are you basing your cultural ties on? Religion / mythology alone? Genetics? Linguistics? Other historical scholarship (Rev Alexander Hislop comes to mind)? Archeology?

I got through the bulk of your associations before my eyes glazed over, but after seeing many obvious connections and many not so obvious connections, I failed to see the Aboriginal Australians mentioned. It is possible I simply missed them, but genetically they are related with Homo Denisova, and considering there is a well known (to anthropologists) careful burial at Lake Mungo dated to 50K yo +/- (quite early, long before the Noahic Flood), and likely isolated as so many Pacific Islanders were until Portuguese and English sailors visited within the past 500 years, I can also see how they rightly may fall outside of the parameters of your study.

On the other hand, I see a perhaps unintentional overlooking of the "lost tribes" of the Hebrews. I cannot help but feel the "Dan" of your study is not the Hebrew tribe of Dan, and if it is then the familial association is way off. And the glaring omission, again I may have simply missed it, of the remaining lost tribes: Zebulon (I always liked that name), Asher, Reuben, (half tribes of) Ephraim and Manasseh, Gad, Naphtali, Simeon, and Issachar. Dan is held separate as that tribe was banished earlier. Benjamin is not included because they fell under the protection of Judah, and Levi was split between the protection of Judah and the Northern Tribes...but traditionally this is the "10 Lost Tribes" of Israel - per Biblical mythos.

So to be certain you are not making the same mistake of "making claims from silence" that modern scholarship makes...according to you...how are you drawing these cultural associations? What methodology are you using?

Genographic Project - Wikipedia

Evolution of Human Languages - Wikipedia

Mitochondrial Eve - Wikipedia

Y-chromosomal Adam - Wikipedia

Human migration - Wikipedia

Just me noting a few of the "claims from silence," for the record, as an armchair anthropologist.

 

[PS. If you want and ask me, send email, I WILL forward 2-3 volumes of Pilkey’s books in PDF “FREE” for your reading… maybe all 7 volumes. ]

WeirdVideos2008@yahoo.com

Hello,l my new friend. It's RARE to even get a reply nowadays =- so many steeped in bias, alternate theories, and the list is too lo0ng to chart them. What they have not done, and cannot do, is what we have done, well, my professor, Dr. John Pilkey. And that is, to synthesize a proto-history of man, not only according to material archaeology and anthropological “truths” but to INCLUDE mythographic testimony from all parts of the world.

My professor never got into debunking or criticizing too much his opponents, but I might be able to speak for him since he cannot do it anymore: Sad but true, he left himself one of very few students to carry the cross - a stroke wiped his memory, which sent me to the floor of complete befuddlement. WHY!??? God,…

Let me answer you letter my sections the best I can.

A will admit ahead of time I DO NOT HAVE ALL THE ANSWERS. They reside in his brain but only accessible now in his books, of which I am the editor and annotator of.


Well, within “religious contexts” much of our oral tradition has been preserved through “family and national “stories that seem to date back before writing began. We mythographers take such as having great historical value. Unlike modern theories, we see the primary oldest gods and such as real humans back in some “Golden Age” as the ancients themselves saw them. Call them gods or what-not, they seem more human in nature than not. Strip them of the fancies we know are fancies -Zeus lived in the sky, whatever - and we then can extract potential historical data. This is historical Mythography.

Our base of ties is of the Antiquarians such as Bochart, Bryant, George Faber, and the list mentioned in our Introduction. Hislop was a later last on the list. Other basic premises are Monogenesis, a global (or local) Flood, 8 superhuman people survived and genetically relinquished the earth; also, modern dating systems are flawed; Christ is not a liar when He talked about NOAH as a real being; sense He did not criticize the idea of a Flood, we take there was one; geology supports one according to how you look at the data; Other foundations consist of ethnology, diffusion, migration theories - sem to support the Y-DNA and mtDNA genetic studies; semiotics; and pretty much all the classical sciences, including mathematical archetypes in nature, man, the mind, and science, language, and more.


Pilkey can fill in the areas not obvious. But, I do not know how long it will take you to read his stuff. I do hope you are a younger man than I. My hopes now are to find a few that will carry this forward to times I know not.

Aboriginal Australians;

From what I have read in the papers and secular materials, the Aust. Abs seem to genetically derive from the people of southern India, Dravidians. (?) They got there not by boat but by the land bridge between Sri Lanka the old Tamil Empire and Australia before it sank leaving the island of Ceylon. If Homo Deinisovian, then the Denisonvians are not as Apely old as the evolutionists say.


We also question the datings of the anti-Biblicists secular humanists. We like to establish a “relative” chronology of events BEFORE we allow scientific (mis) dating to force our synthesis and mythography to say otherwise.


Long before the Flood: I can also see how they rightly may fall outside of the parameters of your study.


Before you jump on this boat to denying ancient testimony, keep an open mind. Keep in mind, someone is wrong. And whoever is wrong will determain your future perceptions as well as your hopes. As to the Lost tribes of Israel and the name Dan, it may well bve that the Israelites played off the names of the older patriarchs as they design-patterned their generation. A good study could be tracing the names such as Dan and seeing if the name can be tracked to pre-Abrahamic times.

I know Ebla Tablets use a lot of Hebrew-sounding Semitic names and such, and they pre-dated Abraham some few 100’s of years, and more years before Jacob/Israel. The name of the Danube (Dan) river may date older than we think.

How about studying the times “before” the 10 tribes disappeared over the Caucasus? Who was there before them? Japhethites, Pelasgians, etc.

So to be certain you are not making the same mistake of "making claims from silence" that modern scholarship makes...according to you...how are you drawing these cultural associations? What methodology are you using?


Secular humanist anthropologists and evolutionists argue from silence as well, but it seems their conclusions are violating human testimony - they deny the history handed down by human ancestors. You must figure why every nationality on earth would have down pure lies and fictions, “mythologies” that also seem to be universally scattered over the earth throughout every ancient and prehistoric culture telling their children to carry the lie orally transmitted to their children, and give some good practical reason for such misinformation?


By allowing mytho-historical oral tradition to dictate interpretive guidelines, rather than modern science, a larger fuller synthesis is obtained. Now, the choir is to look into the rubble, and documented archaeological materials and SEE if it all matches up. After an extensive chronology of events is formed, then we start adding absolute dates.


May the most extensive compilation of data harmoniously synthesized win the history contest.


No myth on earth testifies to Darwinian monkey origins for mankind. And for evolutionists to pawn off their “belief” system as “fact” without proving the facts and filling the missing link gaps genetically, is a con game. They do this AND MUST at the same time DECREDIT human testimony.


On the other hand, though we have much still to prove materially, we at least include the mythographic accounts while pooling the material data - we favor Literary-Archaeology but do not toss out ALL the opponent's data - just the date settings they use, and the monkey theory connection.


The other temporary policy is, stop using “history” as defined as “fact” based, for now, and define it as it is in the dictionaries - “a story.”


As for as my personal concerns are, I could care less about what happened millions of years ago. All I know is Jesus Christ gave an account of a FLOOD, and so did the Sumerians, who, unfortunately, glossed it over and displaced it as their local flood. The Sumerians don’t actually use the language “antediluvian” but more the idea of “pre-flood.” It’s the Babylonians contemporary with old Israel before Christ (like Berossos) who played with the numbers 10 figures before the flood. The Sumerian King List has EIGHT if I remember. It’s a bit confusing.

Besides that, the Sumerian flood is a big local flood, probably the Black Sea's over-flow memory of the flood during and after the Tower of Babel. E.g. part of the cause of the destruction of Babel and of course its obliteration.

I had a secularist Professor of ancient history reply to me about this. he said there is no proof of a Noahic Flood. I replied, maybe we haven't dug deep enough? No matter, a "local" flood will do if we keep the blatant statement that ALL mammals on land, all mankind perished. take what flood you want, if we don't believe all humans perished but these EIGHT, then why bother reading anything other than hominin history?
It's weird that I have to live with the phenomenon of ALl the world running off into Man from primates that talk of no hope in an afterlife (religion?) and Genesis 10 studies that are for now only backed by Mythography? Yet, much historical-based data is scattered throughout the synthesis.

I would suggest you read all of John's materials before formulating your lifetime conclusion. i am also a student archaeologist/anthropologist/historian, but from a Mythographer's point of view - I call it "Literary Archaeology"(Ethnographer?) study of the origin of the ethnic groups "according to Genesis 10."
ROSS

 

With all due respect, this is blatant spam. I would much rather discuss with you.

It's not a matter of "steeped in bias," it is a matter of using various tools to synchronize. I don't discount "mythographic testimony," nor do I accord it inordinate weight.

This is sad to hear. I have lost a scholarly friend or two over the years myself.

This is good to read, I too do not claim to have all the answers, and I've been known to challenge the establishment scholarship from time to time.

With due respect, you are conflating early history with prehistory. Since a great deal of my personal focus is on prehistory leading up to the Agricultural Revolution, which is to my way of thinking the basis of the "Adam and Eve" story of Genesis, I do think you are out of your depth here.

Samuel Bochart (30 May 1599 – 16 May 1667) was a French Protestant biblical scholar
"Bryant" is so vague as to be meaningless, there is no scholar or historian listed born prior to 1953...hardly antiquarian or predating Hislop.
And now we get to the meat of the matter:
George Stanley Faber (often written G. S. Faber; 25 October 1773 – 27 January 1854) was an Anglican theologian and prolific author.

I'm not a fan of Darby:

In my opinion, pre-trib rapture and dispensationalism have done more harm to the Christian faith than any overt enemy could possibly wage.

Alexander Hislop (1807 - 13 March 1865) was a Free Church of Scotland minister known for his criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church.
(If my Catholic friends would please look away for a moment...)
He wrote several books, his most famous being The Two Babylons: Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife. This book, initially published in 1853 as a pamphlet, was greatly revised[citation needed] and expanded and released as a book in 1858.

So I would say your champion Faber was contemporary with Hislop. And while your guy does the best he can comparing myths, Hislop was busy comparing languages *and* myths.

Of course, I don't stake my studies on a singular scholar, another that has influenced my pursuits is Sir James George FrazerOM FRS FRSE FBA[1] (/ˈfreɪzər/; 1 January 1854 – 7 May 1941) was a Scottish social anthropologist and folklorist[3] influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion.[4] His most famous work, The Golden Bough (1890), documents and details the similarities among magical and religious beliefs around the world. Frazer posited that human belief progressed through three stages: primitive magic, replaced by religion, in turn replaced by science.

Others to influence my thoughts on the matter include William James and Carl Jung.

Wow, where to begin.

-Monogenesis: The Proto-Human language (also Proto-Sapiens, Proto-World) is the hypothetical direct genetic predecessor of all the world's spoken languages. It would not be ancestral to sign languages. The concept is speculative and not amenable to analysis in historical linguistics. It presupposes a monogenetic origin of language, i.e. the derivation of all natural languages from a single origin, presumably at some point of the Middle Paleolithic. -wiki, emphasis mine Around here someplace is a long thread I started years ago exploring the idea of a root language. Ah yes, here it is: And the Whole Earth Was of One Language | Interfaith forums

-Global Flood is simply not possible, not within the lifetime of Homo, at this point something like 2.5 Million years. Demonstrated conclusively by Glenn Morton, using well known geology, states that at best the Flood of Noah could only have been a localized event. Creation Science Articles, Why the Flood is not Global (oldearth.org)

-Superhuman? Why would they need to be superhuman?

-You do realize "relinquish" means "surrender, give up," right? As written you have stated "genetically surrendered the earth." I presume you mean something like "replenish." Though MtDNA (Eve) and Y-Chromosomal Adam plus "bottleneck with founder effect" pretty well rule out the traditional Flood in that regard, at least in terms of time.

-Noah: The earliest written flood myth is found in the Mesopotamian Epic of Atrahasis and Epic of Gilgamesh texts. I have known for many years there are multiple versions of the Noah story among cultures even older than Judaism. I haven't committed them all to memory or slogged out the details, but suffice to say if so many made a point to recognize this individual then there is quite likely some basis in fact.

-The flaws in dating systems are largely understood and accounted for.

-I think with "semiotics; and pretty much all the classical sciences, including mathematical archetypes in nature, man, the mind, and science, language, and more" you are grasping at straws in an effort to give your position more sway than it truly has, none of what I've seen so far supports this statement.

Since the "evolutionists" don't say that about Denisovans, I can only conclude that you (prejudicially?) suppose they do without actually looking into what they do believe about the matter.

Quite the contrary. That is prejudicing your study, even before you begin. That is not scholarship, that is propaganda.

That door swings both ways, you know?

I think you are grasping at straws here.

Indeed, how about it? Would they not then become known as "Caucasians?"

No they don't. You would like to silence them so you can make this statement true, but it simply isn't a truthful statement.

And you must figure out why prehistoric humanity universally, everywhere they went, painted animals on cave walls...not where they lived, but DEEP in the dark recesses, and what psychological implications that has to mental cognition in the human brain.

You imply "modern science" does not account for these things, when modern anthropology, among other scientific disciplines, do in fact account for these things.

Indeed. Not looking so good for your side right now.

I have other matters to attend to, I will forego the rest for now, that does not in any way, shape or form imply I am in agreement, this is simply getting tedious.

It isn't that your study has no merit, but it is too narrowly focused to the exclusion of matters that are uncomfortable but no less factually true.

 

PS. that Bryant mentioned is "Jacob Bryant - New Analysis of Mythology"...

Wow, I must say I have a new cool friend now. I apologize for my lacking explanations. The professor could do 1000 times better, so... I suggest you read through his materials as I am sure I haven't accurately explained him. I will let him explain himself in his writings. I agree I am a very opinionated satirist. You mentioned anthropology considers mythology? Yes, but they STOP when we say "ZEUS is SHEM," son of Noah, the Thor of Teutonic tradition, and etc. This synchronic comparison is only one in all the Genesis 10 figures available, including the "im" and "ites," ethnic types named after patriarchs.

With this in mind, and with the global mythological cognates compared, a mythographer can compose a "history." What I mean is, "a history completely controlled by the minds who transmitted the myths", if we leave out all the prior guidelines of the empiricists and just stick with what the myths are saying, and of course, interpret the poetic symbolism. We then see a pattern appear and then a "picture." Now, whether all the extra Genesis 10 conventional sciences agree or not, I must bow out - it's too much. I don't know if Carb-14 is accurate or not, and really don't care. Sorry, personally, I don't care what science says AT THE MOMENT, for it has a track record of being wrong and changing its premises.

In my relativistic mind, the material world may be the myth and the mythologies speak of reality. As I say, you are very good and we do have much in common - a short life, hope or no hope, some knowledge but not omniscience, and lots of blank cave walls to scribble our animals on - I noticed one in France (?) where the animals are shown with movement "multi-face" side views stair-stepped with divider negative spaces like they were trying to show animation. Another clay pot, (?) has 4 sides, each sectioned off with foliage curtains with the same animal in each stage set, but each one making a move in jumping. If you rotate it and blink at the same time alternately, you can watch it "jump." Now, this is something I can relate to as a retired Animator cartoonist from Hollywood.

