A Very Historically Blind Christmas II: Father Christmas

Allow me to place this furry hat on your head, fill your hand with a warm cup of either mulled cider or eggnog, and lead you into the drunken revelry. Once you’ve had your fill of merry-making, let us warm ourselves by the fire and watch the snow fall outside the window. Settle in a comfortable chair as I share a remembrance of times long past and of the Christmases of yore. Those of you who joined me last year at this time may remember that we spoke of the ancient origins of this holiday. We spoke of midwinter festivities, of Saturnalia and the Kalends, as the origin of many traditions such as gift giving and decorating with greenery, and we looked back on Mithra and the celebration of Sol Invictus as the original December 25th holy day, long before Christianity placed Jesus Christ’s birth on the same day and made it a central part of their liturgical calendar, a day when the faithful are obliged to attend Mass. For much of the Middle Ages, the Christmas season was a time of conflict between ancient revelry customs and modern religious observance, with images of the Divine Infant, Santo Niño, the Christ Child, personifying the innocence and purity to which all should be aspiring in that time of debauched and licentious carousal. But the Christ Child was not not the only incarnation of the holiday. There is a long and rich tradition of the concept of Christmas being personified, of a figure embodying the holiday, whether it be a real person or a fictional figure, like a mascot, which of course we have today in the rotund and cherry-nosed character we all think of as Father Christmas. So refill your cup, cut yourself a slice of pie, and follow me back to Christmases past.

Stare into the flickering candle flame and follow it back to dawn of Christmas, to the midwinter celebrations of antiquity. Recall our discussions of Saturnalia, the mid-December Roman festival in honor of Saturn, which itself may have evolved from even older solstice traditions among farmers, and the Kalends, a kind of New Year’s festival that followed. We see the decoration of homes and public places with greenery, and the giving of gifts in the form of cerei candles. And as today, it was a time of merrymaking, but the way we think of making merry during the season today may be a bit more tame than Romans thought of it then. As the celebration represented the death inherent in winter followed by the rebirth of light and warmth and hope, as symbolized by the common sight of lit candles, it was a true carnival, in the sense of the word meaning “a farewell to the flesh.” It was an occasion of wild and riotous excess, with not only feasting and music and dancing, but drunkenness and gambling and promiscuity. Saturnalia and the Kalends were times when the norms of society were rescinded and social order upended. Slaves not only ceased their work; they sat at the head of their masters’ tables, raised briefly to a station in life they could never enjoy on any other day of the year. This tradition of inebriation and topsy-turvy social order persisted in midwinter seasonal celebrations long after the Fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity, with not only the rich and poor trading places, but also men dressing as women. Mid-December remained a time for debauchery and reversing the social order all through the Middle Ages and into the Early Modern period. In England, the custom of wassailing appeared, the word evolving from a Middle English toast to one’s health or wholeness. Wassail bowls were popular for communal drinking, and as wassailers often went house to house singing and offering drinks from their bowls or asking that their bowls be filled, it appears to be a forerunner of Christmas caroling. But eventually wassailing became for some an opportunity for thuggery in this topsy-turvy season, and wassailers were sometimes known to force their way drunkenly into homes demanding to be given food and drink. Considering this, as well as the wanton behavior that resulted in a boom of bastard September children every year, it is perhaps no surprise that Puritans outlawed Christmas celebrations in the mid-1600s, both in England under Cromwell and in New England, under the Puritan government of Massachusetts.

Photogravure of a drawing depicting a drunken reveler being carried away by his friends during the Saturnalia, c. 1884, via Wikimedia Commons

To better understand why Puritans might reject such Christmas traditions as further examples of the Catholic Church’s decadence, it must be clarified that such customs were not only practiced by pagans or the godless. The church also took part in these bacchanals, in the form of the Feast of Fools, a tradition among medieval clergy in Western Europe in which low-ranking clerics took over their churches, holding mock services in which they dressed as choir women, sang indecent songs, burned old shoes as if they were incense, gambled danced among the pews, drank themselves silly, and even went out upon the town making lewd gestures, laughing drunkenly, and generally raising hell and making spectacles of themselves. Beyond the debauchery, one particular tradition hearkens clearly back to Saturnalia, and it is here where we first begin to see the Christmas season embodied in a figure. At Saturnalia, a mock king was sometimes raised up to preside over the festivities, and we see this custom echoed throughout history. During the Feast of Fools, on December 28th, Holy Innocent’s Day, a choirboy was chosen to take over as bishop for the day, complete with small robes and jewelry made specifically for this so-called Boy Bishop. Likewise, during festivities of Twelfth Night, the end of the Twelve Days of Christmas, a cake was shared by all, and he who received the slice into which a bean had been baked was pronounced the Bean King and would then preside over the party, choosing a queen and naming other party goers to positions in his mock court. This tradition of mock kings at Christmas time is again further echoed in the late medieval and Renaissance custom of appointing a Christmas Lord to preside over the seasonal merrymaking. This Master of Merry Disports, as he was called, or otherwise, this Abbot of Unreason, or most commonly, Lord of Misrule, acted as a kind of host for all the dancing and mummery, the masquerades and feasts, leading motley groups of merrymakers through the streets and into churches, ringing bells and singing. These roles, filled by random men or children from a variety of socioeconomic classes, represent perfectly the embodiment of the old ways of Christmas, of topsy-turvy role reversal and reckless jollification. But for the history of the character that embodies Christmas as it is celebrated today, we must look at far more recent history.

Feast of the Bean King, c. 1640-45, via Wikimedia Commons

Today, when one thinks of Christmas personified, one doubtless thinks of Santa Claus, that jolly old gift giver with his own elaborate mythos. Now parents, if your children happen to be within earshot, you may want to put in earbuds so that they don’t learn all the secrets of Santa before he wants them to. ...OK, if the little ones are no longer listening, I’ll continue. To fully grasp how the fictional character of Santa Claus was invented, and what historical basis there may have been for him, we must actually begin in early 19th-century America and that inventor of enduring myths, Washington Irving. Many know Irving for his composition of Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a perennial Halloween favorite, and I spoke last year, around Columbus Day, about his role in creating some of the myths surrounding Christopher Columbus as well. Some may not be as aware, however, of his part in mythologizing the figure of Santa Claus. In 1809, Irving wrote A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, a satirical look at New York life narrated by a fictional Dutch historian. It was through this book that he introduced a character from Dutch folklore to American culture, the figure of Saint Nicholas, called Sinter Claas by the Dutch, a much venerated and mythologized Greek miracle worker whose cult had spread across numerous European countries since his death in the 4th century CE. Across most of Europe, he was the patron saint of childhood, but in Irving’s History of New-York, Knickerbocker presented him as the patron saint of New York, and thereafter, others took the idea and ran with it. The next year, 1810, one John Pintard, the founder of the New-York Historical Society and a big proponent of public holidays commemorating history, having helped establish the 4th of July, Washington’s birthday, and Columbus Day as holidays, decided to observe St. Nicholas Day, the feast day of the Saint, on December 6th. New York was an economically divided place that saw class unrest during the holidays, and he envisioned his banquet as an opportunity to resurrect the ancient topsy-turvy traditions, when the poor and the rich dined side by side. Pintard commissioned a poster for his banquet that depicted “Sancte Claus,” but St. Nicholas had not yet taken the form of Santa as we know it today, looking more like an ascetic clergyman, slender and barefoot in a tabard.