So, I guess, I approach prehistoric studies more from an artist's point of view and not as a scientist. Well, plus,... (cough), though I like to think so, I am NOT the most intelligent brain alive, even with a 180 IQ. I still feel like a triple blue ribbon maroon compared to the Professor. I am very sure, if you start reading him, and continue for the next 40 years like myself, he will give you the best "run for your money.' Whether I contribute anything new to his synthesis or not, may not really matter. I am important (I at least feel important) in curating and promoting his works - which he now knows nothing about.

Go to these places and LOOK ME UP 360-421-7195 by name and see the larger papers on Pilkey... https://www.academia.edu/...... AND https://archive.org/index.php
send email to me for free large PDFS. weirdvideos dot com

 

[1]
PS. Sorry for the scanning glitches- words sometimes run together.]

The Apologetics of Noahic Science


Polygenetic Secularism

To those who actually believe it and understand its implications, the story of Noah is a devastating weapon against secularistic thought. It undermines the secular synthesis of modern times in five ways:

(1) by precedenting a threat of judgmental world annihilation,
(2) by reducing the powers of world civilization to unstable principles of charismatic inspiration,
(3) by reducing world history to a single, symbolically reinforced intrigue,
(4) by reinterpreting political and intellectual freedom as divinely appointed privilege, and
(5) by indicting all nations and cultures of unatoned high crimes against their own formative principles of life.
The story of Noah is the very “scourge of Nergal,”* a separatistic baptism of intellect.

[* Nergal (Peleg) is the (southern) Mesopotamian god of death, pestilence and plague, and Lord of the Underworld. Nergal represents a very particular aspect of death, inflicted death, for Nergal is also the god of plague, pestilence and warfare. Nergal's warlike qualities compare to those of Ninurta and Zababa. As a war god, Nergal accompanies the king into battle, delivering death to the enemy. Indeed, Nergal controls a variety of demons and evil forces, most notoriously the ilū sebettu, the "Seven Gods" who are particularly prominent in the myth of Erra as agents of death and destruction. Nergal's earliest incarnation is in the Early Dynastic Period as Meslamtaea, the god of the underworld whose main cult centre was in the city of Kutha (Lambert 1973: 356). From the Old Babylonian Period onwards, Nergal was syncretized with Erra, a Semitic death god (Wiggermann 1998-2001d: 217). Son of Enlil (Canaan, aka Cush) and Ninlil or Belet-ili

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/amgg/listofdeities/nergal/index.html ]


In the day that it stands, much secular logic will fall. Accordingly modern scholars have developed an effective system of defences against it. For the lack of a better term, these defences can be called “polygenesis,” the doctrine of the many origins of Mankind. In reality, polygenesis is not so much a doctrine or even a theory as it is a gentleman’s agreement about how to study antiquity. The leading scruple is never to give undue importance to anyone document or tradition but to distribute the power to define antiquity among many sources in the same way that a democratic electorate distributes power. Essentially, this policy means the avoidance of despotism or centralized power in doctrine. Biblical fundamentalism lies outside the intellectual mainstream because it gives so much importance to a single set of documents from a single culture.

Polygenesis is a specialized synonym for empiricism, as it relates to the study of antiquity. Empiricism means the preference for observation above interpretation in science. To avoid the dangers of premature interpretation, an empiricist keeps gathering more evidence; and to avoid the crisis of interpretation, he makes the gathering of evidence an end in itself. Such policies are a kind of conservative wisdom. However, if premature interpretation is foolhardy, excessive empirical policy is scientific cowardice, a shirking of intellectual responsibility. Cowardice is always rooted in faithlessness; wherever men honestly believe the Bible, they have the power to interpret experience and do so.

The polygenetic approach to antiquity was worked out during the course of the nineteenth century in step with the decline of Bryant’s school of Noahic study. For British writers such as Charles Darwin and Frederick Farrar, the chief stimulus toward polygenesis was simple culture shock through the contrast between civilized Europeans and ultra-primitives such as the Tierra del Fuegans or Bushmen. Darwin, in The Voyage of the Beagle, confessed his astonishment at such primitives:

“One’s mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks could our progenitors have been men like these? .... I do not believe it is possible to describe or paint the difference between savage and civilized man.”[(1)Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, ed. Leonard Engel(Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1962), p. 501.]


Darwin’s question was pregnant with the doctrine of evolution; but his assertion, with polygenesis. Either the prevailing conception of “our progenitors” must be changed; or these savages must be disinherited from the European genetic community. Either we descend from brutal savages; or such savages derive from a source distinct from our own. Victorian racists such as John Crawfurd adopted the second view; and Crawfurd’s harsh brand of polygenesis reached fruition in Waddell’s twentieth-century Nazism. The humanitarian alternative lay in the type of Darwinism espoused by the clergyman Frederick Farrar, a Victorian prototype of the humane Darwinian status quo achieved after the fall of the Nazis in 1945. Farrar read his definitive “Aptitudes of Races” to the Ethnological Society of London on March 27, 1866.

Farrar’s argument began with an analysis of Mankind into civilized, semi-civilized, and savage races. These he called, “three distinct strata or stages of humanity!” (2) The word “stages” implied evolution; and Farrar added, “The only scientific choice appears to be between the doctrine of development, on the one hand, or polygenismon the other.” (2) Frederick W. Farrar, “Aptitudes of Races,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society 5 (March 27, 1866), 115-116.


Although Darwin’s principle of natural selection tends to be polygenetic in casual operation, Farrar distinguished between evolution and polygenism, on humanitarian grounds, by contrasting the harsh racism of Crawfurd with the humble idea that we have all descended from the same apes. Farrar’s paper concluded on anote of Darwinian-styled charity: “We believe that the lowest of them are the eldest brothers of our race .... I do not require the notion of a physical or genetic unity in a motive to philanthropy.”[(3) Ibid., 126.]


In a sense, Farrar was merely echoing the Apostolic commission to preach the Gospel “to every creature,” without having to trace the pedigrees of the Chinese or Teutons or Bushmen to Adam or Noah. Darwinian evangelicals exist; and their logic must rest with Farrar’s conviction that we “do not require a notion of a physical or genetic unity in a motive” to evangelistic zeal. Furthermore, it is always possible to trace all existing races from the same primate species, giving primitive and civilized nations the abstract letter of genetic unity, as some anthropologists have done since 1945.

Farrar’s statement was a key precedent because it combined humanitarian sentiment with an agnostic attitude toward origins. These are the key components of modern polygenesis, especially throughout the Christian world since 1945. The development of a humanitarian version of Darwinism has been extremely important to Christians who compromise with the evolutionary viewpoint because such Christians are at least dimly aware of the fascist uses of “survival of the fittest.” Robert E. D. Clark, in Darwin: Before and After, makes a convincing case that the whole pattern of late Victorian bloodlust reflected in the two World Wars can be traced to the logic of Darwinian evolution! Christian Darwinians and liberal humanists have joined in a common cause to refute Clark by showing that the “doctrine of development” is either kindly in itself or can be rendered kindly by the right sort of emphasis.

In reality, neither Darwinism nor its Creationist alternative is a kindly doctrine in its present ideological function. Experiments in humanitarian Darwinism obscure the real issue. Despite the truth of Clark’s thesis, both the destructive and humanitarian aspects of Darwinism are secondary. Its chief function, especially since 1945,has been to buttress the defences of secularism against the vast destructive power of biblical truth and justice. The God who creates also destroys; and the apostate civilization which denies His creative power must feel the full weight of this other, destructive power.

[Clark writes, “Mass murder? Well, and why not? It was only a matter of the working of evolution. It went to prove that Europeans were the fittest to survive.” Robert E. D. Clark, Darwin: Before and After (Chicago: Moody, 1967), p. 112.]


To appreciate such destructive power, one must interpret its target, the secular synthesis as held together by the evolutionary philosophy. Darwinism could not have supplanted vital Christianity if it lacked the characteristic powers of a post-Christian religion. Its most powerful spiritual resource is civilization itself. The classic Victorian progress myth, sourced in Thomas Babington Macau1ey’s interpretation of British economic history and fortified by Darwin, is little more than implicit worship of civilization. Because the powers of civilization are visible and manifestly excellent, the faithless instinctively worship them; and such worship is more reasonable than some suppose. The powers of civilization derive from Noah’s theocracy.

Relative to Noah, world civilization is a sacred thing; and those who give their lives, conscientiously, to the arts of civilization can sense the power of God in them. To the secularist, this principle means that men and women can labor and plan, temporarily, with a high sense of purpose and hope without any explicit devotion to the God of religion. In other words, civilization, like nature and art, operates as an implicit “means of grace.” The refined secularists of the Soviet Union or of the post-Christian Western universities surround themselves with beauty, discipline, and high social ideals. They engage in the same sorts of utopian exercises as the sons of Noah and meet with successes glorious in themselves and useful to Mankind.

Because God overrules their work, they can sense His presence in all of their best efforts. They, like the rulers of nations, serve God through the Noahic medium of “human government”; and their neglect of Judaeo-Christian religion is quite understandable. Advanced physics, the space program, and medical research all testify to the grandeur of Noahic enterprise, the will to build and maintain a progressive human cosmos.

The Abrahamic, Mosaic, and Christian dispensations succeeded the Noahic in order to satisfy needs beyond the limitations of human civilization. If the glory of civilization is manifest, its spiritual limitations should be painfully obvious to any sensitive conscience. As Thomas Carlyle put it, all the commissions and committees are inadequate “to make one shoeblack happy.” Darwinian secularism is a desperate attempt to prove Carlyle wrong: to conceive of the universe in a way which will enable the powers of civilization to standalone as an adequate substitute for the eternal God of religion.

To accomplish this end, the secular philosophy must furnish a substitute for eternity within range of civilized power: hence the strategic importance of high chronology to the Darwinian theory of origins. To dispute chronology with a Darwinian is like blaspheming against the idea of eternity. Secularists lead spiritual lives; and their engagement with the idea of immense oceans of time is a spiritual fact. Darwinian chronology has become a vital cultural metaphor for eternity. Once eternity is redefined as an immensity of natural time, the metaphor expands to include every branch of theology.

The Victorian apostates who fostered the doctrine of development knew Christianity well. What is more, they worked from an authoritative series of analogies which God has incorporated into the physical universe. Apes certainly resemble men for the same reason that all animals resemble men to a greater or lesser degree: the form of the human body is a divine archetype for the visible definition of life. The Pauline “second heaven” of outer space serves as a convenient substitute for the “third heaven” of the angels, who yield, in turn, to superhuman “space invaders,” products of parallel evolution. Natural selection answers to elective grace; survival of the fittest, to individual redemption; mutation, to regeneration; the progress of civilization, to growth in grace; and an eschatology of superhuman evolution, to the metaphysics of the resurrection body.

So potent are these analogies, that the general erosion of Christian idealism has weakened their general appeal. The high enthusiasm for parallel evolution expressed in the classic Hollywood science fiction films of 1951-56 has grown steadily weaker because secularists are less and less aware of the residual Christian concept of superhuman angels. Of course, these enthusiasms can be revived at any moment; but secularists can sense that by reviving enthusiasm for parallel evolution they run the risk of reviving serious, metaphysical conceptions of angels. Because such conceptions are vital to Christian logic, the secularists have more to gain by riveting their attention on past evolution than by returning to sensational images of future evolution and provoking the masses to revived Christianity.

Hence the strategic secular importance of the unimaginative neutrality of polygenesis. Modern Darwinism is no longer an insurgent intellectual cause but an established, conservative consensus, featuring a placid ideal of powerless origination, a kind of comforting bee-swarm of haphazard causes operative over endless millennia of droning “steady state” punctuated by occasional beestings of genetic mutation. Without pressing the image of human descent from apes or forcing the premise that God does not exist, secularists have won a wide following among Christian academics by circulating the simple polygenetic idea that, “We may never know the origin of the Chinese.” Preying on the conservative instinct for unimaginative bathos, they have successfully reduced the name of Noah to a conceptual nullity.

 

[2] continued...


The Epic of Gilgamesh as Secular Archetype - Commentary

If the story of Noah is such a potent antidote to secularism, the Epic of Gilgamesh, by undermining the logical force of that story, stands as an archetype of the secular worldview. The epic replaces the reality of a Noahic cosmos with the standard secularistic ideal of an existing urban civilization without beginning and without end. The Noah figure Ziusudra is the ancestor of neither Gilgamesh nor anyone else. The hero Gilgamesh’s motivation owes as much to human pathos as to any divine principle of empowerment; his achievements are altogether cryptic; the story features a hoodwinked and debauched farm boy; the actual theme is the glorification of a city world without end; and the world of the epic is in control of politicians, prostitutes, and bullies.

The secret of corrupt power is the same principle that operates in polygenesis: anonymity of origin and vagueness of purpose. Christianity is a holy faith because, among other things, Christ’s origin is so firmly established and His purposes in life so clearly defined.(5)

[(5) The genealogies of Matthew 1 and Luke 3 speak for themselves. Typical of Christ’s candor in stating his purpose in life is John6:38-39, where He defines this purpose as introducing others to the resurrection of the just: concrete eternal life.]


Factual mysteries exist in Christianity but the historical and moral context is clearly established. In the secular city, nothing except the city itself possesses any clarity of definition. Characteristically, the prostitutes, pimps, and hoodlums have forgotten their parents and are known by their function rather than by morally coherent career goals. Although the Erech of the Epic of Gilgamesh is not quite criminal Chicago or London, its prototypical tendency toward “polygenetic” anonymity is quite apparent.

After a few introductory remarks on the unnamed hero, the epic opens as a hymn of praise to the city itself:


“Of ramparted Uruk the wall he built,
Of hallowed Eanna, the pure sanctuary.
Behold its outer wall, whose cornice is like copper.
Peer at the inner wall, which none can equal”
(I, i, 11. 9-12).(6)
[(6) Passages from the Epic of Gilgamesh are from Pritchard, The Ancient Near East, First Princeton Paperback Edition, pp. 40-75.]


Noahic Mankind was certainly proud of architecture, with a pride intense enough to be featured in the climactic story of the Tower of Babel, as in the mighty pyramids of Egypt. Because of the overwhelming need to create civilization after the Flood, this pride was understandable and blameless in itself. The evil of it lay in what was missing: an historical context such as the one offered in Genesis 9-11.

In the absence of such a context, the city became a mythic absolute in abstraction from any sort of moral purpose. The opening section on the glory of Erech concludes with an exception that proves the rule, a note of contextual origin:


“Go up and walk on the walls of Uruk,
Inspect the base terrace, examine the brickwork:
ls not its brickwork of burnt brick?
Did not the Seven Sages lay its foundations?”
(ll. 18-19).


Instead of an explanation, the “Seven Sages” are a bit of allusive folklore. We cannot blame the author for depending on allusion, a common practice in literature. Nevertheless, allusion of this kind points up the interplay between ancient and modern secularism. Allusive folklore is the concrete substance of polygenesis, every culture claiming its own quaint traditions, none of which is supposed to possess international scope or historical authority. To the standard secularist, the “Seven Sages” are an ancient phrase and mental image, not seven anthropomorphic beings engaged in historical enterprise. The dainty alliteration of the English translation makes the point; the “Seven Sages” are no less decorative than the “cornice like copper.”