Broadsheet depicting St. Nicholas as “Sancte Claus,” by John Pintard, 1810, via Wikimedia Commons

Some eleven years later, in 1821, Irving revisited his History of New-York, and its second edition shows either some new inventions of Irving’s or reflects the changing image of St. Nicholas in America during the intervening years. Irving describes him smoking a pipe and bringing presents to children in a magical flying wagon that soars over the treetops. Then, St. Nicholas took his essential and final form a couple years later, with the December 1823 publication of the poem “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” in an upstate New York newspaper. For more than 150 years, this classic poem, originally titled “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” was attributed to Clement Clark Moore, who legend has it composed the piece during a sleigh ride into lower Manhattan to buy a turkey for Christmas dinner. A literary poet and classical scholar, Moore thought it mere doggerel and wouldn’t have his name attached to it for twenty years. However, in 1996, the literary sleuth Don Foster made the convincing argument that it was actually penned by judge and amateur poet Henry Livingston, Jr., whose surviving work far better matches, in tone as well as meter, the poem in question. But regardless of who wrote the poem, Santa Claus had arrived in all his particulars. Irving’s flying wagon full of gifts had become a sleigh, and it now was hitched to reindeer, each with a name. St. Nicholas descended through the chimney to enter homes by the hearth, where stockings had been hung for him to fill with gifts. Here we see the universal modern image etched forever in verse: the rosy cheeks and red nose, the droll smile and white beard, the rotund figure dressed all in furs. Only one particular seems to have been ignored in subsequent iterations: in the poem, he is a small elf, his conveyance a “miniature sleigh and eight tiny rein-deer.” As his legend grew, so too did his size, and the elfin element of the legend does survive, of course, in Santa’s army of elf tinkerers at the North Pole. With the small exception of his stature, the figure of Santa Claus seems to have leaped from the imagination of 19th century New Yorkers fully formed. But that is not in fact the case. They built upon an existing mythos surrounding the figure of St. Nicholas, and they incorporated elements from traditions surrounding other seasonal figures in European folklore, all of which we must explore in order to fully grasp the origins of the character we call Santa Claus.

The notion of St. Nicholas as an elf, and later of elves toiling in his service at the North Pole, seems to have been a clear syncretism of folkloric traditions. Elves and faeries have long been associated with Christmastime, stretching all the way back to Scandinavian antiquity. Icelandic tradition holds that the thirteen Jola-Sveinar, sons of a troll named Gryla, arrived in households one at a time during the Yuletide and departed just as slowly, playing pranks and stealing food and sometimes abducting naughty children. These Christmas elves are mirrored by the Swedish Jultomten, the Danish Julnissen, and the Finnish Joulutonttuja, Yuletide elves known to either reward or punish, for whom householders left out offerings of milk and porridge, as well as tobacco and booze. Over time these Christmas elves came to be represented much like modern day garden gnomes, white-bearded with a pointed hat, which seems to be a clear inspiration not only for the diminutive stature of the “jolly old elf” in the famous aforementioned poem, but also for the modern image of Santa Claus and our annual offerings of milk and cookies. Another influence on the image of Santa Claus was the English folkloric character of Father Christmas, also called Sir Christmas, a robust and bearded character dressed in a fur-trimmed robe that appeared in the late Middle Ages as a symbol of the season. Perhaps the most famous iteration of this character was the Ghost of Christmas Present in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. But not all the folkloric and mythological characters from which Santa Claus evolved were so recognizable. For example, much of his legend appears to have been borrowed from ancient winter goddess traditions out of Northern Europe. Longtime listeners may remember one of the digressions I took while discussing white lady ghosts in Germany years ago. That rabbit hole led me to the goddess tradition of Berchta, or Perchta, the spinner, a spirit who took great interest in matters of the household, a disheveled witch-like character who inspected homes for cleanliness, rewarding the diligent children who kept houses neat and punishing the indolent and naughty children who made messes. Berchta flew through the night skies during the Twelve Days of Christmas, accompanied by phantom creatures and ghost children, entering homes to make her judgment on the family’s industriousness, and to rock babies in their cradles. If the members of a household did not placate her by leaving out the remnants of a special dish, then it was said she cut open their stomachs as they slept and ate her fill of their undigested meal. There were numerous versions of this winter goddess Berchta or Perchta, including Hertha, Bertha, Holde, Holda, Holle, and later iterations like the German Frau Gaude. In some variations, the goddess was said to gain entry into homes via the smoke of a hearthfire. Therefore, we have in her a figure who enters houses through the chimney, who expects a treat to be left out for her, and who rewards or punishes children based on naughtiness.

Depiction of Perchta accompanied by spirits, 1863, via Wikimedia Commons

While all of these elements give context for the idea of a gift-giving supernatural spirit, an elf or gnome or goddess or witch, that visits children at Christmastime, how did such pagan traditions come to be associated with St. Nicholas, the namesake of Santa Claus? We know very little of the figure called St. Nicholas. He was born sometime around the late 3rd century in southwest Asia Minor, probably in the city of Patara, in the district of Lycia, and eventually became the bishop of Myra, in what is today Demre, Turkey. He survived the persecution of Christians in the area during the first several years of the 4th century, and he was said to have attended the Council of Nicaea, although some historians have found that his name did not start appearing on lists of those who attended the Nicaean council until the Middle Ages, after he had become a popularly venerated figure. While at first and for a long time, his veneration as a saint was limited to only his homeland, eventually it spread across Europe, with his feast day of December 6th probably memorializing the day of his death. Today, because of the vast legendarium that has grown around his life, he is without doubt the most famous saint in existence, and in these legends can be seen some seeds for the legend of Santa Claus as we know it today, as well as influences from some of the pagan traditions that already existed in the countries where his legend spread. But not all the stories about St. Nicholas can be seen to connect to the Santa Claus story. Some were merely the acts of a godly man, and some miracles attributed to him by his cult seem like the common fodder of hagiographers. For example, Nicholas of Myra is said to have confronted a group of thieves and convinced them to return their stolen goods, a story that led to “clerks of St. Nicholas” becoming a medieval euphemism for thieves. Then there were multiple tales of St. Nicholas stopping innocent people from being executed for crimes they did not commit. One involved standing up to Emperor Constantine when he wanted to execute three soldiers for disloyalty, and another had Nicholas intervening by seizing the sword of a soldier who was about to behead an innocent man. Furthermore, Myra being a port town, many prayers were directed toward safe passage for their sailors and the grain they carried. Many of the older traditions surrounding St. Nicholas as a wonderworker have him performing miracles at sea, as a guardian of seafarers. One legend tells of Nicholas calming a storm during a voyage to the Holy Land, and others suggested that St. Nicholas saved the lives of sailors who called to him for help, making him something of a patron saint of sailors. Indeed, some depictions of Nicholas have him riding a white horse that symbolized the froth of a cresting wave, much like the pagan sea god Poseidon, leading to speculation that the cult of St. Nicholas was absorbing pagan traditions long before the Middle Ages.

Many have looked for connections to Christmas traditions in the legendarium of St. Nicholas, and some of the connections that have been made are dubious, such as the claim that Nicholas was so young upon becoming bishop of Myra that he was called “the Boy Bishop,” a claim for which there appears to be no support beyond the fact that boy bishops were customarily chosen on St. Nicholas Day. But one begins to get an inkling of the eventual course his legends would take when one hears the tales that cemented his reputation as a gift-giver and patron saint of children. The central story of his legendarium in which the tropes of Santa Claus can be seen is the story of the three maidens. In this tale, which seems to have originated in the 8th century, long after his death, a young Nicholas is said to have become aware that three virtuous young ladies faced a terrible fate. They were of age to marry, but because their father could afford no dowries, he intended to sell them as prostitutes instead. Springing into action, Nicholas, who apparently had plenty of money, secretly crept up to the man’s house at night and tossed a bag of gold through an open window. The gold made it possible for the man to marry off his eldest daughter, and the next night, he was surprised to see another bag of gold fly through his window, enabling the marriage of his middle daughter. On the third night, when a third bag of gold was thrown into the house, the father raced outside and caught Nicholas in the act. He thanked Nicholas profusely, but Nicholas asked him to keep his gifts secret. Later versions of this story claim that Nicholas climbed onto the roof and dropped the gold through the chimney, which may in fact be a syncretization of the Nicholas legend with that of Berchta entering homes through chimney smoke. Some variations have it that Nicholas’s gifts of gold fell into some stockings that had been placed by the fire to dry, thus resulting in the tradition of Christmas stockings, but this too may be the result of syncretism, as some scholars have pointed to ancient Norse Yuletide traditions as the origin of Christmas stockings. During the Yuletide, Odin was said to ride through the skies leading his Wild Hunt, and children who filled their shoes with straw or carrots to feed Odin’s horse Sleipnir might in the morning find their shoes full of candy and gifts to repay their kindness. But regardless of whether these particular traditions originated from legends about St. Nicholas or were incorporated from pagan traditions, we do know that Nicholas was associated with charitable and secret gift-giving, such that, after his death, it became common when any gift was received from an unknown source to attribute it to St. Nicholas.