The next section of the epic, the urbanization of the wildman Enkidu, expresses an archetypal understanding of the difference between farm boys and city slickers, the one class in communion with nature, the other attached to the will of the city through union with its prostitutes. Gilgamesh instructs his agent, the “hunter,” to introduce Enkidu to a prostitute and thus subdue him to the urban way of life, reducing the threat he poses to the city:


“Go, my hunter, take with thee a harlot-lass.
When he waters the beasts at the watering-place,
She shall pull off her clothing, laying bare her ripeness.
As soon as he sees her, he will draw near to her.
Reject him will his beasts that grew up on his steppe!”
(I, iii, 11. 41-45).


The episode celebrates the transition from the Nomadic to the Imperial Age. Gilgamesh’s Eanna regime commenced some fifty years after the Tower of Babel and consolidated the urban and imperial ideal of Mesopotamia in the Erech-Aratta [Isfahan?, and/or Jiroft?] War. We have seen that the Sumerian King list refuses to acknowledge a nomadic age between the Flood and epoch of First Kish. The Enkidu episode reveals the spiritual climate surrounding this suppression of the nomadic heritage.

What sort of magic does prostitution exercise in creating and maintaining the secular city? If marriage is a metaphysical absolute, prostitutes are married to all of their patrons. Their careers are the physical embodiment of polygenesis. Every marriage, like that of Adam and Eve, is an origin; and the prostitute’s anonymous swarm of marriages embodies the polygenist’s vague swarm of origins. In Noahic times, prostitution represented a corrupt variation of polygamy. Noah’s polygamous goal was to generate a millennial plenitude of nations; his enemies managed to replace polygamy with prostitution and reduced the gentile world to a spiritual condition both “common and unclean.” Marriages, in particular, degenerated into sex in general; nations lost their status as explicit fractions of a universal community; and history lapsed from a single, purposeful intrigue into the casual rote variations of prostitutes’ memoirs.

The apocalyptic phrase “Harlot of Baby1on” is an ap characterization of a polygenetic world order governed by conflicting beliefs and agnostic science. The pride of Erech, the Eanna temple, was devoted to the goddess Inanna, Semitic Eshtar, whom the iconoclastic Hislop singled out as prototype of the Harlot of Babylon.

One of Hislop’s chief insights concerning the Inanna-Eshtar-Astartefigure is that she was a goddess of urbanization, the mythic source of walled cities:

“These testimonies in regard to Astarte, or the Syrian goddess, being, in one aspect, Semiramis, are quite decisive. The name Astarte, as applied to her, has reference to her as being Rhea or Cybele, the tower-bearing goddess, the first, as Ovid says, that ‘made towers in cities’; for we find from Layard that in the Syrian temple of Hierapolis, ‘she was represented standing on a lion crowned with towers.’ ”
[(7 Hislop, The Two Babylons, p. 307.]


Unlike Hislop, we have interpreted Inanna as a very great and legitimate power in Noah’s original order. Her divine son was not, in fact, Nimrod but the great god Marduk, the Messianic heir Salah, Lugalbanda of Erech, father of Gilgamesh and of the next heir Eber, Meskiaggasher, founder of Erech. As granddaughter of Shem and mother of the Messianic line below her father Arphaxad-I, Inannabelongs to sacred history as well as profane. In dealing with her reputation as a prostitute, we must consider the possibility of calumny or obscure political allegory. In her, as in her mighty son Salah, apocalyptic streams of good and evil meet at the source.

[(8) Typical of the idealistic side of the Inanna cult are the seven hymns to the goddess translated in Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer, Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth (New York:Harper and Row, 1983), pp. 93-110.]


The Epic of Gilgamesh boldly asserts Inanna’s reputation as a strumpet at the foundation of the Gutanu/Gutanna/Bull/(heavenly) or “Bull of Heaven” episode. We have suggested that the heroic slayings of Huwawa and Gutanu/Gutanna/Bull/(heavenly) symbolized the two campaigns of the Mesopotamian-Iranianwar, a bizarre affair in which Sumerian legend identified Inanna as the chief goddess of both antagonistic powers, Mesopotamian Erechand Iranian Aratta [Isfahan?, and/or Jiroft?].

The epic captures the same ambivalence, picturing Inanna, goddess of the temple of Erech, as creator of the Gutanu/Gutanna/Bull/(heavenly),” one of the enemy factions of Iran. Beyond all this, we have identified Inanna with the Celtic war goddess Medb, comprehensive ruler of the Iranian order constructed by Noah’s family around her birthplace at Aratta [Isfahan, and/or Jiroft]. In accusing Inanna of prostitution, the Sumerian epic serves to discredit the Iranian cause in much the same way that the Babylonian epic discredits the same cause through its portrait of the Red Matriarch as Tiamat, goddess of chaos.

If prostitution lies at the cornerstone of the secularization of Noahic Mankind, the Gutanu/Gutanna/Bull/(heavenly) episode is a key to the spiritual destiny of the gentiles. At the outset of Tablet VI, Inanna invites Gilgamesh to become her husband:


“Thou shalt be my husband and I will be thy wife.
I will harness for thee a chariot of lapis and gold,
Whose wheels are gold and whose horns are brass.”
(ll. 9-ll).


Because chariot wheels dominate the imagery of the Medb panel, Inanna’s offer is tantamount to the possession of Iran, a land destined to bear Gilgamesh’s Hebrew name Elam. The epic apparently means that Inanna’s influence over Iran remained great enough to have appeased the Iranian forces through a royal marriage to Gilgamesh.

In a fit of monogamous indignation, the hero rejects the offer by questioning the goddess’ value as a loyal wife in view of six former husbands, all of whom she has ruined: “Tammuz, the lover of thy youth,” “the dappled shepherd-bird,” “a lion,” “a stallion,” “the keeper of the herd,” and “Ishullanu, thy father’s gardener” (11.46-64). Because of its combined zoomorphic and anthropomorphic membership, the list reads like a variation of one of the Gundestrup interior panels. The details match none of the panels; but the totalof six suggests the six points of Inanna’s own Medb panel, the Iranian empire at issue.

What is not so clear is the justice of Gilgamesh’s case against Inanna’s polygamous [‘polyandrous’] career. If the four female survivors of the Flood practiced systematic polyandry in order to generate nations, how did Inanna’s career differ from theirs? According to the letter of the epic, she was unable to dispute the charges against her. She complains to the god Anu, not that Gilgamesh’s claims are false, but that he has offended her by naming them:


“My father, Gilgamesh has heaped insults on me!
Gilgamesh has recounted my stinking deeds,
My stench and my foulness” (11. 83-85).


Neither she nor Anu disputes that her deeds are, in fact, “stinking.” The answer to our question lies in the polygenetic spirit of the whole work. Inanna’s polyandry can find no excuse in the duty of generating nations because, in Sumerian tradition, neither gods, demigods, kings, nor ordinary men generate nations. The true polygenist cannot conceptualize the origin of anything; that is, he prefers not to and, therefore, does not. As far as the epic is concerned, Inanna’s amours remain fruitless; and her cultic status as mistress of “pleasure-lasses and temple-harlots” remains unexplained, a traditional given. We are still faced with the question of how an acceptable principle of polygamy had degenerated into harlotry.

?[(9) Epic of Gilgamesh, VI, 1. 93.]


In the light of Kramer’s The Sacred Marriage Rite, the issue of Inanna’s morality seems irrelevant because she represents an idealization of sexual power among a people innocently preoccupied with physical wealth: “grain-laden fields, vegetable-rich gardens, bulging stalls and sheepfolds, milk, cream, and cheese in profusion.” (10)

[(10) Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sacred Marriage Rite (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1969), pp. 56-57.


From our fundamentalist understanding of the universal Flood and the need to regenerate the human race, the Sumerian obsession with procreation and productivity was perfectly understandable. As long as Inanna’s cult can be viewed in such a light, there is no moral issue. But the Gutanu/Gutanna/Bull/(heavenly) episode does, in fact, raise an explicit issue of sexual morality. In it, we have passed from Kramer’s world of innocent pastoralism to the worlds of epic and tragedy, where sexual misconduct connotes treason. Noah’s family did not merely survive and procreate their kind; they created nations and experienced the peculiar ethics of high political intrigue.

In biblical tradition, the focal point of sexual irregularity is Noah’s son Ham, who began his political career as Enmebaraggesi of Kishand concluded it as Ur Nammu of Ur. Ham’s regime of Third Urholds the key to the sacred marriage rite and to its political and spiritual correlatives. The dynasty claimed an all-star cast from thegreat rebel faction: Ur Nammu, Ham; Shulgi, Ham’s cursed heirCanaan; Shu-Sin, the “Mighty Hunter” Nimrod; and Amar-Sin, Jebus, the great god Zeus. Shulgi, as it happens, was the first fully documented “husband” of the sacred marriage rite as political ritual.

Reasoning from the standard, leisurely evolutionary chronology, Kramer explains that, at some unknown point in the third millennium, “the king of Sumer, whoever he may have been, had to become the husband of Inanna, as a kind of Dumuzi incarnate.”[(11) Ibid pp. 62-63]

Dumuzi was the patriarch Togarmah, Noah’s son by the White Matriarch and father of the Sumerian race. As Ham’s son by the White Matriarch, Canaan was Dumuzi’s logical counterpart, especially if we recognize Ham’s desire to supplant Noah as first father of postdiluvian Mankind. The regime of Third Ur commenced after Noah’s death. Whether or not the practice of the sacred marriage rite originated at Third Ur is beside the point because it arose from Ham’s primitive motive to supplant Noah. Coming into his own at latter-day Ur, Ham made Canaan the definitive “Dumuzi incarnate,” spouse of the goddess Inanna, who would confirm Canaan’s legitimacy despite all the curses that Hebrew tradition could summon against him:

“ln battle I am your leader, in combat I am your helpmate,
In the assembly I am your champion,
On the road I am your life.
You, the chosen shepherd of the holy house,
You, the sustainer of An’s great shrine,
In all ways you are fit.”
[(12) Ibid., pp. 64.]


The voice of Inanna in this crux passage carries the weight of the “Ka,” even the Christian Paraclete, a point made repeatedly by Hislop in regard to the cult of Astarte. Through Ham’s logic, femininity replaced the “Ka” altogether. Enkidu of the Epic of Gilgamesh lay with a prostitute because sexual contact was supposed to have opened his eyes to the powers which distinguish urban civilization from rural savagery. Ham had experienced the great revolution of the dispensation of human government and realized, in the depth of his soul, the spiritual difference between antediluvian and postdiluvian life. He and Canaan lacked the faith to attribute this great revolution to the will of an invisible God. Instead, they found what seemed to them the ultimate explanation of civilized glory in the distinctive sexual privileges of Noah’s early postdiluvian family. Polygamy degenerated into prostitution when sexual privilege became a medium of free and casual power hunger. Secular world civilization is built on such a foundation of prostitution, polygenetic amnesia, and an endless process of political manipulation and improvisation. The explicit Noahic charter is gone; instinctive power hunger remains.


The Texture of Modern Apologetics

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century triggered the climax of the present age of the Church both for good and evil. It took effect in three ways:
(1) by placing the Bible and the privilege of interpreting biblical doctrine in the hands of Christian laymen;
(2) by promoting liberty of conscience and, therefore, general liberalism, as an ethical ideal; and
(3) by giving scientific prestige to empirical investigation, rather than tradition, in determining issues of fact and truth.

The Protestant phase of the Church Age climaxed two centuries later in the Great Awakening and Evangelical movement of eighteenth-century Britain and colonial America. Evangelicals modified all three of the Protestant tendencies: (1) by achieving anew catholic consensus through key salvation doctrines too humane and popular to be neglected or opposed by the Protestant world;(2) by redirecting Protestant moral energy from liberty of conscience to missionary zeal; and (3) by re-focusing empirical thought on the concrete phenomenon of New Birth and on the casual growth of Church population. In short, evangelicals treated the sixteenth-century revolution as a means to specific Gospel ends rather than a liberal end in itself.

The Great Awakening, however, coincided with the Enlightenment, the foundational movement toward secularistic apostasy throughout Christendom. John Wesley and Voltaire were contemporaries. The Enlightemnent simply meant the Reformation stripped of its religious premises, subject matter, and motivation. Because of the variety of religious opinions which resulted from the Protestant ideal of lay Bible study, “enlightened” Deists concluded that the Bible was too specific in contents and too peculiar in its impact on diverse readers to inspire religious consensus. Ignoring the evangelical answer, they rejected peculiar Bible doctrine in favor of the general truths of natural revelation. These Deists now treated liberty of conscience as a humanitarian moral absolute superior to any purely religious consideration. In fact, they put religion on the defensive to prove its humanitarian value. Trends in science followed suit. By the early nineteenth century, “enlightened” minds of the logical positivist kind began to treat methodologies for gathering factas more authoritative than any conclusions drawn by these or any other methods. Secularists now began to conceive of science, not as knowledge, but as an endless quest for knowledge, that is, a set of learned rituals for confirming agnosticism.

In sum, the Enlightenment implied three principles: a distrust of religious orthodoxy based on a fear of being misled by doubtful specifics; an absolute humanism, the ethics of humanity for humanity’s sake; and a curiously self-contradictory agnostic science. In religious terms, these principles meant a distrust of the Bible, a distaste for the doctrine of hell (as inhumane), and a commitment to be “ever learning and never coming to the knowledge of the truth.” No matter what the vicissitudes of philosophical or religious opinion, these three principles remain the foundation of secular learned consensus.

Because these principles are neutral and colorless in themselves, they required concrete embodiment and received it from the Victorian thinkers Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud. Marxism, Darwinism, and Freudianism represent more than the specifics ubject matters and issues of Das Kapital, Origin of Species, or The Ego and the Id. Marx and Lenin gave the secular principle of humanity for humanity’s sake a concrete revolutionary image by identifying the cause of humanity with the economic interests of a specific social class. Freud took a lesson from Shakespeare’s character Queen Gertrude of Hamlet and applied to the souls of millions the “flattering unction” that human psychology, rather than spiritual power, accounts for the affairs of men. By explaining the spiritual away, Freud confirmed the “enlightened” distrust of religion by dismissing transcendental symbolism as earthy dream imagery, colorful and compelling but devoid of objective authority. Darwinism completed the process by anchoring the secular ideal of the endless quest in a colorful theory of origins. Darwinism buttressed Freudianism (and largely inspired it) by redefining animal species as casual variations rather than complete manifestations of God’s creative ideas, thus establishing the Freudian premise of purely subjective symbolism.

Some Christians misunderstand this last point. In fact, Darwinism can be traced back to certain conceptual deficiencies in the Christian theology of Europe. In their zeal to reject pagan idolatry, Christians have adopted the mistaken view that the form of the human body has nothing to do with the “image of God” in man.” (13) This conventional theological notion seems intellectually sophisticated but has led directly to the conceptual triumph of Darwinism. The “image of God” is supposed to represent man’s “invisible part,” that is, the intangible faculties of conscience, reason, and the like. No one disputes that the “image of God” refers to conscience and reason; but the view that this image has nothing to do with the body is profoundly erroneous, even blasphemous, because it implies that God, in the Creation, failed to harmonize the form of the body with these faculties.

[(13) Calvin states the conventional position by attacking Osiander for “indiscriminately extending God’s image both to the body and soul” and thus “mingling heaven and earth.” The issue, overlooked by Calvin, is whether things on earth correspond to things in heaven or from a closed, secularistic, evolutionary system of their own. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), I, 187.]


The enemies of Christianity can sense the futility of this theological flaw and have exploited it with profound effect. If the form of the human body derives from any other source except these divine faculties, then we might as well say that human form derives from purely casual causes, unrelated to the ideal mind of God. Darwinism is the logical result, namely, that God caused the animal and human forms to occur haphazardly and without regard to any dimensions of His own essence. The doctrine of special Creation loses all of its logical force once we assume that the animal and human forms fail to incarnate specific dimensions of God’s creative mind. Every logically consistent Creationist is also a Christian idealist; and everyman who doubts the divine meaning of the human body is in process of becoming a Darwinian. Under the influence of its doctrine of human form, the Christian Church could easily have invented the theory of evolution, on its own, except for the restraining influence of the Book of Genesis.

The organic nature of the secular apostasy has dictated an organic apologetic response, with implicit anti-Marxist, anti-Freudian, and anti-Darwinian dimensions. Living under the pressure of the apostasy, Christians have developed such a response whether or not they are fully aware of it. Some of the response is more or less superficial or indirect in logic. Christian conservatives oppose Marxism, ot through strong anti-communist logic, but through the simple awareness that the Soviet Empire equates communism with atheism and is determined to persecute both the Church and Israel. The anti-

Freudian position is a simple defence of Christian sexual morality; and the anti-Darwinian, a mere detail of the general case for biblical literalism. In other words, many Christians are not consciously aware of the inner logic of the apostasy until it begins to conflict visibly with the “letter of the law.” The task of confronting apostate logic has fallen to Christian intellectuals such as the British “Inkling” group of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams.

Despite their community of interests, Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams expressed three fundamentally different and complementary types of apologetic testimony. A Roman Catholic, Tolkien shared in the same principle of conservative nostalgia for Catholic Christendom which inspired the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott and, through Scott, the conversion of John Henry Newman. Because Scott never turned Catholic, the Christendom ideal is larger than the Catholic Church and has determined the conservatism of many Protestants. For lack of a better term it can be labeled “amillennial sentiment” or “the High Church consensus.” It is essentially a cultural, even literary spirit of cooperative harmony among the best minds of Christian Europe and, as such, influenced Lewis and Williams almost as much as Tolkien.

The chief target of Tolkien’s school is Marxism. At its worst, th eamillennial spirit degenerates into fascism, a tendency which Lewis occasionally noted in Tolkien.” (14) Fascism originated as an anti-Marxist movement. The point of conflict is easily defined. Marxism assumes that every man’s god is his belly: that the purpose of humanity is to feed itself. From the time of Thomas Carlyle down to Tolkien, the enemies of Utilitarianism or Marxism have objected that Medieval chivalry and feudal loyalty had actually worked because man “does not live by bread alone” but is a spiritual being activated by conscience, ancient symbolism, and ideals of self-sacrifice. Through his concept of the Hobbit race, Tolkien acknowledges that most men appear to be comfort-loving epicureans but respond, inevitably, to the mystical appeal of chivalric high adventure.

[(14) Carpenter notes Tolkien’s sympathy toward Franco’s cause in Spain and his passing affinity for one Roy Campbell who represented “a particular blend of Catholicism and Fascism.” Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings (New York: Ballantine, 1978), p. 212.]


C. S. Lewis exhibited the Protestant gift of iconoclastic criticism. Like the eighteenth-century poet-critic Samuel Johnson, he was at his best in condemning the illogical follies of fashionable error. He targeted Freudianism, matching the clever anti-Christian iconoclasm of the Freudians with a clever anti-Freudian strategy of his own. The common ground was an interest in sexuality. Freud, basing his concept of practical Christianity on the behavior of “repressed” Victorian Germans, was fascinated by the blind, irrational power of sexual impulses and was convinced, with Friedrich Nietzche, that respectable, timid people are merely scandalized by powers which they neither understand nor ultimately control. In other words, Freud interpreted sexuality as a dark, quasi-religious mystery, deeper than any religion and, thus, the key to all religions. Lewis despised this argument through the Christian perception that “resurrection power” is akin to sexuality and simply superior to it.

Lewis’ apologetic approach, grounded in reason, is not well adapted to those parts of the world where apostasy has advanced so far that anarchy reigns and Freud’s “dark power of the Id” vies for immediate social supremacy. Confrontation with such satanic power was the specialty of Charles Williams. The final form of apologetics is supernaturalistic, apocalyptic, and judgmental. It threatens the enemies of Christianity with the consequences of unrepentant death, requiring them to choose heaven or hell today and experience one or the other tomorrow. As an apologetic strategy,t hreats of judgement are worthless apart from metaphysical support, given evidence of supernaturalistic change within the human context of life. Although most apostates are infuriated by threats of judgment, the human conscience remains open to this very elemental sort of conviction.

This final branch of apologetics correlates with what is known as “gothic” fiction and, in fact, can be labelled the “gothic argument. ”Gothic stories differ in religious tone from the comparatively Christian Dracula of Bram Stoker to the surface secularism of most Poe stories. They also differ in their capacity to represent the preternatural as an empirical given. Dracula is boldly heroic in this respect. M. R. James’ stories are especially clever in making us feel that the preternatural should be regarded as “gross and palpable.” Nearly all works of this kind have the same tonic effect on the human conscience, intimating to secularists that their flight from the supernatural is a childish attempt to whistle in the dark.

To the Freudians, of course, these works merely “play on our fears”; but when we ask secularists where these fears originate, they discuss the circulatory, glandular, and nervous systems in the manner of Ebenezer Scrooge’s psychomatic explanation of Marley’s Ghost as, an “underdone bit of potato.” The Freudian arsenal of explanations features repressed childhood memories; but the logic remains the same and similarly limited. To demonstrate how fear is registered in the psyche has little bearing on whether beings and situations capable of inspiring fear actually exist. In this respect as in others, Freudianism functions as the domestic handmkaiden of Darwinism, where the real strength of the anti-supernaturalistic position lies and where the ultimate confrontation with the “gothic argument” must take place.

It is no coincidence that M. R. James, cleverest of the gothic writers, based his stories on a formula taken from the field of archaeology. His Ghost Stories of an Antiquary appeared in 1903,twelve years after the discovery of the Gundestrup Caldron. The overriding theme of his stories is that antiquity implies a cosmos of powers which have only been sleeping, like the bodies of the Christian dead, “in the dust of the earth.” In Christian apologetics, the greatest of all doctrines is the resurrection of the dead, an idea so powerful that it, rather than sex, holds the key to the mysteries of human existence. Wherever it is clearly conceived as a metaphysical reality, resurrection annihilates every premise and every conclusion of the Marxist, Freudian, and Darwinian schools of thought. It erases the premise of Marxism by positing a version of humanity independent of the natural food chain; it cancels the premise of Freudianism by furnishing a degree of vitality so absolute that temporary sexual euphoria loses all meaning; and it destroys the whole point of evolution by bringing Mankind to absolute physical perfection in an instant of transformation.

[NOTE: EDITOR: The godless world thinks that sex is the ultimate example of intimacy. But, this reminds me of Bible verses that describe the relationship a person can have with God as being greater than and superior to that of marriage. It alludes to the resurrection of the dead in Christ into a tear-less perpetual euphoria undisturbed by human frailty and pain.]


James’ stories do not, in fact, present resurrection motifs as such.Like the North American gothicists Algernon Blackwood and H.P. Lovecraft, James rivets his attention on the preternatural and,thus, confirms the secularistic attitude that supernaturalism of anykind is rather unsavory. But, like all art, his stories imply more thanthey state. The evil in his stories serves a dramatic, as opposed toa moral purpose. The effect is not indignation, but surprise. In classicgothic fiction, evil tends to be metaphor for apocalyptic power, justas Halloween imagery tends to stir the spirit of a child more deeplythan the pallid imagery of Easter. Freudians explain the imaginativepreference for Halloween as evidence for the irrational power of theId; but there is a far more Christian explanation.

A great gulf separates resurrection as a perennial doctrine of theChurch from resurrection as an accomplished metaphysical fact.Sooner or later the conscience must come to grips with this difference.Christians are fortunate to live in the twentieth century because Einsteinian physics has made it so much easier to conceptualize theglorified body of the resurrection. In the absence of such scientificinsight, the Victorian Matthew Arnold supposed that the ApostlePaul was dabbling aimlessly in metaphysics in his account of theresurrection body in I Corinthians 15. Arnold labored under the delusion that Christianity is a tissue of moral sentiments; and VictorianChristians had fed his delusion by treating the “blessed hope” ofthe resurrection as a wistful, consoling sentiment rather than a sincerebelief about the future transformation of Mankind. The gothicwriters should be honored for the way their work scandalizes passive,materialistic notions of reality and strips away the cloak of sentimental palaver from the stunning metaphysical promises of the faith.

Of course, gothicism, like all art, has a dual potential of false andtrue. It is always possible to glorify the occult for its own sake andmiss the tonic, apocalyptic message altogether. One gothic writerdiffers from another in this regard; and readers bring a host ofpresuppositional attitudes to such works. The distinction betweenChristian gothic and unwholesome occultism depends on nuance.Poe’s Romantic goal was to make rationalists aware that they havesouls poised between life and death. Dracula is based on the commendably Christian theme that Satan is very dangerous yet conquerable. M. R. James remains the most significant gothic writerfor our purposes because of his steady commitment to associate antiquarian study with apocalyptic power. A brief exposition of “TheTreasure of Abbot Thomas” should suffice to reveal his method.A Mr. Somerton has “undertaken” a personal “expedition,” likea true archaeologist, to investigate “Lord D---’s private chapel.” (15) The combined note of unsuspected adventure and deadpan empiricalmethod symbolizes the first stirrings of supernatural awareness inthe hearts of a skeptical generation. Somerton’s empirical memoryjust happens to stir up an echo of the Apocalypse: “They haveon their vestures a writing which no man knoweth, an evocativeparaphrase of different passages from the Book of Revelation, plunging the reader’s mind into a context all the more compelling for being somewhat irrelevant and half-digested, as based on archaeologicaldata and free association.”

[(15) M. R. James, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (Baltimoreenguin, 1975), p. 140.]


Somerton manages to uncover and decipher a cryptogram promising buried treasure at the house and well of Abbot Thomas, oncethese can be located. He discovers that the well, like an invertedTower of Babel, is about seventy feet deep and equipped with a circular staircase leading downward. At the descending thirty-eighthstep, he finds a patch of cement disguised as stone, removes it,recognizes some prerequisite imagery, penetrates further, and sees,“some round light-coloured objects within which might be bags.”He reaches for one of these and precipitates the climax of the story:


“I got the thing fairly in front of the mouth and begandrawingit out. Just then Brown gave a sharp ejaculation andranquickly up the steps with the lantern. Hewill tellyou why in a moment. Startled as I was, I lookedround after him, and saw him stand for a minute at thetop and then walk away a few yards. Then I heard himcall softly, “All right, sir,” and went on pulling out thegreat bag, in complete darkness. It hung for an instanton the edge of the hole, then slipped forward on to mychest, and put its arms round my neck.”[16) Ibid., pp. 150.]


Freudian logic is on the right track in interpreting such a fictionas a myth of parturition. The well, hole within the well, and “complete darkness” all suggest the womb. The “great bag” simulatesa birth sac; and the act of “put[ting] its arms round my neck,”typifies the behavior of a more mature infant, juxtaposing timeframes in the classic manner of a dream. Freudianism, like all greatnon-Christian ideologies, begins with a truth, idolizes it, and “comesshort of the glory of God. Because symbolism is a synthetic reality,parturition is only one dimension, though an important one, ofJames’ story: a kind of “psychological local color” element.

According to the literal surface of the story, Somerton’s animatedbag is the furthest thing from a lovable infant: a loathesome preternatural being attached by a curse to the Abbot’s treasure in the sameway that mythical dragons guard treasures in folklore. Again, anthropologists will satisfy themselves that they exhaust the meaningof the story once we identify the dragon-guard motif. Why, then,does the story identify the dragon-guard with suggestions of anewborn infant? In the first place, the story adds a further suggestion, namely, that Abbot Thomas himself is the infant’s “father.”Somerton’s assistant Brown explains what had startled him:


“So I looked up and I see someone’_s ’ead lookin’ over atus. I s’pose I must ha’ said somethink, and I ’eld the lightup and run up the steps, and my light shone right on theface. That was a bad un, sir, if ever I see one! A holdisman, and the face very much fell in, and larfin’, as Ithought.”[(17) ibid., pp. 151-152.]


Abbot Thomas’ laughter is appropriate because the outcome of thestory is both horrible and ludicrous yet horribly and ludicrouslysublime in the same way as the miracle of childbirth or greatermiracles yet. James concludes his story with a doubly ironic quotation of Latin Scripture, “Depositum custodi,” “Keep that whichis committed to thee.”The concluding words ‘ ‘Depositum custodi” can be read two ways.To the unimaginative, they are a blasphemous distortion of the Apostle’s exhortation to preserve the Gospel for future ages. To the Christian who understands the gothic argument, they mean, “Keep theglorious hope of an actual resurrection (when the Gospel will takecare of itself), under a cloak of darkness and horror until someoneactually dares to believe it.” The words, like the story, satirize theincapacity of soulish human beings to take the supernatural seriouslyuntil it literally reaches out and “puts its arms around their necks.”

The gothic argument, therefore, represents the defiant, apocalypticside of Christian testimony. This argument, like the milder formsof Tolkien and Lewis, has much to gain from the development ofNoahic science.

 

[3]

Apocalypse and the Gundestrup Imagery

The logical connection between future Apocalypse and high antiquity is a truism of Christian prophecy and has been strengthenedby the American fundamentalist stress on the “seventieth week ofDaniel,” the concept that the entire Church Age is a hiatus in theancient struggle between Jew and Gentile for the mastery of the earth.These prophetic concepts intensify interest in archaeology, givingeach new find the immediacy of an international news report. Undertheir impact, the Victorian notion of world progress fades into secondary importance as a description of the “interstices” of progressivedevelopment at low intensity between the “inspired moments”’ ofdispensational revolution. The artifacts of high antiquity becomepieces of the same puzzle which we are completing in modern times.The ancients are a peculiar variety of “moderns”; and we are apeculiar variety of “ancients.”

The apocalyptically inclined “Romantic” shares a deep affinityto the charismatic world of Noah, the world of ancient art whichacts as a magnet on Shelley’s Romantic persona Alastor:


“His wandering step

Obedient to high thoughts, has visited

The awful ruins of the days of old:

Athens and Tyre and Balbec, and the waste

Where stood Jerusalem, the fallen towers

Of Babylon, the eternal pyramids,

Memphis and Thebes, and whatsoe’er of strange

Sculptured on alabaster obelisk,

Of jasper tomb, or mutilated sphinx,

Dark Ethiopia in her desert hills

Conceals!”(3)


(1) Revelation 14:6-7. Misplaced footnote.]