“The Story of St Nicholas: Giving Dowry to Three Poor Girls” by Fra Angelico, c. 1447-48, via Wikimedia Commons

Indeed, death did not halt the growth of St. Nicholas’s legendarium, for some of his most famous miracles were said to have been performed from beyond the grave. In one story, when a Christian man swore by St. Nicholas to repay a loan to a Jewish moneylender but then tried to cheat him, St. Nicholas took notice. The moneylender took the Christian to court, and the debtor brought a hollow staff full of gold, which he handed to the moneylender before swearing he had given back all the money to the lender--a technical truth since he had given the lender his staff to hold. Afterward taking back his staff, he went on his way, but the spirit of St. Nicholas caused a cart to run him down in the street and break open the staff, revealing the gold. The Jewish moneylender refused to take the money, however, because he did not think the man deserved to die, but when St. Nicholas raised the cheating debtor back to life, the moneylender converted to Christianity. After this, Nicholas came to represent fairness in financial dealings and became a patron of moneylenders. The three bags of gold he gave for the three maidens became three balls of gold, a symbol taken up by the Medici banking family in Renaissance Italy, and an icon that can be seen even today decorating the establishments of that most common of modern moneylender: the pawnbroker. Thus St. Nicholas has as part of his character a sense of justice, rewarding the good and punishing the wicked. Then there is the legend that truly cemented his reputation as a guardian of children: the story of the Three Students. This medieval tradition out of 12th-century France holds that a wicked innkeeper received three young men who were traveling through his region, and while they slept, he murdered them so that he could take their money. The innkeeper chopped the students into pieces and packed their dismembered corpses into pickle barrels, and he would have surely escaped justice for this heinous crime if St. Nicholas had not been watching from on high. The story tells us that Nicholas made the students whole again and resurrected them. Over time, these young students were depicted more and more as children, just as the three maidens were depicted more and more as little girls, and St. Nicholas’s reputation as not only a bringer of gifts but as a protector of children was complete. All he needed now were Odin’s fur coat and hearty frame and the twinkling charm of an elf, both of which he collected as his legend spread through pagan northern Europe.

From La Légende du Grand Saint Nicolas, published by the Société de S. Augustin, Desclee, De Brouwer & Cie., Paris-Lille-Bruges, ca. early 1800s, via StNicholasCenter.org

Today, St. Nicholas enjoys an odd position. Through the evolution of his legend and the corruption of his name, he has become a universal symbol of Christmas as Santa Claus, and many still celebrate his name day to remember him as a saint. However, the Roman Catholic Church has always had a conflicted relationship with Nicholas. His veneration predated any official canonization process, and it has been suggested that some in the church are put off by the saint’s popularity, especially insofar as he seems to have eclipsed the Christ child in his embodiment of Christmas. Indeed, one of his names, Kris Kringle, appears to have derived from Christkindel, a word for the baby Jesus, so it seems the gravity of the legendarium of St. Nicholas is such that it pulls in not only pagan traditions but Christian ones a well. It is a snowball that started rolling in the 4th century and has grown to become a massive, unstoppable folkloric force that assimilates everything in its path. Perhaps in an attempt to resist this relentless legend, as part of a 1969 revision of its calendar of saints, the Roman Catholic Church made veneration of St. Nicholas optional, but the saint remains an important figure in both the Anglican Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. In fact, in 1972, after reducing St. Nicholas’s position, the Roman Catholic Church gave the bones and other relics of the saint to the Eastern Orthodox Church. Today, the supposed remains of the saint who became Santa are kept in New York, a fact that the myth-maker Washington Irving and his fictional narrator Diedrich Knickerbocker would truly appreciate.

Saturday Evening Post cover by Normal Rockwell, 1920, via Wikimedia Commons

Further Reading

Elliott, Jock. Inventing Christmas: How Our Holiday Came to Be. Harry M. Abrams, 2002.

Flanders, Judith. Christmas: A Biography. St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

Gulevich, Tanya. Encyclopedia of Christmas. Omnigraphics, 2000.

Kelly, Joseph F. The Origins of Christmas. Liturgical Press, 2004.

Shadow of the Werewolf, Part Two: The Salve and the Sabbat

In the conclusion of this Halloween series, the full moon exerts its influence on my diseased mind, and I consider making a pact with the devil, or at least that’s what my accusers tell me, as they stretch me on the rack….

In the previous edition, I discussed the notion that werewolfery, as a concept, originated from a metaphor likening savage murderers and outlaws to inhuman beasts like wolves, but I also showed how, in Early Modern Europe, the metaphor became literalized, when genuine wolf attacks were blamed on supernatural beasts, or when men committed murders so foul that people thought they could not possibly have been perpetrated by a human person. As I indicated, this connection between terrible murders and werewolfism survived to modern times, when numerous killers have been compared to werewolves. Some examples I didn’t mention are Albert Fish, notorious child rapist, murderer, and cannibal sometimes nicknamed the “Werewolf of Wysteria”; Mikhail Popkov, a Russian serial rapist and murderer called “The Werewolf”; Vasili Komaroff, another Russian serial killer known as “The Wolf of Moscow”; Manuel Blanco Romasanta, Spanish serial murderer called “The Werewolf of Allariz”; German pedophile and cannibalistic murderer Fritz Haarmaan, “The Wolf-Man of Hanover”; and Michael Lupo, a sadomasochist, coprophile, and murderer who called himself “Wolf Man.” The connection cannot be denied, but there is more to the legend of werewolfism, which itself transformed in Early Modern Europe, during the prevalent witch trials of the era, into more than a metaphor that made terrible crimes easier to comprehend and their perpetrators easy to dehumanize. In the werewolf trials of the 1500s to the 1700s, the accused confessed, whether by torture or under the threat of it and guided by their interrogators’ assumptions and leading questions, to actually having transformed, and to having been influenced by the devil, either through a witch’s curse or a pact with Satan. So to wrap our minds around this, we must consider the idea that these “werewolves” truly believed they turned into wolves, leading us to question their mental stability, and we must look at the culture of Early Modern witch hunts, which is all bound up with the legend of the lycanthrope.

*

Long has the werewolf’s transformation been supposed to be governed by the cycles of the moon. While the origin of this element of the werewolf legend is not so easily ascertained, the fact that the lunar cycles have been associated with mental instability since antiquity may lead us to conclude that lycanthropy was considered a mental illness long before our modern clinical conception of it as a delusion. This stretches all the way back to ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who compared the mind to the moon, suggesting it influenced the blood as the moon does the tide, and Roman naturalist and encyclopedist Pliny the Elder, who asserted that the moon moistened the brain through a kind of nocturnal dew. Eventually, the idea evolved that the moon held sway over the fluids of that moist organ, the brain, in the same way as it influences the tides. Thus one word for insanity, “lunacy,” from which we get “lunatic,” as well as more informal terms like “looney,” as in “looney bin” and “looney tunes,” is derived from the name of the Roman goddess of the moon, Luna. This appears to be our best explanation for the addition of lunar cycles to the legend of werewolves, which would suggest that our modern understanding of clinical lycanthropy, characterized by the irrational belief that one transforms into an animal, may not have been that far from what constituted a werewolf during the monster’s Early Modern heyday. After all, many werewolf stories and accounts of werewolf trials spoke of the accused taking on the “likeness” of a wolf, which after all might not have been so great a likeness as we assume in today’s era of movie special effects makeup and computer generated imagery. Take, for example, the modern case of Bill Ramsey, a famous werewolf from 1980s England. A classic case of clinical lycanthropy, Bill Ramsey checked himself into a hospital believing himself to be experiencing come kind of medical emergency, but when he attacked the nurses, and later the responding police officers, he ended up in a jail cell, where he snarled and gnashed his teeth and reached out of his cell with hands forming claws, trying mindlessly to rake his fingers over his captors, as though he could slash them with his nails. If one looks at photos of Ramsey when in his lycanthropic state, one cannot deny a certain animalistic quality to his face: the snarling lip baring the teeth, the prominent brow low over the eyes, the hunching back and clawing hands. Might not such a transformation have been called a likeness, warranting the label of a werewolf? 