(2) In Revelation 2-3, explicit repentance is a factor in five of theseven churches of Asia Minor. Misplaced footnote.]

(3) The definitive radical Shelley understood that theories of development, inart, refer to mere extrapolative “fi1ler” between momentsof empowerment. The same logic applies to theories of general progress. “A Defense of Poetry,” Mahoney, p. 548.]


Instead of deriving casual inspiration from such objects, Alastor isdrawn to them by “high thoughts” of his own, motives both modernand apocalyptic. They reinforce an existing sense of meaning andpurpose which operates, like all poetic charisma, “above and beyondconsciousness.”

Alastor’s “thri1ling secrets of the birth of time” have been vastlyaugmented by modern archaeology; but familiarity breeds contempt,especially if the familiarity takes the form of evolutionary condescension toward the limitations of “early man.” The spiritual challengeof antiquarian study is to maintain a balance between learneddiscipline and numinous awe. The status quo, today, favors achieving this balance by letting the ancient artifacts speak for themselves.

At the heart of this approach is Pritchard’s Ancient Near East Pictures. The camera or transparent exposition can work wonders, butonly where the “birth of time” still implies “thrilling secrets.”Mature Darwinian thought, gradually but inevitably, banishes everyhint of numinous power from all reasoning about the past.


A striking analogy exists between the subgenres and the exteriorpanels of the Gundestrup Caldron. The Dragon panel is clearly“gothic, featuring a pair of monsters, and a hideous double-headedserpent in the act of dismembering a pair of human victims. Theallied panel of the Braided Goddess reads like a puzzling murdermystery. The Trinity panel proclaims an apocalypse of cosmic powerin the manner of invader science fiction; the Hirschnatur panel expresses legendary veneration for a sainted monarch in the vein ofa Scott romance; and the Sphinx panel anticipates local color writing,in its Edenic idealization of a harmonious environment. (6)

(6) Scott features incognito monarchs (or the private lives ofmonarchs) in Quentin Durward (Louis XI), Ivanhoe (Richard I), TheTalisman (Richard I), The Fair Maid of Perth (Robert III),Kenilworth (Elizabeth I), and various novels on the seventeenth century featuring the Stuarts. The possibility of a casual encounter witha monarch lay at the heart of Scott’s creative enthusiasm.


These analogies point directly into the heart of the ChristianApocalypse. The Gothic principle corresponds to the apocalypse ofAntichrist and the preternatural reign of terror introduced by himafter the Rapture of the Church. The murder mystery anticipatesthe motif of judgement and incrimination which begins, even beforeChrist’s Second Advent, by replacing the Raptured Church with anew body of believers, not only Jewish but Judaistic or judgmentalin spiritual temperament. Invader science fiction captures the cosmicimpact of the Second Advent, as a public event witnessed throughout the world. The Scott romance, in its excitement over the physicalpresence of monarchs,‘ anticipatesthe popular impact of JesusChrist, the supreme sainted name, as visibly present on earth andaccessible to its inhabitants.Finally, the Edenic idealism of local colorfiction anticipates the Edenic qualities of Christ’s MillennialKingdom.

The exterior panels also celebrate specific members of Noah’sfamily, opening up a new branch of apocalyptic typology. The“gothic” logic of the Dragon panel lays the cult of Antichrist squarely at the feet of Ham and the Hamite “Titan” faction. Despite allthat can be said in defense of this family, the forces of Antichristwere unleashed by their rebellion against Noah. The complementary panel of the Braided Goddess tells a slightly different story. AsTiamat of the Babylonian epic, Ham’s mother headed the loyalistfaction of Peleg’s Iran. We have seen that the panel echoesthe orthodox logic of Genesis 9-11 in tracing the error of theTower of Babel back to the sin of Ham. Its apocalyptic functionis to incriminate the gentile world order by revealing the patheticruin at its foundation. The Dragon panel expresses what the gentilepowers know themselves to be in their full flush of preternaturalmanifestation; the Braided Goddess panel picks up the pieces of agentile criminality which has run its course.

The Hirschnatur panel treats Shem as a sternly venerable Noahictype of Christ. Despite the genetic blend of Shem and Ham in theMessianic line, Shem remains the exclusive moral type of Christ,among the eight survivors of the Flood, because the cult of YahwehElohim distinguishes Christ in His special relationship to Israel andHis role as apocalyptic Judge. The two stags of the panel, in symbolizing the Semitic and Indo-European stocks, also suggest theelements of Jew and Gentile which make up the Church. Thus theera of the Hirschnatur panel bears the same relationship to theChurch Age as the succeeding Tower of Babel era to the reign ofthe Antichrist in the succeeding Tribulation era. In claiming theTower era, the curiously dislocated Braided Goddess panel interpretsthe Tribulation period as the beginning of a process of apocalypticjudgments.

For the benefit of skeptics, what are we saying about the propheticimplications of the Gundestrup Caldron? Are we saying that theHirschnatur panel, for example, is a pagan prophecy of the ChurchAge as governed by Christ? No. The analytic orthodox must begranted the privilege to restrict the letter of prophecy as narrowlyas they wish. The Hirschnatur panel is a pagan memorial to theancestral relationship between Europeans and Shem. If we regardShem as an implicit type of Christ, this opinion is our syntheticprivilege and must stand the test of further biblical study of thesignificance of Shem to the Christian faith.

The Trinity panel identifies Shem’s royal wife, the YellowMatriarch, with the explosive, sensational power of Christ’s SecondAdvent, the rising “sun of righteousness with healing in his wings.”The Mongoloid race is synonymous with the choleric humor, theroyal “element of fire.” Christ pictured His Second Advent as a boltof lightning shining from east to west.’ The Egyptian mythology identified the image of a lightning bolt with the Yellow Matriarch’sHamite son Mizraim (Min). The choleric humor implies the compulsive power of volition, the privilege to decide and command. Atthe Second Advent, Christ initiates a new age of such commandment, an age of “ruling the nations with a rod of iron.” The starkvisual impact of the Second Advent will symbolize the new orderof the Noahic outpouring of the despotic “Ka,” technically featuredas the special topic of the panel.

Misplaced Footnotes:

(10)The numinous beauty of Egyptian civilization is a spiritual factrooted in early postdiluvian charisma and reflected, for example,in Jeremiah 4:20: “Egypt is like a very fair heifer, but destructioncometh; it cometh out of the north.”

(11)The Egyptian judgement on the firstborn obviously contrastedwith the Canaanite judgement of extermination.


The Sphinx panel, in the same apocalyptic context, symbolizes thecontinuity of Caucasoid, European, or phlegmatic values from theChurch Age to the Millennial Age. Once the thunder and lightningof the Apocalypse are over, Mankind will experience, once again,the cultural benefits of peace, a revival of something like AustrianCatholicism. The resurrection of the Christian dead will have addeda new dimension to this ideal. Aside from “ruIing the nations witha rod of iron, “resurrected Christians, in selflessly perfect bodies,impervious to injury, will function as a uniquely effective servantrace, analogous to the ministering spirits of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Nights Dream. Tolkien’s version of the same ideal rests on thesame premise, European amillennialism, which simply means theirenic dimension of millennialism relocated in time. H. G. Wells,in his characteristically pejorative way, has given the same ideal afuturistic value in the fairy-like upper crust of evolved human society in The Time Machine. All such authors deal with the same potentiality of the same Noahic world community faced with the sameschedule of apocalyptic changes.


Noah and Israel

Outside the Book of Genesis, direct references to Noah occur onlyfive times in the Old Testament and eight in the New, not an especially impressive record for the physical ancestor of all nations. Thestatistics are much the same for Adam. Scott is quite correct aboutthe pragmatic nature of theBible in its focus on the salvation historyof Israel. In reality, the world of Adam belongs to physical science;and the world of Noah, to the field of secular political history. Aslong as we follow the pragmatic guidelines that limit the fields ofscience, history, and theology, Noah will remain just another namein the Messianic genealogy of Christ.

Noah takes on a higher structural importance, however, in abstractdispensational theology where he emerges as the second of an elitecompany of five dispensational founders including Adam, Abraham,Moses, and Christ. Adam participated in the formation of the firsttwo dispensations; Noah, in the third; Abraham, in the fourth;Moses, in the fifth; and Christ, in the sixth and seventh. In reducing the seven dispensations to five personal lives, these men furnishanother explanation for the apocalyptic pattern just described.Adam’s Eden accounts for the ethos of the Sphinx panel; Noah’sthird millennium, for the gentile horror of the Dragon panel; thetradition of faithful Abraham, for the Messianic veneration motifof the Hirschnatur panel; the Law of Moses, for the judgmental ethosand blood sacrifice motif of the Braided Goddess panel; and Christ,ultimately, for the “Oriental despotism” of the Trinity panel.

Noah’s comparative place in the scheme is tragic. The biblical narratives of Genesis 6, 9, and 11 establish an unmistakable note oftragedy: the destruction of Mankind, the corruption of the new worldorder, and God’s comprehensive judgement on high human enterprise. Nothing can change this tragic accent. Tragedy and even gothicterror, however, can inspire high hope through a potent reversepsychology.” Our consciences convict us of sin; and the apocalypseof gothic tragedy clears the air. Once we know the worst, we cananticipate the best, unless we are foolish enough to neglectatonement.

Once we grasp the spiritual importance of gothic horror, we havenothing to hide from ourselves in estimating Noah’s worth or thevalue of gentile Mankind. We recognize the importance of Mosaicsin-consciousness in preserving the Noahic heritage, in its plainestterms, in the Hebrew Old Testament. The logic of Genesis 6-11reveals how glorious and magnificent Noah’s privilege was; but wemust take that logic with the bitter seasoning of the narrative text.

From the hour that Canaan threw Noah’s curse back in his face,the glory of the gentiles has become an unspeakable horror. Unlesswe accept the Jewish explanation of that horror, we have no rightto recognize the glory; and the proof is that the same Hebrew textestablishes both the one and the other.Noah’s true impact on ,Israel is not to be measured by direct allusion but by analogy, beginning with the striking parallel betweenJacob’s prophecies in Genesis 49 and the ethnic system of the Cernunnus panel. The strict analogy was between Cernunnus (Peleg theDivider) and Jacob himself. The geographic focus of Peleg’s powerwas Camp 11, capital of a Martu claim extending westward to thesea and encompassing Jacob’s Palestine. The prophetic GreaterIsrael,” in extending to the Euphrates, encompassed Martu in turn.If Jacob was the third from Abraham, branching heir of the lowerSemite line, Peleg was the third from Salah, branching heir of theupper Semite line. Peleg divided the whole Noahic community,creating gentile ethnology. Jacob, in dividing his tribes, created theethnology of the counter-world of Israel. The tribes of the Cernunnus panel number eleven; and the tribes of Israel, twelve, as determined by eleven sons of Jacob.

The holy war between Joshua and Canaan recapitulated the struggle between Peleg and Canaan over Camp 11 and over the politicaldestiny of Mankind during the seventy-five years following the judgment on the Tower of Babel. We have seen that the substance ofJezebel’s apocalyptic cult-the triad of Ashtart, Melqart, andResheph-Eshmun-celebrated the ruling order of the world at theEanna epoch in 2308. Jezebel’s triad was the rebel counter-weightto Peleg’s loyalist faction, which had come to power thirty yearsearlier. There is no question that the heroic prophet Elijah foundJezebel the spiritual epitome of all that was evil in the Canaaniterace of Palestine and Phoenicia. Thus, the Israelites, after the Exodus, had resumed Peleg’s struggle against Canaan. The loyalistfaction of the First Kish dynasty was the moral equivalent of Israel,including, as it did, both Noah and Shem, as the fabulous Etanaand his son Balih.

A careful study of the Exodus will reveal just how the nation Israel,in its birth hour, confirmed its privilege to represent the righteouscause of Shem and Noah without putting a stop to the “times ofthe gentiles” altogether. The sacred history of Israel is a study inoverlapping privileges. Shem and Noah had given something ofthemselves to the gentile world; and, without canceling all effectsof this heritage, the Israelites made good the imperial Messianicclaims of Abraham ir1 a manner peculiar to themselves. At the centerof this mysterious process was God’s act of judging the gods of Egyptby striking all the firstborn of the land. A superficial reading of Exodus 12:12 might suggest that, in the Exodus, God simply discreditedthe Egyptian religion in the same way that he might discredit anyform of paganism, But the Egyptians were a unique part of the paganworld;and the Exodus judgement on their gods was a unique,revolutionary act, essential to forming the Mosaic dispensation.

In the first place, the Egyptians differed radically from the Canaanites because of the shifting perspective of the two rebel erasbefore and after the First Kish era. The Tower of Babel era,beforehand, was as “Egyptian” as the Erech-Aratta [Isfahan, and/or Jiroft] era was “Canaanite, “ dominated by the house of Canaan and especially, by Canaan’s grandson Salah, the Semitic hero Marduk. Egyptianpaganism, rooted in the Hamitic linguistic stock and in the peculiarspiritual climate of the Tower of Babel era, differed so greatly fromthe Canaanite paganism of the Eshmun triad (above p. 40) that Israel’s entire relationship to Egyptbelonged to a separate category of spiritual confrontation. Israel was never told to exterminate the Egyptians. Onthe contrary, Moses was reared on Egyptian soil, bore an Egyptianname, and was “learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.”

The Israelites sought to exterminate the Canaanites preciselybecause the latter were linguistic and physical kinsmen, false representatives of a Semitic stock which wassupposed to have belonged tothe spiritual heirs of Shem. As Hamitic speakers, the Egyptiansbelonged to a separate branch of the Noahic theocracy and madeno claim to the Semitic “Enlil (Canaan, a.k.a. Cush)-ship.” The evil of Canaan, focusedby the notorious populace of the Cities of the Plain, had taken rootin the Semitic linguistic stock; and the Hebrew task, through theirown populace, was to reclaim that stock and its proper territory forthe God of Shem, not to dispute the Hamitic claim to the Nile. TheEgyptian evil, the Tower of Babel, was subtler and less virulent thanthe Canaanite. It dated from an earlier era, when the opposingspiritual factions of Noah’s family were less distinct.

The Egyptians were simply more civilized than the Canaanites,more disciplined in their expression of pagan values; and they owedthis distinction to the most mysterious of all pagans, their god Ptah,creator of their system of gods, Enki of the Sed pole Seal 684, Canaan’s Solomonic firstborn Sidon. God’s disciplined slaying of theEgyptian firstborn, linked to Ptah’s system of gods in Exodus 12:12,alluded to the firstborn Sidon, as architect of civilized worldpaganism.”Sidon was the supreme compromiser and peacemaker of the rebelfaction, responsible for all the synthesizing and reconciling powersof civilized world paganism. The Semitic tradition of Ugaritremembered him as the ally of Shem, Koshar, architect of AliyanBal’s temple; and the Teutons remembered him as Loki,erstwhile ally of Thor. This testimony arose from the fact that Sidon voluntarily yielded power to Shem’s loyalist faction at the First Kish epochin 2338. Sidon lent his theocratic authority of the Enkiship of ElOlam to the Messianic line, preserving the concept that Shem shouldremain its spiritual head, even allowing Shem to name the successiveheirs of each generation below Salah.