Various images of Bill Ramsey portraying his animalistic behavior.

Now add to such beastlike posturing the fur or pelt of a wolf, draped over the shoulders and head like a cloak, for often it was said that werewolves put on the the skin of a wolf in order to transform. One might think of this as metaphor, wearing a thing’s skin meaning putting on their form, but the stories are clear. Some werewolves claimed to have been given magical wolf hides, which they donned when they wanted to transform and doffed when they wanted to be themselves again. Take for an apt example the story of Jean Grenier, a 13-year-old, red-headed pauper known to beg around villages in the south of France who in 1603 was sometimes hired to tend sheep. Some children had recently gone missing, and Grenier came to the attention of authorities in the matter after some young shepherdesses reported his strange remarks. Two girls came forward to say that on different occasions, Jean Grenier had frightened them by telling them he sometimes went about in the skin of a wolf. By their telling, he was toying with them, saying that he killed and ate dogs while in the form of a wolf, but that he much preferred to kill other children and would eat them too. He said that the wolf-skin cape he wore in order to transform had first been wrapped around him by a mysterious black man named Pierre Labourant, whom he called the Gentleman of the Forest. When the girls he told about Labourant and his wolf-skin gift scoffed, he laughed menacingly and described him; he wore an iron chain round his neck, which he perpetually gnawed upon, and he lived in a land of darkness and fire, where everyone burned. One of the girls to whom he said these things afterward was attacked by an unusually small and reddish wolf. When questioned by authorities regarding his supposed crimes, Jean Grenier described falling upon and eating numerous children, and even stealing a baby from its crib and devouring it. The authorities checked the details of his confession, apparently given freely and not under torture, against the particulars from testimony by the children he had attacked and not killed and the families whose children had disappeared, and though they were entirely satisfied that Grenier had indeed committed the heinous crimes to which he confessed, even they considered his transformation a hallucination and believed he was not of sound enough mind to be executed, remarking on how dull-witted he was for a boy his age. Instead of the punishment usually accorded the dreaded loup-garou, they merely gave him over to the care of monks to be tutored in the ways of godliness. After seven years of life in the monastery, he confided that he still felt the urge to consume the raw flesh of young girls.

Now, think of a boy like Jean Grenier, declared intellectually challenged for his age. What is more likely? That a real man visited him and gave him a wolf-skin cape and told him that it would turn him into a wolf, or that his own imagination, encouraged by stories of the loup-garou, caused him to believe that when he put on a wolf pelt, he changed into a wolf, this delusion then leading to his ravenous and wild behavior? Like the other interpretation of the werewolf as a savage or outlaw, this idea of wearing a wolf’s skin making one a were-wolf also goes all the way back to ancient scandinavian folklore, as can be observed in the language of old Icelandic Sagas. As Sabine Baring-Gould shows, these often describe men wearing wolf-skins and thereby transforming into wolves in every way, except their eyes, which remained human. Indeed, some characters had the name Ulfhedin, which meant “wolf-skin coat,” while some were called Ulfhamr, meaning “wolf-shaped,” but this word hamr in other contexts also meant “skin or habit,” a word with cognates in French, Gothic, Persian, Sanskrit and Hindi, all meaning a leathery hide or some article of clothing. And we also see a link to madness or mental illness in this same place, for in old Norse mythology we see the berserkir, those legendary rage-filled warriors. Berserkers were said to be ulfhednir, meaning they wore wolf-skins over their chainmail, and the word berserker itself, which some scholars have argued means naked, or bare of sark—sark meaning shirt—may according to other scholars mean those who wore bear-sarks, or the skin of a bear. But whether they wore bear or wolf skins, it is clear that when a berserker put on the animal skin, he believed some transformation took place. Rage was a central aspect of the berserker; when in the habit of a wolf or bear, they went into wild frenzies and according to the folklore even developed supernatural strength and became somehow impervious to fire and sword. Descriptions of the berserker in his rage paint a clear picture of a wild man acting like a ferocious beast, his eyes glaring madly as he chewed on the shields of his enemies, frothing at the mouth. They are even said to have howled like wolves when rushing into battle. The fact that donning an animal skin appears to have initiated this descent into an animalistic state seems like a clear indication that the berserkir were very early examples of lycanthropes, as in ordinary men who acted under the delusion that they became animals. 

Woodcut depicting a berserker wearing the head and pelt of a wolf or bear, via Wikimedia Commons

The fact that even in 1603, at the height of Early Modern werewolf mania, a court suggested Jean Grenier wasn’t truly a werewolf and only believed he was stands as strong evidence for this explanation. And Grenier was not the only person put on trial for being a werewolf who confessed yet ended up not being believed or executed. Five years earlier, in a remote place in what is today the Touraine province in France, some men discovered two wolves feeding on something, which when the wolves fled into the woods turned out to be the horrifically mangled corpse of a 15-year-old boy. The men immediately went after the wolves, following their bloody paw prints, and just when they thought they had lost the trail, they found a frightened man hiding in the scrub. He had long hair and an unkempt beard, he was nearly bereft of clothing, and his hands, which had long and sharp nails like claws, were covered in blood and pieces of flesh. This man was Jacques Roulet, a beggar whose belly was hard and distended upon his capture. While in custody, he drank an entire bucket of water, and then he refused any food or drink. Before a court in Angers, he confessed freely that he had killed the boy, and that he had done so in the form of a wolf, which he took on by smearing a salve on himself. This salve had been given to him by his parents, he said, and the other wolves seen feasting on the poor child had been his brother and cousin, who also used the salve to become wolves. But his parents proved to be upstanding folk, and his brother and cousin had alibis. Moreover, his account of what happened when he used the salve was inconsistent. When asked whether or not, when he used the salve, he became a wolf, he answered, “No; but for all that, I killed and ate the child…; I was a wolf.” This response hearkens back to the metaphorical notion that “being a wolf” meant only acting like a ferocious animal, but upon further examination, Roulet indicated some transformation took place. To the leading question, “Do your hands and feet become paws of the wolf?” he answered yes, but when asked if his head and mouth became those of a wolf, he said first that he didn’t know, and then that his head remained as it was, but that he still used his teeth to eat children… for he claimed to have eaten many others beyond the boy they had found. While the court sentenced Roulet to death, an appeal based on his idiocy resulted in his sentence being commuted. In the end, Roulet spent only two years in an insane asylum. 

However, there was a further aspect to Roulet’s confession that begs exploration. He said that he had been to a sabbat, or a Black Sabbath, which during this era of witch-phobia and persecution of women accused of witchcraft meant he had been to a witches’ gathering. At such sabbats, it was claimed that witches danced naked, feasted and worshiped the Devil. According to the Compendium Maleficarum, sometimes the Devil came to them in the form of a goat and carried them bodily to the sabbat, while in other instances, the witch attended only in spirit, which they accomplished by smearing a salve on themselves and then lying down on their left sides. Here we see the element of the salve appear, a common thread throughout many werewolf tales, as we saw in the tale of the Gandillon family and Jacques Roulet, and also in the story of Jean Grenier. Though I didn’t mention it, Grenier claimed his Gentleman of the Forest gave him both a wolf-skin cape and a pot of salve, and that he used them together. So folklore or church propaganda about witchcraft is present everywhere in cases of accused werewolves, whether because the authorities led the accused, through torture or the threat of it, to give the kind of confession they expected, about sabbats and pacts with Satan and gifts of wolf skin and salves, or because the accused, who perhaps had committed some atrocity or were simply so unwell in their minds that they believed they had, incorporated the witch lore into their delusions. Looking at the works of demonologists of the day, as Montague Summers did in his book The Werewolf of Lore and Legend, we see authors trying to reconcile the notion of such a magical transformation with logic and reason. So in 1580, French demonologist Jean Bodin argued that having wounds like cuts or bruises on their bodies that correspond with those received in their other forms proved witches and werewolves made a physical transformation, while in the 15th century work Flagellum Maleficorum, it’s argued that no real transformation takes place, but rather that a demon would possess a wolf and then enchant the senses of a man to make him see the actions it took and believe he was doing those things himself. Likewise, in the Malleus Maleficarum, it is theorized that Satan took hold of a wolf, causing the wolf to do all that the witch wished to do in that form while transmitting the acts done into the mind of the witch, and then just to complete the illusion that the witch had actually transformed, placed wounds on the witch corresponding to those the wolf had received.  Similarly, theologian Bartolomeo Spina’s 1523 work Question of Witches suggests no actual physical transformation occurred, but that witches might curse a man to believe himself transformed by creating an illusory wolf form that covers his body, such that others see a wolf, and the victim sees himself as a wolf, but when attacked, weapons pass right through the illusion to harm the man within. 