Never before or since have good and evil been so closely intertwined as in Sidon. The key to his temperament was the Caucasoidphlegmatic humor, that low-energy approach to life which achievesprodigies of civilized neutrality. Sidon understood more clearly thanany other postdiluvian the nature of Noah’s privilege to build worldcivilization. When Canaan’s rebellion gave him a chance to supplantNoah as architect of the gentile world, he proceeded with such careand discipline that the world system he organized has lasted to thepresent moment and will continue until Christ destroys it at His Second Advent.

In contrast with Caucasoid Sidon, Noah was a choleric Mongoloid,just compulsive enough to have cursed Canaan as he did and justbluntly honest enough to have been outwitted by Sidon. To gain insight into the struggle between Noah and Sidon one need only reviewthe history of Mongoloid-Caucasoid relations: the shortlived TatarEmpire, with its even shorter-lived potential for becoming Christian;the explosive confrontation of Imperial Japan and the United States;or the alienation of Communist China from the Soviet Union. Thereis nothing inscrutable about the Orientals. The modern Caucasoidshave shown themselves inscrutable and nothing more so than theinfinite deviousness of the secular Enlightened, with their myriadphilosophical adjustments to a religion which they are simply toodishonest to believe.

Yet God has chosen to work through the Caucasoid race, beginning with Noah’s white son Shem, because of the peculiar tendencyof the low-energy temperament to cooperate with processes of grace.If the white race of Europe has hesitated long enough to devise waysto reject Christianity, their ancestors also hesitated long enough torecognize its subtle power and to accept it. The same logic applies toSidon, to the religious culture of Egypt, and to civilized worldpaganism generally. Apart from Christ, the choice is between theelegant idolatry of Egypt and the savagery of the Aztec ritual.

The ultimate question of Israel’s conformity to Noah, therefore,is a question of how much of the Mongoloid Orient enters into thereligious culture of Israel. To what extent does the Jewish quest forthe Messiah anticipate the Mongoloid ethos of the Trinity panel, theinterests of Shem’s Mongoloid wife, or the values of his “only begotten son,” the only Messianic heir of his male line, Arphaxad-I? Conversely, what will become of Arphaxad’s people, the Far EasternMongoloids, in Christ’s Millennial Kingdom? The obvious answeris an extremely affirmative one, namely, that the Mongoloids willfunction in the Millennial Age as the Caucasoids have done in thepresent age. Noah’s tragic loss of power over his sons translates intothe temporary theocratic eclipse of the Mongoloid race; and theworldwide restoration of his principles of righteousness, in theMillennial Age, will assure the popular importance of the Chinese,Koreans, and Japanese. But what sort of Mongoloid undercurrentactually exists in the Bible or in the history of Israel?

We are faced with the striking fact that Abraham came from Arphaxad’s lunar cult center of Ur and migrated to Arphaxad’s birthplace of Harran, as though the Messianic hope were the cause ofArphaxad-In particular. What sort of man was Arphaxad? Hindumythology pictures him as the sternly judgmental Daksha, infuriatedby his daughter Sati’s engagement to the slovenly Shiva, much asNanna might have been outraged at the notorious “harlotry” of hisdaughter Inanna. In fact, Arphaxad emerges as Noah’s Mongoloidalter ego, duplicating in his wrath against his erring daughter Noah’swrath against his erring son Ham.

[NOTE: STORY OF THE DEATH OF SATI: Kali in the form of Sati marries Shiva against the will of her father Daksha. Daksha refuses to accept him into his family and denounces Sati andforbade her to return to his kingdom. Shiva and Sati lived happily on Mount Kailas, high up in the Himalayas. The sage Narada relays news to them that Daksha was planning a festival and sacrifice for everyone, but does not invite them. Sati shows up anyway, approaches Daksha but is rejected. Daksha curses Shiva. Sati then drops dead. Nandi goes to Shive in Kailas and relays the news of Sati’s death. Shiva gathers a whole army of giants, snakes and ghosts. War iesues and they turned Daksha's palace to ashes.. Shiva then picks up the dead body of Sati andbegins a terrible dance of destruction. To save mankind, Vishnu hurled his discus at Sati's corpse until her body falls to earth.. Shiva flees and remarries to Uma (another form of Kali-Sati). Wherever the fragments of Sati's body had fallen to the earth, theysprouted sacred Shakti pithas (places dedicated to Mother worship). Ancient temples stand on these spots in homage to the great Mother. SATI’S BODY PARTS typified in the Shakti pithas (dedicated Temples) locations: TOES - at Kalighat, Calcutta- as Kalika; EARRING - at Manikarnikaghat, benares; RIGHT ARM - at Jalandhara; LEFT BREAST - at Ramgiri. - as Tripuramalini; and SEX ORGAN (yoni) - at Kamakhya, Assam.]

Most students of the Christian heritage understand this pivotalrole of wrath in the tragedy of “carnal Christianity” or orthodoxfutility. On the face of it, Noah’s anger against Ham accomplishedlittle. The Apostle James assures us that, “The wrath of man workethnot the righteousness of God” (James 1:20). The phlegmaticsophisticates of Europe have taken this lesson to heart and turnedback the tide of “graceless zeal” time and again. While separatistswarn of the wrath to come, cool masters of the social arts protestthat they have never seen it. An ethical challenge of Christianity isto balance the claims of a divine wrath which few have witnessedagainst a human wrath which many have seen and despised. In viewof this challenge, the most important of all pagan myths was theone which pictured Shem’s Messianic son as wrath personified.

 

[4]

The Wrath of Telepinu

The Hattian myth of Telepinu outranks most others in establishingthe Noahic pagan correlatives to Judaeo-Christian orthodoxy. In it,both Taru and his son Telepinu, Shem and Arphaxad-I, appear asstorm gods because the central theocratic power of the myth is theStorm God, Noahic version of Yahweh. The myth attempts to copewith the wrath of Yahweh, as expressed in the Flood and in the judgment of the Tower of Babel, the myth’s unstated premise. Itacknowledges the characteristic effect of apostasy as the withdrawalof God’s presence and favor. It identifies the wrath of Yahwehspecifically as Arphaxad-I’s motive and claims that such wrath hasbeen appeased through the good offices of Kamrusepas, the RedMatriarch, and her command of Abel’s principle of ram sacrifice.

In short, it furnishes a Noahic counterpart to the Christiandoctrineof propitiation and atonement.Because the prime movers of the myth are the angry Telepinu andsolicitous Sun God, its historical focal point is the First Kish epochof the Trinity panel, which features these two deities, Arphaxad-Iand his solar son Obal, at either side of the Yellow Matriarch, whoappears in the myth as Hannahannas. Telepinu has gotten angry forreasons lost with the opening lines of text.” He has withdrawn fromthe other gods, causing universal famine and eventually a flood. Wehave seen that the Chinese Flood date of 2357 refers to the judgment on the Tower of Babel, nineteen years before the First Kishepoch to which the Sumerians referred the Flood. Clearly, Noahicthought perceived the judgement on the Tower of Babel as a duplication of Yahweh’s wrath in the Flood. The Hittite myth associatesboth judgments with some separatistic policy adopted by Arphaxad-I.

The Sun God takes a series of measures to appease Telepinu’swrath. The Egyptian polarity of the Tower of Babel scheme meant,in effect, that the Sun God of the Hamitic tongue had sought topromote unity among the gods. Through the conceit of polytheism,the judgement on the Tower was held to have meant conflict betweenthe solar and judgmental qualities of God Himself. Thus the mythtreats the dualism of the Trinity panel as a conflict of values between separatism and imperial world union. More important, themyth interprets these two principles as synonymous with the two factions of Shem and Canaan. In the Trinity panel, the bearded Arphaxad I displays the “Ka” of the loyalist faction, and smooth-shaven Obal, the “Ka” of the rebel faction, hence Meskiaggasher’sclaim of descent from the Sun God at the outset of the rebel Eannadynasty. The myth acknowledges, in its own arnoral way, that thewrath of God, in the form of Arphaxad’s loyalist faction, had determined to thwart the rebel hopes for world union.

The process of the myth is supernaturalistic, whimsical in imagery,and allegorical in meaning, more so than the Marduk Epic wherethe motif of warfare is a literal value. The council of the Sun Goddesignates three divine agents to act in conjunction with three lesseragents to find and reconcile Telepinu: the Sun God sends out aneagle, Hannahannas sends out a bee, and Kamrusepas employs thesame propitiatory magic which is assigned to a “mortal man.” Theeagle fails to find the angry god. The bee finds and stings him, provoking him to further anger and a destructive flood. Eventually,either Kamrusepas, working through “twelve rams,” or the “mortal man” succeeds in appeasing the god’s wrath.Despite the whimsical surface, the myth reveals a systematicframework through its total of six agents who seek appeasement.

These represent six qualities of the theocratic octad, excluding theStorm God and Air God, which were compounded into a unit bythe “Yahweh Elohim” of Taru and Telepinu. The Sun God speaksfor himself; and his eagle represents the motif of Etana’s ascent toheaven, Noah’s cult of the Heaven God, paired with the solar cultin the first two fiefs of the Taranis panel. The Yellow Matriarch Hannahannas, in dominating the Trinity panel, represents the cult of theMoon God; and Kamrusepas, the Red Matriarch’s cult of theShepherd God. Their secondary agents, the bee and “mortal man,”are interpretive cruxes.

As Hannahannas’ agent, the bee symbolizes the cult of the WarGod, which superceded her lunar cult in 2308. Nimrod, as chief priestof the War God, had anticipated the use of war in completing theTower of Babel by forcing laborers into the “bee swarm” of theplain in Shinar. The Yellow Matriarch took responsibility for thisswarm because of her larger responsibility for childbirth and thegrowth of population, a motif characteristic of her image as Hannahannas, Ninhursag, and Nekhebet. The bee’s sting provokesTelepinu to cause a flood precisely because of the conceit of theChinese Flood, dated at the judgement on the Tower of Babel ratherthan the Flood itself. At the judgement on the Tower of Babel,Yahweh was angry both at the concentration of populace at Camp12 and at Nimrod’s militaristic means of pursuing the Tower scheme.

The subtlest part of the myth is the “mortal man” who acts inparallel with Kamrusepas. We think at once of the fallen mortal,whom the Red Matriarch cradles beneath her arm in the BraidedGoddess panel. Because that panel describes the Red Matriarch’sruined boar-holding structure, the mortal can only be her son Ham.

In the context of the Hattian myth, Ham represents the eighth andlast cult of the Water God, sacred to his royal wife, the WhiteMatriarch, and to her Sumerian race. Thus the final appeasementof Telepinu rests with the two Havilahs of Genesis 10, Ham and hismother, descendants of the patriarch Abel. A further mutilation ofthe text obscures their cooperation, but their common descent fromthe first priest of blood atonement speaks for itself.

The final implications of the myth are as tragic as the textualthemes of Genesis 6-11. Although the concluding appeasement motifcan be read in the light of the Christian plan of salvation, its overallfabric yields the classic status quo of civilized paganism. Motivatedby their version of the imperial Sun God, civilized pagans have alwayssought world union in their own way, as a presupposed amillennialreality, a gentleman’s agreement about the eternal scope of their collective authority. They realize that separatistic dissent exists and alternately despise and fear it. In their highermoods, they pursue theidealism of the “ascending eagle,” various efforts to storm heavenby lofty enterprise. As these efforts fail, they lapse into the bee-stingsof warfare, transforming themselves from .Greek philosophers intopragmatic Roman warriors. All the while, their consciences areperpetually troubled by their inability to control or influence the Godof Telepinu, the “Yahweh Elohim of Shem,” that separatistic Godwho threatens to judge them adversely. In their darkest moods, whenidealism and pragmatic violence have failed, they emulate the darkerside of Kamrusepas’ cult and embrace occult religion.

 

[5]

The Sed Festival

Dispensational theologians have sometimes overlooked the factthat the apocalyptic millennium, as a fixed period of one thousandyears, establishes an order of magnitude for all of the previousdispensational ages. By rejecting the third millennium Flood and suggesting that the event might have occurred thousands of years earlier,they have begun to tamper with the coherent logic of Weltgeschichte.The single millennium is an apocalyptic measuring-stick againstwhich to judge the character of each earlier dispensation. Accordingto the tight chronology of Genesis 11, the exclusively Noahic dispensation of human government was the briefest of the postdiluviandispensations, just as the present age of the Church has been thelongest, nearly twice the length of the future millennial age.

The extraordinary brevity of the dispensational interval between2338 and Abraham’s career, around 2100, reveals the virulence ofthe gentile apostasy together with the extraordinary creative powersof Noah’s family. Able to build world civilization within Noah’slifetime, the Noahic princes were also capable of forfeiting their collective relationship to God within the same period. We have seenthat Abraham’s birth occurred shortly after Noah’s death,(17) asthough to suggest that Noah’s species of righteousness died with him.

(14)The standard date of 2166 for the birth of Abram fell 352 yearsafter Niessen’s Flood date of 2518; whereas Noah died 350 yearsafter the Flood (Genesis 9:28).


This chronology accords far better with the moral logic of dispensational theology than do the high chronologies introduced byscholars who are rarely, if ever, dispensational in viewpoint.Nevertheless, the formative principles of the dispensation ofhuman government have lived on through every subsequent generation; and the fate of this dispensation is a study in transformation.Every discrete era of political history has modified the Noahicprivileges and drawn the Second Advent of the Jewish Messiah astep closer. In fact, startling political changes had occurred duringNoah’s lifetime; and, despite Noah’s death and the career ofAbraham, a peculiar, “Egyptian” status quo existed until the Mosaic judgement of Exodus 12:12, forming a kind of gentile Millennial Age,from the Tower of Babel to the Exodus.

Niessen’s chronology dates the Exodus to 1446 B.C.” If we extrapolate a millennium backward, the year 2446 occurred seventy-two years after the Flood, when Noah’s family was on the Nilebuilding the tradition of the nomes, specifically, at the twelfth nomefrom the north, in Lower Egypt. We have seen that the nome sequence, reckoned southward, duplicated the Syrian-Mesopotamiancamp sequence, so that Camp 72, in Egypt, duplicated Camp 12,later site of the Tower of Babel in Akkad. Camp 72 duplicated Seba’sCamp 12 in Seba-Osiris’ Busiris, “House of Osiris Lord of theSed,”“ that mysterious cultic pole which reappears as the sign ofSeba and Camp 12 in Mesopotamian Seal 684.

Misplaced Footnotes:

(15) Niessen, “A Biblical Approach to Dating the Earth,” 60.

(19) Moret, The Nile and Egyptian Civilization, p. 58.