Scene of nocturnal circle dance at a witches' sabbath, via Wikimedia Commons

One can see, by reading between the lines, that the culture of the witch-hunt pervaded thought in Early Modern Europe, not only among the uneducated and superstitious but among the learned as well, who struggled to make the concept of werewolf transformation conform to reason. Let us look to a further case of alleged werewolfism frequently held up by such writers as an apt example and apply their views in our analysis of it. In 1573, after a rash of wolf attacks on children that had been blamed on a loup-garou that some witnesses claimed to have seen, the Court of Parliament at Dole, in the Franche-Comté region of France, authorized the citizens of the affected villages to gather weapons and engage in a massive hunt for the werewolf that had carried off their children. It was some time, however, before they found a man to accuse. On a dark November night that year, some peasants returning home from their daily labors heard a child crying and a wolf baying in the woods, and investigating, they found what most thought was a wolf attacking a young girl, but some among them thought they recognized in this creature’s face the features of a certain hermit known to live with his wife in a hovel outside Amange, a stoop-backed man with deep-set eyes beneath bushy brows. His name was Gilles Garnier, and he was no friend to anyone, especially because he spoke in such a patois that few could understand him. After another little boy went missing in the area, the authorities brought in Garnier for questioning, and under torture, extracted the following confession. He said he had been out hunting for small game in the forest, upset because he could not provide for his family, when a figure approached him, some kind of spirit, he seemed to suggest, though his accusers took it to be a demon or the Devil. This figure offered to make hunting easier for him by giving him a salve that would turn him into a wolf. Thereafter, in the form of a wolf, rather than hunting small game, he chose to fall upon children, killing some four or five little girls and boys, eating their flesh and bringing some home to his wife for her own sustenance. With his confession in hand, the authorities had the hermit dragged through the streets to his very public execution, where he was bound to a wooden stake and burned alive.

Now, obviously the best explanation of the Garnier case is that the wolf seen was not Garnier at all, that it was just a wolf, that the witness was mistaken in recognizing him, and that this unpopular hermit was being persecuted, but let us for the sake of understanding the witch-hunt culture apply the logic of his contemporaries. Gilles Garnier could not be said to be asleep somewhere sharing the vision of a possessed wolf, for his face was recognized in the beast. This would seem to support a more physical transformation, but an incomplete one, in which there was no wolf’s head, even though the wolf’s jaws and teeth would seem to be necessary for such attacks. So perhaps this better supports the notion of a black magic illusion, an illusory form that for just a moment faltered, giving the briefest glimpse of Garnier’s face beneath. The fact that at least one of his victims was said to have been strangled to death before he was eaten would work with this conception of the transformation, for the wolfish form, including the claws, would only be an illusion obscuring the hermit’s own hands. But another instance raises further questions. Witnesses claimed and Garnier confirmed (under torture) that he had once seized a boy of about 12 or 13, killed him, and dragged him into the brush to eat him, but that he had been interrupted by some men. These men claimed that, when they happened upon him, he was simply a man and was in no way transformed. Now… another contemporary thinker, 16th century French poet Jean de Sponde, in his own discourse on werewolfism, occasioned by his analysis of Homer and the incident of Oddyseus’s men being transformed into pigs, raised a different kind of idea, rooted in the notion of herbalism as sorcery. He states that many in his time doubted that the physical frame of a man could be changed into that of an animal, and rather thought it more likely that their senses had been deceived, perhaps through the application of some kind of herb. He specifically mentions Haitian herbs that drive men mad. Jean de Sponde’s point is that if herbs can be used to control a mind, then perhaps they can be used to control a body, as well, and to physically change it. This may strike us as baseless and unscientific speculation today, but it raises the interesting notion that supposed werewolves like Gilles Garnier had merely been dosed with some kind of hallucinogen. 

A wood cut depicting a werewolf transformation or the hallucination of one, circa 1722, via Wikimedia Commons

In considering the idea that werewolves were perhaps not non compos mentis but rather under the influence, one must be drawn to the common denominator in so many of their stories: the salve, the ointment or unguent that is given to them by strangers who tell them to smear it upon themselves in order to transform. The lore and propaganda about witches in Early Modern Europe had it that witches themselves used such salve, and I’ve spoken about it before. It was called hexensalbe, or witch salve in German; also buhlsalbe, demon salve, and flugsalbe, flying salve, for this ointment, it was claimed, was what made it possible for witches to fly on their brooms, a claim that to a modern mind suggests that their “flights” were only ever hallucinations, if they indeed believed them to have occurred and weren’t merely coerced into confessing to them. In Latin, it was unguenta somnifera, sleeping unguent, and unguenta sabbati, or sabbat unguent, for this ointment, applied before sleep, allowed the witch to travel in spirit to the black sabbath, there to worship the devil. But of course, again, to a skeptical modern mind, this would suggest that any accused witch who really believed he or she had made a nocturnal spirit journey to a sabbat, who wasn’t just saying it had taken place because his or her accusers demanded it, was actually describing a vivid dream or hallucination. At the time, it was asserted that the main ingredient of witches’s ointment was the fat of dead babies, but today it is more commonly argued that it was a mixture of psychotropic herbs like jimson, hemlock, mandrake, belladonna, and wolfsbane, which applied as a salve to the skin could cause hallucination. The first mention of its use was by Homer in antiquity, when Hera smeared ambrosia on herself to enable her extraordinary flight and descended from Mount Olympus. This substance does not appear to be a myth. Rather, during Early Modern witch hunts, many of the women accused of sorcery and consorting with the Devil were actually herbalists, healers, practitioners of a naturalist folk tradition stretching back into antiquity, who may have also enjoyed the recreational or ritualistic use of psychotropic herbs. Now, of course, there were also many accused witches who did not fall into this category, but they still had some things in common: most of those accused of witchcraft were women with a power others didn’t understand or trust, who were disliked and feared because of it, and considered apostate or heretical by a church that didn’t recognize their practices. If such herbalists existed and gave pots of this ointment to others, telling them it had the power to transform them into animals, this could offer an alternative explanation for werewolfism.

In our final illustration, we will look to Besançon, France, where in 1521 the Inquisitor-General heard the testimony of two men from Poligny accused of being werewolves. Pierre Bourgot, a shepherd, told his story first, beginning on New Years Eve, 19 years earlier. He said a storm had scattered his flock, and while searching for them, three horsemen approached and assured him that their master had gathered his flock and would see to their safety and even give Pierre money if Pierre would serve him. Afterward, finding his flock nicely collected, Pierre was tempted by the offer and rendezvoused with them again, at which time he learned that their master was the Devil. Nevertheless, he rejected his faith and kissed the cold and corpse-like hand of this servant of Satan, whom he said was named Moyset. For two years, Pierre never entered a church, and he no longer had a fear of wolves preying on his flock, for the Devil protected them. Only when he had forgotten his pact and resumed attendance at church did he meet his fellow accused, Michel Verdun, who had also been initiated into the service of Satan, not by Moyset but by some other unearthly demon. Michel brought Pierre to the woods one night, where some others were dancing by the light of green tapers that burned with a blue light. Still foolishly believing that he might obtain the money promised him so long ago by Moyset, Pierre did as Michel said and smeared himself with an ointment, which caused him to grow fur and fall on all fours. His hands and feet were transformed into paws. He was a wolf, and his initial horror at the fact only subsided when replaced by his delight with the incredible speed at which he could travel. Afterward, when their masters gave him and Michel their own supplies of the ointment, they would frequently go together on nocturnal runs in their wolf forms. Eventually, the form of the wolf began to encourage savage behavior. Pierre attacked a boy of about six or seven, but the boy fought him off. Then he and Michel both attacked a woman who was out gathering peas and killed both her and a man who came to her aid. Thereafter, he claimed they began to attack and eat children, a girl of four and another of nine who was engaged in weeding her garden at the time and begged him to spare her. 

A woodcut of witches preparing their magic salve, circa 1571, via Wikimedia Commons

The story of the Werewolves of Poligny may be the best illustration of all our competing explanations. If they truly had been given a hallucinogenic salve, then it is reasonable that a shepherd who was afraid of wolves would in his mind transform himself into the creature he so feared. And as for who gave him the salve and why, perhaps it was not demons but rather herbalists who liked to dance in the woods by taperlight, who had seen his anxiety over his flock and sought to better his life through their folk healing. The fact that it went awry and that he thought he had become a wolf and then was driven to kill may indicate more of a psychological condition, such as clinical lycanthropy. And even their confessions showed an inconsistency regarding whether a real transformation had taken place; some of their victims had been strangled or had their necks broken by Pierre while in his natural human form. So perhaps, then, they were simply viewed as terrible murderers, as outlaws that should be killed as one would kill a savage wolf. Moreover, Pierre Bourgot and Michel Verdun confessed under torture, as did so many others, so their interrogators surely might have encouraged them to characterize those who gave them the salve as servants of Satan, or they may have coerced an entirely fabricated version, inventing the salve and the sabbat themselves through leading questions. Indeed, the legend has it that Michel Verdun was first arrested because, after a wolf attack in Poligny, someone followed a trail of blood to Verdun’s door and found him injured, his wife dressing his wound. Clearly this could have been a mistake, for if Michel was wounded for whatever reason, he may have left a trail of blood to his door, or it may have been a purposeful act of revenge by someone who disliked Verdun and wanted to see him stand trial as a werewolf. Either way, under torture, Verdun named two others, the aforementioned Pierre and a third, Philibert Montot, who, it is interesting to note, refused to confess to being a werewolf according to some tellings of the tale. This did little to help him, though, for all three were burned alive. So in the end, how should we view werewolves? Was it a superstition explaining the attack of a rogue wolf, a metaphor for criminal behavior, a mental illness, a vivid hallucination common among shepherds who used herbal folk remedies, or simply an extension of the mania of witchcraft trials in Early Modern Europe that claimed tens of thousands of lives?  One might argue it is all these things, but they do not all work logically in conjunction, some cancelling out others. Therefore, unsurprisingly, we are left with the by now quite familiar uncertainty that characterizes much of history.

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Further Reading

Baring-Gould, Sabine. The Book of Were-Wolves: Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition. Dover, 2006.

Summers, Montague. The Werewolf in Lore and Legend. Dover, 2003.

Shadow of the Werewolf, Part One: Killer on the Road

Even though they warned me at the tavern that I must not walk abroad this night, yet must I make my way across these misty fields… but what is that I hear, in the darkness beyond the treeline… snapping twigs… a quiet snarl? In this edition of Historical Blindness, the werewolf stretches the bristly fur upon its neck, digs its inhuman claws into the cold earth and lets loose an unearthly howl in the night. But wait, you may ask, how do werewolves fit into the theme of Historical Blindness? Well you may be surprised to learn that from the 15th to the 18th centuries, werewolves were not thought of as a horror trope or as just a scary story told to thrill children. They were considered a real evil, lurking on shadowy pastures and byways, killing women and eating children, especially in France, where the werewolf is known as a loup-garou. But where did this belief originate? How did the notion of a man transforming into a wolf enter folklore, and what about the other aspects of the lore, like its connection to the cycles of the moon and its vulnerability to silver bullets? And what basis in fact might there be for the myth, such as illnesses both physical and mental? And are werewolves a thing of the past, or do they continue to exist today?

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Mankind has always feared the wolf. If you’ve never seen a genuine wolf, and instead are picturing a big dog like a husky, it may be difficult to fathom the sheer size and speed and ferocity of the wolf. From the Middle Ages to modern times, gray wolves were, far more than any other animal, the worst enemy humanity had in the natural world—not the only creature to still prey upon us, but certainly the most successful of our predators. Let’s take France as an example, for as opposed to the British Isles, where wolves were long ago killed off, prior to the 19th century, France had as many as 15,000 wolves, one of the biggest feral wolf populations in Europe. And there is a reason that wolves were hunted in France to near annihilation by the mid-20th century. Children would go missing, grumblings would be heard of a large and shadowy creature seen loping through the night, and then an attack would be seen, the culprit revealed, such as the occurrence on the 8th of October 1749, when 7-year-old Marie was seen snapped up in her own doorway by a wolf, her remains found in a field, where the wolf had left only her stomach, one arm, and her head behind. And it seems that villages in every province of France likewise suffered from such awful wolf depredations. Little wonder, then, that they sought to wipe out the wolves at their doorsteps. But sometimes, it seems, fear of a wolf on the loose became more of a panic or mass hysteria, as can be seen in the case of the Beast of Gévaudan.

In 1764, in a rural area of southern France then called Gévaudan, 14-year-old girl Jeanne Boulet stood in a pasture tending her flock when something awful fell upon her and murdered her in a most gruesome manner. One month before, another shepherdess had been saved when her flock encircled her in defense against a lupine beast that appeared more interested in her than her livestock. And a month after Boulet’s death, another girl was attacked and grievously wounded, but survived to describe the beast that had set upon her: it was reddish brown with a dark stripe down its back, like a wolf if wolves could be as large as a donkey or a bull, but with claws and jaws unlike any wolf’s. Soon the number of dead attributed to the Beast skyrocketed, with a hundred killings blamed on the creature over the next few years. It was said the Beast ripped off the heads of the young children it took as victims, and then it drank their blood from the spouting stumps of their necks, leaving behind nothing but a jumble of bones. The tales and the mounting body count soon caught the attention of King Louis XV. His kingdom was in a shambles at the time. After defeats in the Seven Years’ War and the loss of its colonies abroad, the country’s economy was in the doldrums, and though as a sophisticated city dweller he may have thought the monster to be the product of the imaginations of backward provincial folk, he may have seen in the threat of the Beast a unifying cause, something to bring the country together. He offered a reward equal to a year’s salary for most men, and he organized a massive hunt, 30,000 men strong, some of whom were royal troops but the majority of whom were volunteers. They poisoned the corpses of the Beast’s victims and left them out as bait, and they dressed as women, the Beast’s favorite prey, to lure it out of hiding, and they had some few close encounters with a wolf that they shot but never killed, or at least never tracked down the body after it fled. Eventually, the king put his own Gun-Bearer and bodyguard in charge, who thereafter eventually slew a large wolf to great fanfare, and the attacks ceased, but only for two months, after which the deaths continued, with as many as 35 killings in 18 months.

Artist’s depiction of the Beast of according to eyewitness descriptions, via Wikimedia Commons

The king viewed the matter as having already been resolved and gave no further aid, so the locals found themselves alone in battling the Beast. Finally, in 1767, a farmer named Jean Chastel shot and killed another creature believed to be the Beast, and the bloody depredations ceased. Just what the Beast of Gévaudan was remains a mystery. The creature killed by the king’s Gun-Bearer was described as a large wolf, which doesn’t exactly match the descriptions given by the Beast’s victims. But the creature killed by the farmer Chastel was something different. Some suggest it was an African striped hyena, based on the fact that a stuffed specimen of such a creature appears to have been displayed in France’s National Museum of Natural History just after the time of the Gévaudan slayings. In fact, it appears that the farmer Jean Chastel’s son had kept a hyena in his menagerie, leading to suspicions that the Chastels had kept the Beast themselves and let it loose to terrorize the countryside, only to later kill it and play the part of the heroic Beast slayers. Then there is the theory that it was a lion, as a lion’s reddish coat and claws and tail would better match the descriptions given by victims. But the most plausible explanation is that the attacks were perpetrated by a pack of man-eating wolves, perhaps a wolf and its mate and whelps. So after all, is this even a werewolf story? Clearly the people of the region viewed the Beast as supernatural or preternatural, or at least thought it was unlike other wolves, and some claimed that it walked on two feet like a man. The tradition of the loup-garou was well-established by the late 17th century, so certainly among the many whispered legends of the Beast of Gévaudan, there must have been some that suggested it was a werewolf. But what makes this one of the most prominent werewolf stories in history is that it appears to be the origin of the legend that silver bullets kill werewolves.