If the Exodus judgement of 1446 terminated a Noahic millennium,beginning 2446, nothing outranks the Sed pole of Busiris as a signof the Noahic ideal, the dimension of gentile hope which outlivedthe three tragedies of Genesis 6-11. The Egyptian Sed festival wasthe sacred mystery of civilized paganism, a spiritual order whichstood, in some sense, until the God of Moses “judged the gods ofEgypt.” Erman describes part of the festival as follows:


“So far, we can understand the festival; it represents thejoyful moment when the dead Osiris awakes to life again,when his backbone, represented in later Egyptiantheology by the Ded, stands again erect. The fartherceremonies of this festival however refer to mythologicalevents unknown to us. Four priests, with their fists raised,rush upon four others, who appear to give way, twoothers strike each other, one standing by says of them,“I seize Horus shining in truth.” [(20 )Erman, Lye in Ancient Egypt, p. 279.]


The chief goal of pagan orthodoxy was to rationalize the eternalstrife between the two Noahic factions and to come to grips withthe pagan inability to win the favor of Yahweh Elohim. The pagansfelt a desperate need to stabilize instability and transform disfavorinto complacent hope. Enough elements existed in the Noahicheritage for the religious genius of Sidon to build a case for suchstability and to celebrate the solution in an appropriate ceremony.The four priests who rush against four others symbolize the victoryof half the Noahic octad over the other half, as though the two factions had divided the octad into equal shares. This conquest andsubordination pattern explains certain imbalances of prestige in theSumero-Akkadian pantheon where the Sun God of Sippar outranksthe shrineless and ambiguous Heaven God; the Air God Enlil (Canaan, aka Cush) eclipsesthe Storm God Ishkur; the Water God Enki rules a land vacatedby the slain Shepherd God; and the latter-day Sidon, as Gudea,contends for the War God of Lagash, rather than the Moon Godof Ur. The same pattern appears throughout the Egyptian pantheonwhere the Sun God reigns supreme, the Storm God degenerates intothe hated Seth, the nation “abominates a shepherd,” and Ptahoutranks both lunar deities, Zehuti and Khons.Because resurrection is the central apocalyptic reality and thepremise behind Christ’s Millennial Kingdom, it is impossible to ex-aggerate the importance of the Sed festival. Frankfort acknowledgesits synthetic power in holding together the quasi-millennial worldorder of the Pharaonic institution:


“In the five days of its duration multifarious connectionsbetween gods and king, land and king, people and king,were woven into that elaborate fabric which held societyas well as the unaccountable forces of nature by strandswhich passed through the solitary figure on the throneof Horus.”


He adds that it was sometimes celebrated thirty years after thePharaoh’s accession, an evidence of the Noahic premise, with its formal thirty-year generation. When we understand the depth of thisNoahic origin, we can appreciate the iconoclastic scope of Exodus12:12. Noah’s millennium lasted as long asit did because the resurrection motif of the Sed festival was neither polluted nor harmlessnor “prescientific” but a theocratic reality, attuned somehow to thefuture millennium of Christ. If the orthodox underestimate the valueof the Sed festival, they undervalue the revolutionary power of theExodus itself.

The Sed festival included the familiar theme of unification of thetwo lands of Mizraim, linked to a foot-washing ritual preliminaryto the main celebration. Frankfort describes a relief showing thisceremony at a Sed festival of the Pharaoh Neuserre:


“While the “Great Ones of Upper and Lower Egypt” kissthe ground before him, two courtiers of the rank of“Friend” wash his feet. They pour water from a vaseshaped like the hieroglyph sma, meaning “Union” andused especially for that basic rite of the accession, the“Unification of the Two Lands.” ( )


Yet these two lands originally belonged to the eternal antagonistsSeth and Horus. Whether we identify the two gods as Obal and Arphaxad I (Ra and Khons) of the Trinity panel or Seth and Horusmakes no difference. The “Unification of the Two Lands” suppliedwhat all civilized paganism demanded: the impossible dream ofmillennial reconcilation between the two spiritual factions of Noah’sfamily. Whoever created the Sed festival understood all aspects ofthe spiritual tragedy which had frustrated the Noahic hopes to achievea perfect millennium.

Because the feet are the formal end of the body, the foot-washingmotif symbolizes the phenomenon of teleiotes, or vocational “perfection,” the completion of spiritual preparations to undertake somelofty task. In a sense, the “perfection” of New Testament logicmeans “complete preparation” rather than sinlessness; but the sinlessperfection of the resurrection body is another premise behind Christ’sMillennial Kingdom. The Pharaoh of Egypt, in his absolutedespotism and sense of eternity, comprehended this demand formillennial perfection and, in his own way, achieved it. Foot-washingof the Pharaoh from a vase in the form of “union” was as precisea symbol as the Apocalypse demands. The eternal “Pharaoh” Jesuscannot enter His Kingdom until apocalyptic events such as the Battle of Armageddon have “United the Two Lands,” terminating thestruggle between Shem and Canaan forever. The Christian foot-washing ordinance of John 13, directed toward the Apostle Peter,signified the same principle of millennial perfection, as premisetoward “building the Kingdom,” under the limitations of the present age. It follows that the Christian “Union of the Two Lands”becomes the explicit reconciliation of Jew and Gentile in the Bodyof Christ.

At the same time that the Sed festival celebrated the millennialideal, the Egyptians also found ways to acknowledge the pagan realityof irreconcilability between the two factions:


“In the hieroglyph of the Sed festival, the two thrones appear, empty, in two pavilions placed back to back. Thismay be merely a graphic way of combining the two royalseats, which in reality stood side by side.”


Frankfort conjectures that the back-to-back construction of thehieroglyph may have resulted from graphic convenience. We offeranother explanation. The side-by-side construction of the ritualmatched the design of the Trinity panel; but the back-to-back designof the hieroglyph suggested the mystery of irreconcilability.The next detail of Frankfort’s summary confirms that this ritualcelebrated the epoch of the Trinity panel. The Pharaoh’s climacticact, during the festival, was to dedicate a field by marching swiftlyacross it is a “fourfold course according to the points of the compass.” He performed the first axis as King of Lower Egypt and thesecond as King of Upper Egypt. Aside from introducing the two godsObal and Arphaxad-I, the Trinity panel celebrates the epoch ofPeleg’s “division of the earth.” Both the Noahic prototype and Egyptian ceremony symbolize Christ’s inevitable act of dividing theMillennial earth into specific jurisdictions under the resurrectedSaints or “gods” of the Millennial Age:


“The king, by crossing this “field,” would dedicate it and,therewith, Egypt, to the gods and at the same time asserthis legitimate power over the land. This is strongly suggested by a Ptolemaic text from Edfu which refers to the“will” as the “Secret of the Two Partners”-Horus andSeth. Since their “secret” is the division of Egypt-withHorus predominant, and yet with a reconciliation of thetwo-it is likely that the “will” concerns the land as awhole and kingship over it, not merely as a basis for sometransaction such as the transfer of a field to some godor temple.”


In expanding the range of the ceremony from a concrete field to thewhole land, Frankfort stops at the borders of Egypt. In the FirstKish period, Mesopotamia was the world; the Egyptians regardedEgypt as the focal part of the earth; and the Millennial reign of Christwill cover the earth from the central “field” of Israel, that land whichhappens to intervene, geographically, between Mesopotamia andEgypt. '

Frankfort adds a further detail confirming the cosmic scope ofthe ceremony. At one point, he touches on a ritual with cosmicethnographic value, another essential of Christ’s Millennial Kingdom:


“The king then shoots an arrow to each of the four pointsof the compass; and he is, moreover, enthroned fourtimes-each time facing one of the four directions-upona curious throne base, ornamented with twelve lionheads.”

The Egyptian ceremony of the four arrows matches the Amerindian ceremony of the red and black arrows. A synthesis of the twotraditions implies the dispersion of the four variously colored racesof Noah’s family to the four quarters of the earth. Such dispersiondid not begin to occur until sixty years after “Peleg’s division,” thetribal order of Cernunnus in and around Mesopotamia. By dividingthe lion of Cernunnus, the Hamitic stock, into its basic red and whitesubdivisions, the Egyptians reckoned the tribes of Peleg’s systemtwelve, rather than eleven, in keeping with “Emperor Shun’s” division of the land into twelve provinces.(*) Because the rebel faction hadsucceeded in compelling all these tribes to speak Hamitic, during theprevious era, the base of Pharaoh’s throne is marked with twelvelion heads, as the foundation of world ethnology.

[* See “The Twelve Emblematic Divisions” paper. ]


Conclusions

It is a pathetic thing to witness fellow Christians who contentthemselves with earthly affairs and who adopt dull, skeptical,agnostic views of history. The Christian Rapture hope is ecstatic onthe face of it; and, no matter what sorts of adjustments we maketo mortal life in a hostile world, our minds should remain attunedto the sublime and extraordinary. What else can “heavenly things”mean except things pertaining to a sublime world beyond the limitsof everyday life? And how can one “set one’s affection on thingsabove” without active, meditative conceptions of sublimity or“aboveness”? What an ironic thing for Christians to disavow theRomantic heritage, in general, when their beliefs make them thesupreme Romantics of the world.

The challenge of the third millennium Flood lies passively and objectively in the text of Genesis ll. Without scientific scruples derived from outside the text, no one would bother to question thatAbraham was born only four centuries after the Flood. Christianscholars have yielded to such external scruples for cultural reasonsextending beyond the immediate issue. Equipped as we are withhistorical consciousness, the third millennium Flood offers us astrong dose of apocalyptic sublimity, a riot of extraordinaryphenomena: a Shem contemporary with Abraham, an internationalcommunity of Noahics princes, patterns of unique monogenetic incest and polygamy in the will of God, the wedding of paganism andorthodoxy in the same place and time, the sudden origin of culturesand civilizations through supernatural endowments of special power,and a principle of human deification in the will of God.Some of these phenomena contradict our sense of practical Christian ethics. Neither incest nor polygamy is lawful or profitable forany Christian.

The whole pattern of separatistic baptism warns usto distinguish between things sacred and profane; and the historicalblending of such things, in the second half of the third millennium,is morally troublesome. Some of the other points may seem conceptually ludicrous. Because the Book of Genesis does not state, in somany words, that Shem encountered Abraham, their contemporaneity may strike us as theologically meaningless and bizarre. Above all,the notion of charismatic endowment of Noah’s family and of thesudden origin of civilization violates some dogged principle of ourEuropean culture revealed in the Progress cult and Darwinism ofthe Victorian Age.

The missing dimension in such reactions to the Noahic world ishabitual apocalyptic thought. If we take the resurrection of the deadseriously enough to reason from it instead of toward it, these objections disappear. Noahic marital irregularities arose from uniquegenetic circumstances.Although these circumstances differ radically from the resurrection state, a serious understanding that redeemedhumanity can live and function without marriage (in the resurrection) enables us to conceptualize such revolutions in the past. TheChristian resurrection has the same sort of logical effect on Judaisticfears of compromised separatism, the illicit mixture of things sacredand profane. Because the resurrection of I Corinthians 15 isorganically total, it seals holiness into the physical processes of anorganically distinct “master race.” Once we comprehend this sortof transcendence, we perceive the separatistic struggle between Jewand Gentile as a condition of mortality and a product rather thana premise of Noahic history. To suggest that separatism existedamong the eight survivors of the Flood implies that Noah failed inhis attempt to form an ekklesia and that the salvation experienceof the Flood does not pertain to sacred history or to the ritual ofbaptism.

Above all, a serious meditative grasp of the resurrection enables usto appreciate the charismatic endowment and high privilege ofNoah’s family after the Flood. According to Revelation 5:10, resurrected believers have become “kings and priests to our God” destinedto “reign on earth.” The apocalyptic promise to the believers atThyatira includes “power over the nations” (Revelation 2:26). Oncewe take these promises to heart and connect them with the uniquestatus of the resurrection body, we can afford the luxury of an unbiased appreciation of Noahic privileges to form the same “nations”which resurrected saints are to rule “with a rod of iron.” We beginto feel familiar and easy in the company of the Pharaohs of Egyptor the feudal aristocrats of Europe or the angels of heaven. Suchpowers may scorn us today but can hardly afford to despise us inthe superhuman condition of the resurrection. Not only do we claimthe mighty promises of the Christian faith; but, in claiming them,we adopt the “powers that be” and the very pagan gods as genericbrethren of power, sharing, as all creatures must, in privileges whichan uncreated God chooses to bestow on them. The very words andimages of apocalyptic mythology pertain to us and belong to us, ina loosely cultural sense, through a Christ greater than all thePharaohs, a Christ privileged to reign, like them, over the fourquarters of a ritually subdivided earth.

NOTES


1.Revelation 14:6-7.

2.In Revelation 2-3, explicit repentance is a factor in five of the

seven churches of Asia Minor.

3.The definitive radical Shelley understood that theories of develop-

ment, in art, refer to mere extrapolative “fi1ler” between moments

of empowerment. The same logic applies to theories of general prog-

ress. “A Defense of Poetry,” Mahoney, p. 548.

4.Shelley, “Alastor” (11. 106-16), Ibid., p. 456.

5.Shelley, “A Defense of Poetry,” p. 539.

6.Scott features incognito monarchs (or the private lives of

monarchs) in Quentin Durward (Louis XI), Ivanhoe (Richard I), The

Talisman (Richard I), The Fair Maid of Perth (Robert III),

Kenilworth (Elizabeth I), and various novels on the seventeenth cen-

tury featuring the Stuarts. The possibility of a casual encounter with

a monarch lay at the heart of Scott’s creative enthusiasm.

7.Matthew 24:27.

8.Such is the theme of John Keats’ candid “Ode on Melancho1y.”

9.Deuteronomy 11:24.

10.The numinous beauty of Egyptian civilization is a spiritual fact

rooted in early postdiluvian charisma and reflected, for example,

in Jeremiah 4:20: “Egypt is like a very fair heifer, but destruction

cometh; it cometh out of the north.”

11.The Egyptian judgement on the firstborn obviously contrasted

with the Canaanite judgement of extermination.

12.Beyerlin, Near Eastern Religious Texts, p. 160.

13.A Sumerian legend of the Erech-Aratta [Isfahan, and/or Jiroft] War features the Erechite

ploy of withholding grain from Aratta [Isfahan, and/or Jiroft], mingling the issues of war

and sustenance in classic fashion. We have noted that the Moon God

represents nationalism and destructive power, prerequisites of war.

14.We have seen that the Water God stood for the world of

authoritative literature or propaganda. The resemblance between cer-

tain parts of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible is no coincidence.

15.The English and German words for “church” derive from a

Greek derivative of kurios, the familiar New Testament word for

“lord” applied to Christ as Lord. In this sense, a church is a kind

of house of lordship; and any focus of the postdiluvian “ka” of

human government is a kind of church. The separatistic aspect of

Noah’s church of eight yielded to a catholic or universal variation

of itself in the spread of lordship after the First Kish epoch. It must

be remembered that Jesus Christ, the Lord, is “head of all principali-

ty and power” (Colossians 2210).