In the many retellings of the story of the Beast of Gévaudan, different versions have it that Jean Chastel shot and killed the Beast with bullets cast from a holy silver amulet. While this an absurd embellishment, there is some primary source evidence that, among the many bullets fired at the Beast, some were made of silver. One Madame de Franquieres wrote in a letter to her daughter-in-law about the fear gripping the region, how no one dared to work alone tending sheep in the fields, how everyone traveled only in large groups, how the Beast eats only human flesh, preferring the heads and stomachs of men and the breasts of women but when hungry would consume a person entirely. She writes, “We essayed to shoot him with balls of iron, of lead, of silver. Nothing can penetrate.” Why might they have tried to shoot him with silver bullets? Either they were just trying every material at hand, or they believed it may be especially effective against a loup-garou. Historically, silver weapons have not been thought to be more effective than iron or steel. Some may argue by pointing to what the Oracle at Delphi told Philip of Macedon, father of  Alexander the Great, that “[w]ith silver weapons you may conquer the world,” but actually this appears to have been a suggestion to bribe rather than destroy those he wished to subjugate. But bullets of silver had long been established in folklore as artillery magically capable of killing a certain other bogeyman… or woman: the witch. Usually these were items with some sacred quality, such as a silver penny with a cross on the face of it, or a bullet cast from the silver of a church bell, but eventually, the Brothers Grimm had their protagonists killing a witch with normal silver buttons ripped from their garments. So this element of folklore surrounding witches seems to have migrated to that of the werewolf, and for good reason, since werewolf lore also has a strong connection to witch lore, but I’ll get to that. For now, let us focus on the element that is missing from the story of the Beast of Gévaudan: the actual transformation, a human being changing forms to become a wolf.

Another story may illustrate well this most central notion of werewolf lore. Some 80 years prior to the depredations of the Beast of Gévaudan, another wolf had turned from preying on livestock to carrying off and devouring children. In 1685, in the Principality of Ansbach, a city in modern day Bavaria, the wolf killed so many peasants that many believed it could be no ordinary animal, and some whispered that it was actually the new form taken by their old Bürgermeister, a cruel and universally hated man who had recently died. Thus, they viewed it as a man who had become a wolf in order to prey upon his fellow man, a loup-garou or werewolf. The townsfolk hunted the wolf with hounds and flushed it out of the forest, leaving it nowhere to hide but a well, into which it leapt and trapped itself. After killing it, the hunters dragged it through the streets of Ansbach and, gruesomely, attempted to make it transform back into its true form. They chopped off its snout and dressed it up like a man, complete with a wig and a mask and a false beard. Then they raised this dressed up animal carcass on a gibbet and scorned it as though it were the very Bürgermeister they despised. With this tale, we have a better sense of the French belief that the wolves preying upon them may have actually been men who had transformed into wolves, and yet we are still far from our modern day conception of a werewolf, which is not a reincarnation of a dead man, but rather a living man who changes back and forth—an all the more bothersome notion when one thinks of someone walking among us who is capable of killing as viciously and savagely as a marauding wolf. And if we were to take these two cases alone, the wolves of Ansbach and Gévaudan, we might be tempted to dismiss werewolves as nothing but simple gray wolves to which superstition had attached some further, paranormal attributes. But the Wolf of Ansbach was not the only time a supposed werewolf faced the unforgiving justice of European townsfolk, and in most cases, they were quite alive and had stories to tell.

The Wolf of Ansbach, dressed as the Bürgermeister and hanging from the gibbet, via Wikimedia Commons

Among living werewolves brought to trial, there was still this question of whether they entered and controlled the body of a wolf through some sort of possession of the spirit or whether their own bodies actually changed into that of a wolf. From the 16th to the early 18th centuries, in places such as Livonia and Estonia in the Baltic region of Europe, the common folk believed more in werewolves than they did in witches, but in order to put a person on trial for committing crimes in the shape of a wolf, they conformed to the established norms of witch trials, torturing defendants until they admitted to having made pacts with the devil. One such Baltic werewolf trial illustrates the distinction made between a werewolf who possesses a wolf and one who transforms into a wolf. In 1651, an 18-year-old boy named Hans confessed before an Estonian court to having preyed upon people as a werewolf for two years. In his confession, the authorities wished him to clarify if his soul was transmuted into the body of the beast, or if it was his body, and they had their answer when Hans told them that once, after having been attacked by a dog while he was the wolf, the dog’s bite mark remained on his human leg. Hans told them that a man clad in black had bitten him, which led to his eventual transformation and ability to shapeshift. For the court, this was tantamount to a confession of a pact with the devil, so they executed young Hans on no further evidence than this dubious confession. But for our purposes, we have here a human who turns physically into a werewolf, even carrying over to his natural form the injuries his wolf form sustains, and the fact that it was a bite that turned him makes this, perhaps the historical werewolf claim that conforms most with our idea of werewolves today.

But regardless of how we conceive of werewolves today, where did the notion of a man transforming into a wolf originate? To find this, of course, we must look to antiquity, but I think we can do without the tedious sifting through ancient writings that speak of men being transformed into other animals, for example, when Circe changes men into pigs in the Odyssey, and focus only on myths that seem more relevant to the werewolf legend. This allows us to home right in on Lycaon, the myth surrounding whom many claim is the origin of the werewolf legend. In Greek mythology, Lycaon was the human king in Arcadia, to whom Zeus made a visit in the form of a man. There are many versions of the myth, but in most, it is said that Lycaon doubted Zeus’s godhood and devised a test. He would kill a child, in some versions his own son, and mix some of the victim’s entrails into a dish that he would serve to Zeus, and if Zeus truly were omniscient, he would know what he was being served. As it turned out, Zeus did know and punished Lycaon by transforming him into a wolf. It is hard to view this myth as anything other than an instructive or cautionary fable, though, for the king’s very name, Lycaon, is derived from the Greek word for wolf, lýkos (λύκος), which is also the root for lycanthropy, our word for werewolf-ism. So clearly, the character of Lycaon was an invention named for the animal he would become later in the narrative. Or if based on any grain of truth, his name must have been changed to better suit his fate. And the lesson in his story seems to be one against barbarism, warning against the savage practice of cannibalism and the evil of murder, making his punishment apt, for men who murder and eat their victims surely are no better than wild wolves who creep through the woods at night. Elsewhere, when ancient writers mention people who transform into wolves, this allegorical reading can also provide some perspective. For example, Herodotus and Pomponius Mela both mention that the Greeks and Scythians believed that a certain remote tribe, the Neuri, were sorcerers who had the ability to change into wolves once a year. When interpreted in the same way as the Lycaon myth, these rumors about the Neurians could simply be suggesting that they were murderous savages, or even that they practiced cannibalism.

Zeus turning Lycaon into a wolf, via Wikimedia Commons

The notion that the entire idea of a werewolf evolved from this practice of labeling someone capable of barbarism or guilty of crimes against humanity as being like a wolf, or to literalize it, as being a wolf, is supported by the etymology of our words werewolves. Rather than give the impression that I’m playing the amateur etymologist, which I have so recently disparaged, I must credit 19th-century antiquarian scholar Sabine Baring-Gould for the following linguistic analysis. His monograph on werewolf folklore, The Book of Were-Wolves, being an account of a terrible superstition, has been an indispensable source for me.  According to Baring-Gould, the Anglo-Saxon root from which is derived the “were” in “werewolf,” as well as the “garou” in “loup-garou,” come from the Norse word vargr, which had a dual meaning, denoting both “a wolf” and “a godless man.” This Anglo-Saxon root, wearg, was also used to signify “a scoundrel,” and among Goths, their word varg meant “a fiend.” And Baring-Gould raises evidence that seems to indicate the same terms in different forms were long used to refer to anyone guilty of some crime which would see them cast out of society as an outlaw. He points to a passage in Sidonius Appolinaris that indicates aboriginal peoples in Europe had a certain name for roving bands of highwaymen who would attack; this name was vargorum. He raises as further evidence a passage from Frédéric Pluquet’s 1823 work Popular Tales, Prejudices, Patois, Proverbs, Names of Paces in the District of Bayeux, Followed by a Vocabulary of Rustic Words and the Most Remarkable Place Names of This Country, which tells us that according to ancient Norman custom, those cast out of society for their crimes were told wargus esto, meaning “be an outlaw!” Finally, Anglo-Saxon tradition had it that an outlaw, or utlaugh, had the head of a wolf, and their ancient law pronounced that outlaws must “be driven away as a wolf, and chased so far as men chase wolves.” So here we see a throughline, from antiquity to later legends. It tells us that when someone was accused of being a werewolf, it may not always have been a literal accusation but rather an accusation of some terrible crime, some especially awful act of violence or cannibalism, that seemed to make the perpetrator more animal than man.