16.Such is the implication of the foundational prophecy of Genesis

9:11: “ ‘Thus I establish My covenant with You: Never again shall

all flesh be cut off by the waters of the Flood; never again shall there

be a flood to destroy the earth.’ “

17.The standard date of 2166 for the birth of Abram fell 352 years

after Niessen’s Flood date of 2518; whereas Noah died 350 years

after the Flood (Genesis 9:28).

18.Niessen, “A Biblical Approach to Dating the Earth,” 60.

19.Moret, The Nile and Egyptian Civilization, p. 58.

20.Erman, Lye in Ancient Egypt, p. 279.

21.Frankfort, Kingshiu and the Gods, p. 79.

22.Ibid., p. 83.

23.Ibid., p. 85. 24. Ibid., p. 86. 25. Ibid., p. 88.

 

So is this a religion?

Is your dude a guru or prophet?

Are you an acolyte or disciple?

What level of devotion are we.talking here?

 

I can appreciate your exuberance, but I have other demands on my time, what say we pace this a bit, shall we?

I found a wiki bio on your guy Bryant:

I don't know how the mythology of Sumer (Sumerians) could be derived from the Hebrew Scriptures...since Sumeria predated the Hebrew Scriptures. That alone calls the first part into question.

Guys like Bochart (born in the 16th century!), Faber and Bryant, and if I must be truthful even my guy Hislop, are a product of the period of time when challenging religion was difficult - politically, socially, economically.

Keep in mind the times of these men, as all men are a product of their times.

Consider Isaac Newton...surely you would not dismiss good ol' Newton?...

Point being, were it not for Newton's uncanny mathematical ability he would be behind a pulpit, or relieved of his Fellowship at Trinity College. Even though he managed to avoid the pulpit, nevertheless he had to maintain certain appearances for the sake of his position and prestige. No matter what a learned man (or woman) thought in private during that period of time, they were obligated to uphold and defend the Church in any open and public communication (such as books).

So there was a bit of a fad for a couple hundred years or more throughout Europe at the beginning of the Enlightenment of finding (or even creating) Scientific justification and validation of the Bible. The one place this was not as much of a prevailing norm from authority, yet still prevailed upon by social norms and peer pressure was in the U.S. (separation of Church and State, still a very novel idea at the time). Newton was the exception, lesser learned men had to kowtow. Your preferred scholars had to kowtow (as did mine and why I take him with a grain of salt) because of the time and place they were writing in. Even Charles Darwin had to pay homage to the COE.

Now, *if* the motivation of the scholar was defense of the Church to begin with, then the sky would be the limit, and ideas that would not gain traction today were put forward in an effort to give the Church more "street cred" as it were.

Looking at the bios of your scholars seems to me they fit this latter category. I'm sure their intentions were good...but the old saying is that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

I see Bryant in particular, argued strongly *against* Troy being a real place, in spite of the myth. We all know how that turned out when Troy was actually found. I don't know if your professor or yourself are aware of some of the other archeological finds based in "myth," such as Jericho and Ur. So I don't dismiss the role of myth in history, the term "history" means something very different today than it meant a thousand years ago, or two thousand years ago. We still can't say with certainty that Plato's Atlantis is a real place or not...we are in the same position regarding Eden.

I think if you don't mind, I'm going to stop here, I have other things that require my attention. I will say simply and succinctly, any scholarship should be approached with a critically thinking mind. That includes my own. We'll see if yours bears scrutiny...but it will not be in one day.

PS, What animation studio did you work for and what animation have you done? I have family that grew up in N. Hollywood.

 

ref: Jacob Bryant - Wikipedia

I think this will give me the gist underlying all of the "research." If Jacob Bryant is emblematic of the scholarship combined into a thesis, I think I can forego a great deal of reading. Again, these men had the best of intention, but their scholarly resources were limited and necessarily slanted. In this quote alone, referring to Ham (aka Kham and other variants; the cursed son of Noah) I have seen to this point 3 or 4 at least conflicting scholarly assessments developed during this period of time. These conflicts exist even between your listed scholars. The "science" as it were, was embryonic and developing.

The title alone of Faber's seminal work on the subject should go far to establish what I wish to say here: "The Origin of Pagan Idolatry Ascertained from Historical Testimony and Circumstantial Evidence"

Circumstantial evidence is not the same as evidence. If circumstantial evidence were sufficient, then one is guilty until proven innocent, all that is required is an accusation.

To be fair...circumstantial evidence can help support genuine evidence, that is to say if a line of evidence is pointing in a particular direction, and there is supplemental circumstantial evidence continuing in that direction, typically that can sway a jury. But circumstantial evidence alone is not even supposed to be allowed in a Western Court of Law. Of the 4 scholars between us, two lived at the same time and a third lived long enough to see the other two...point being all 4 likely had access to the same pseudo-science material circulating at the time.

And since Faber and Hislop were contemporaries, I looked into Hislop's work again today for some refreshers and find that there have been a number of challenges to his assertions as well. Not knowing your guys like I know Hislop, I have to stay with him at this moment to flesh out my position here. At least Hislop made an attempt at linguistics, although according to some of the detractors he was basing much of his position on dated and unsubstantiated so-called knowledge that was rife in that era. Linguistics is like a greased piglet in the best of times, and these men did not have the benefits of archeology that has taken place since they wrote their signature tomes. These men did not have access to human migration maps, or DNA / genetic tracers, or other tools of the scientific trade at their disposal, and if they had they likely would have dismissed or chosen not to use any data that conflicted with their stated aims of reinforcing the Church and authenticating the Bible. Of the 4 scholars pointed to here between us, three were avowed Churchmen - arguably with an axe to grind that could prejudice their assessments, and only one was a "pure" anthropologist, though he did bequeath a sizeable endowment to a Church function at his death.

I am reminded of a thesis presented here years ago titled "Torah, Torah, Torah," which advanced the scholarship of Redaction Theory, and of the response written by a brilliant Orthodox Jew titled "Tilting at Windmills." tilting at windmills: a response to 'redaction theory' | Interfaith forums

Both authors exchanged ideas in the response, but the takeaway for myself was the concept that the Bible (or any religious text) need not be "scientifically truthful" to contain truth. There are lessons to be found in the corrections and contradictions, presuming of course someone takes the time to look into them to begin with. This is the basis of the Jewish oral tradition.

Science, and that is what the 4 scholars between us purport to represent, doesn't have that luxury. What science does have, ostensibly, is the opportunity to amend itself as new information becomes available. Having said that it is also true there are those who would cherry pick science in an effort to beat down religion today, but those individuals would not be true scientists, just as Churchmen who cherry pick science to support their religion are not wholly truthful either.

 

Who delineates "the fantastic?" Are you saying that if the legend of Mithras has him spring forth out of a rock on Christmas Eve, that it actually occurred? Or an infant Achilles gets dipped in a river by his mom (or one of the gods, I forget now) for invincibility, and a thumb covers his heel leaving one vulnerable spot...it actually happened?

That is where Hislop shines, in a general sense (he is not the only one). There are "archetypes," meaning universal themes that all humans relate to; love, life, the (successful) hunt, war, peace, prosperity, death, etc. And these themes were "anthropomorphized" beginning in historical times (or so it would appear), which means *after* the advent of agriculture.

Prior to written language it is difficult to say what people believed, verbal language has an incredibly short shelf life, but if the cave paintings all across Europe into the Levant and Asia, and a lesser extent in Africa, Australia and the New World are any indication, there was likely some form of sympathetic magic as a basis for their religious beliefs. By extension, most who study this period imply either some form of animism or ancestor worship, or some combination or similar. The animals depicted in the caves are quite well done; unlike the humans who, the seldom times they are depicted, are typically stick figures. These prehistoric artists had sufficient talent to depict humans, and yet chose not to. How does that play into your thesis?



Once the anthropomorphic representations of archetypal themes were invented (Sumer is the earliest I am aware of, and even then it was developmental), the overarching collection of "gods" did seem to transfer from culture to culture, but this is me speaking generally and from a Western bias, in that the Egyptians had essentially the same pantheon as the Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Etruscans, yadda yadda yadda. Sometimes names transferred (translated or transliterated), sometimes they didn't, but the thematic concepts on the whole did.

I can't speak knowledgeably on the ancient beliefs of African tribes, or the Island peoples of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, or the Asian nations. I think generally it would be relatively accurate to think tribal cultures on the whole favored a belief system similar to that of the cave dwellers - animism and ancestor worship. Frazer expands on this for the European Celtic and Teutonic tribes, including sacrifice (sometimes human).

The Agricultural Revolution brought radical changes to the human mind. Grain is not human food. Stated another way, humans did not evolve to consume grain. And yet *bread* has become so ubiquitous as to represent abundant food (Give us this day our daily bread...). And to this day many modern humans struggle with grain allergies...because grain is not human food. (Says he who eats bread practically daily.) Grain creates a chemical storm in the human brain, and this is evidenced by the explosion of knowledge among humans with the advent of agriculture; Astronomy, Math, Writing, the wheel, warfare (as an art), walled cities (as defense) and a long list of other things we take for granted today that were novel inventions five thousand years ago. Religious texts are the result of the Agricultural Revolution.

Why would you disallow the psychological aspects? They are imperative to daily life. History is built on psychological aspects, there is no point of history that isn't. Your thesis is built using psychological aspects, one of which is denial of anything that might contradict. It would be fictional to think otherwise.

No they don't. As an armchair anthropologist, I can state emphatically I do not hate anything regarding the development of humanity.

As for "literal" Genesis 10, which translation? As an English reader you and I both are hamstrung by language; doesn't matter KJV, Companion, Douay, Peshitta, Interlinear, Tyndale...whenever a language is translated to another, there is always loss of context and meaning. It is subtle. As an example, I've read in the past the Azteca and Maya had one word for precipitation. Here stateside we have a few; rain, sleet, snow, drizzle, hurricane. Studies of the Sami languages of Norway, Sweden and Finland, conclude that the languages have anywhere from 180 snow- and ice-related words and as many as 300 different words for types of snow, tracks in snow, and conditions of the use of snow.[10][11][12] (ref: Eskimo words for snow - Wikipedia) This is emblematic of just one hurdle linguists deal with routinely.

My best guess is you haven't read Genesis 10 in the original Hebrew, let alone with any understanding in context. So unless you have read it in Hebrew and do understand in context, an accusation of hate accorded to others over something you yourself don't comprehend is not at all scholarly, to be polite.

 

Matthew 18:16
But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed.

Deuteronomy 19:15
“A single witness shall not rise up against a man on account of any iniquity or any sin which he has committed; on the evidence of two or three witnesses a matter shall be confirmed.

2 Corinthians 13:1
This is the third time I am coming to you. Every fact is to be confirmed by the testimony of two or three witnesses.

Deuteronomy 17:6
On the evidence of two witnesses or three witnesses, he who is to die shall be put to death; he shall not be put to death on the evidence of one witness.
Source: https://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Three-Witnesses ; emphasis mine, -jt3

Your professor has built his thesis on one witness, only those who agree with that witness are allowed to participate or contribute.

By bringing in multiple witnesses, to corroborate each other's "testimony," the actual, factual truth becomes more clear - though the nature of the animal renders it difficult to reproduce in any sense or regard to begin with. But this is why I do not isolate myself to these narrow views, if there are no corresponding witnesses then the "myth" is likely fable. Fable can still teach a truth, and thereby still be truthful, simply not in the sense of factually or really true.

 

-Glenn Morton, The Migrant Mind: Eden and the Flood: A Historical Reading of Genesis 2-3 and 6-9

Not saying I completely agree, but he certainly provides more grist for the mill.

 

found this. did Uranus summer on curcubata?
peace

 

Welcome, and I must say your presentation is ambitious.
What are you basing your cultural ties on?

AN: I suppose any and all, everything we can get our hands on.
no Aboriginal Australians mentioned.

If you were to read all SIX volumes of John's work he mentioned them: I think I remember he connects them to the Tamils, then Dravidians by way of Sri Lanka, over a land bridge that's not there now - Adam's Bridge? Anyway, I prefer the DNA trail, which he was writing before we had such data.

Genetically they are related with Homo Denisova,...

AN: burial at Lake Mungo dated to 50K yo +/- (quite early, long before the Noahic Flood)...

AN: We consider all "dating systems" fouled... That's a whole other BOOK to write. I suppose we ("I") work in a vacuum and just disregard it. My new approach (Not my professors) is to work "inside" "within" mythographic parameters - whether IT can be said to be a type history or not, I personally don't care anymore.

Mythography is a ancient system and it seems to say something? So, I leave out modern science and stay solely within what the ancients said. It would be dishonest to force them to say things by modern standards - right or wrong, true or false not withstanding. We may be wrong in putting such a date on Denisovia.

On the other hand, I see a perhaps unintentional overlooking of the "lost tribes" of the Hebrews.

It could be that the tribes adopted the ancient names of the geography they went to- course the account in O.T. as written down 1000 years later, late 1st Mill.

 

Well, science is built on one "cultus" witness then. But, I consider the multiplicity of National witnesses (their heritages- mythologies) as more than one witness. No national mythography testifies to darwinism or so called scientific testimony. Maybe when dating systems are calibrated correctly, they will show Denisonvian man a late post flood human. he just might be a pre-flooder: but this depends on the flood as "deep" or "superficial".

I take a superficial flood along with an old earth system of strata. here again, I will not debate extra-mythographic data. It is unfair. Notice: As long as One favors the outside "world" with all their scientific claims, no one will synthesize a prehistoric history as john Pilkey has done. The man did not have space or time to Master every science in the modern fields. Something in common with the scientific realm. They have not mastered the sciences of the ancients nor even begun to listen to what mythographers have to say.

How can (almost) every nation on earth testify to a flood and a post-flood survival and origins?

Either every national culture is a liar or there is something wrong with "science" - carb 14 etc. It might be that carbon levels are different and give off false readings. It is based on a uniformatarian measure and it is known that the carbon they test is NOT all everywhere uniform. AI may be wrong. But when they take a stand that they are not and never wrong, i am suspicious.

Besides, I am a mythographer and NOT an historian, though I feather in mythography to explain history but only according to mythography. Seems this approach is the same with non-mythographic studies - they LEAVE OUT mythology as a separate and fictional data set.

 

RE: "Your professor has built his thesis on one witness, only those who agree with that witness are allowed to participate or contribute."

PLEASE first explain what you mean by interpreting my Professor as using only ONE witness? This is a bold statement considering yo8u are practically damning him to hell?

I propose we establish what "one" witness is.

Q. Is not a multitude of nations a multitude of witnesses? Being that they most all account for this traditional view? Notice it is with Christ-hating scientists that manufactured Darwinian principles and then made everything else fit this false model. Notice that THEY ALSO refer to ONE witness - Darwin (or actually, Wallace whom Charlie stole the idea from). So if you want to damn a single witness theory, add Darwinism to the curse.

Our JOB will be to show how both may hold many truths and synthesize it all together. If you leave out scientific darting systems, we will work together to formulate a relative chronology. First, it could be left out that Adam and Eve are so late in the game. Put your gap somewhere before the birth of Noah and I will,. be happy to work with you.

All dates from that point can easily be crammed into a short chronology as the Biblical chronology fits well in the Mesopotamian - if we also disregard the Mesopotamian's propagandized reign years- same with Egyptian.