While the accusation of lyanthropy, of being a werewolf, as in behaving so savagely and cruelly that one is no better than a vicious wolf and must be chased away from civilized places in the same way as wolves are driven off, may have started as a metaphor, throughout history, as mythology was formed, that metaphor must have become literalized, for in the European werewolf trials of the 15th to the 18th centuries, it is clear that they believed a literal transformation had taken place and wanted the accused to admit to it, even if they had to coerce a confession under torture. But the crimes attributed to these so-called werewolves, if they had indeed committed them, truly would have made them seem inhuman. Let us look to the story of the Demon Tailor of Châlons, a bare bones tale, if you’ll excuse the pun, because this serial killer’s crimes in late 16th century France were so horrific that, upon his conviction in 1598, all court records were thrown into the fire at the base of the stake on which he himself burned, so that this murderer’s terrible crimes might be forgotten, a damnation of memory, it was called, or damnatio memoriae. And today, we no longer remember this man’s name. We know only that he was a tailor in France during a time when children were going missing and rumors abounded of a loup-garou hunting in the woods at night. In his shop, authorities discovered a cask of bones, and after being tortured, he confessed to nearly 50 murders. He lured children to his shop, butchered them, dressed their flesh and cannibalized them. He is said to have been unrepentant for his crimes, admitting how much he enjoyed committing them, but tellingly, despite the torture, he appears to have never admitted to the other accusations that he transformed into a wolf to hunt his victims. Of course, that did not stop the public from calling him the Werewolf of Châlons.

Woodcut entitled The Werewolf or the Cannibal by Lucas Cranach the Elder, circa 1512, via Wikimedia Commons

Even today, it is common for murderers and serial killers to be called werewolves with the tacit assumption that the name is meant metaphorically. Brad Steiger makes this argument extensively in The Werewolf Book, pointing to the case of the “Werewolf of San Francisco,” a killer who cut up prostitutes with especial brutality in the late 1930s, but whom, despite the headlines, no one really thought was morphing into a wolfman and raking his claws over his victims. Likewise, Steiger profiles rapist and murderer Henry Lee Lucas and, perhaps the most horrifying serial killer of modern history, cannibal and necrophile Jeffrey Dahmer, suggesting that they too can be viewed as modern day werewolves. This conception of werewolves as mere men who have committed unthinkable crimes highlights our struggle to comprehend how such criminals can be capable of such incomprehensible atrocities, our inability to reconcile their behavior with our understanding of what it means to be a human being. But of course, today, we know enough about the diseases and aberrations of the human psyche not to dehumanize all those who murder, for mental illness, while it does not exonerate, does explain much of the behavior that terrifies and disgusts us. And indeed, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders still has an entry for Clinical Lycanthropy, a rare delusion in which the patient believes his or herself to transform into a beast. Clearly, this could have played some role in historical werewolf cases. If those accused of being werewolves really were guilty of the crimes attributed to them, it makes sense that they also might have been disturbed in some way and could have genuinely believed that they became wolves when they murdered. But this opens our study in a new direction, one which must wait for our next installment, for this understanding of the origin of werewolf lore only explains part of the legend. If werewolves were only ever killers, their transformation into animals but metaphors, perhaps encouraged by their own delusions that they were not themselves when they committed their crimes, then what of the further element that many of these stories share, that someone else was responsible for their transformations, someone evil, someone infernal.

As an example of the further places our study of werewolves must take us, look at the case of the Gandillon family, executed in France in 1598, the very same year as the Demon Tailor of Châlons. A girl named Pernette Gandillon was known to lope around the countryside on all fours, like an animal, a curious habit that turned ugly when one day she attacked another girl and boy who were out picking wild strawberries, killing the boy by gnashing out his throat with her teeth. The townspeople responded just how you might imagine, forming a mob and tearing the poor deluded girl apart in a fit of ferocity equal to her own. Soon after, the same townspeople accused Pernette’s brother, Pierre, of being a werewolf, and her sister, Antoinette, of witchcraft. To these crimes they confessed. Antoinette avowed that she had given herself to Satan, who came to her in the form of a black goat, and Pierre said that he had been given a magical ointment by the Devil himself, and when he rubbed it on himself, he transformed into a wolf and went out to hunt animals and people alike, until such time that he wished to return to his own form, when he would roll around in dewy grass and become himself once more. These could be easily dismissed as further delusions, like their sister Pernette’s belief that she was an animal—a case of mental illness that ran in the family—for after that, Pierre’s son Georges also said that he had been changed into a wolf by the salve his father was given, and that the family had together, in the form of wolves, attended a black sabbath to worship the devil. Or if a hereditary psychological condition doesn’t suit your fancy, one might be tempted to dismiss their confessions as false, for at least some of them had been given under torture, and any that had not been were then made under the threat of it. But then there is the description of Pierre and his son in their cells, where without their shapeshifting ointment, they appear to have gone quite mad, running in circles on all fours, their bodies covered in scratches. Pierre especially “was so much disfigured in this way that he bore hardly any resemblance to a man and struck all those who looked at him with horror.” But this description was given by their judge, a man who prided himself on convicting and executing witches and werewolves, which he thereafter did to the entire Gandillon family. So were the Gandillons murderers merely labeled werewolves? Was the entire family mentally disturbed? Did they really believe they did the things they’d been accused of? Or were they merely the victims of a witch hunt that forced them to confess according to a pattern from other witch and werewolf trials? Join me in the conclusion of this two-part series as we consider these other motifs in werewolf lore in order to reach a more holistic understanding of the legend.

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Further Reading

Baring-Gould, Sabine. The Book of Were-Wolves: Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition. Dover, 2006.

Steiger, Brad. The Werewolf Book: The Encyclopedia of Shape-Shifting Beings. Visible Ink, 2011.

The Chronological Revision Chronicles, Part Three: The Hardouin Conspiracy and the Newton Piracy

In this episode, I conclude my chronicles of those who make grand revisions to the timeline of history by going back, to the Renaissance and the dawn of historical chronology and on into the Enlightenment, to discuss some eminent and respectable minds who also proposed outrageous revisions to the accepted timeline. As I discussed in Part Two, Joseph Scaliger, the father of modern chronological science, can himself be considered a chronological revisionist akin to some of the other recent figures I’ve discussed. But there was not an absence of chronological revisionists from the time of Scaliger all the way to the 20th century when the Russians Morosov, Velikovsky, and Fomenko developed their theories. And indeed, as I indicated in my recent Blindside patron exclusive, The Phantom of the Dark Ages, about the German writer Heribert Illig and his claim that the Western European Dark Ages and King Charlemagne were fabrications, it has not been Russian scholars only that have had doubts about the timeline and have developed elaborate revisions of it. Before Scaliger, there had already been much debate over chronology in accordance with the Bible, and about a hundred years after Scaliger, some of the most respected minds in Europe would take on what they saw as errors, or even outright falsifications, in the chronology, producing two of the most fascinating revisions of history in history.  {Please join me next time} Thank your for joining me for Part Three of the Chronological Revision Chronicles: The Hardouin Conspiracy and the Newton Piracy

As discussed in Part Two, in the late 1500s, Joseph Scaliger sought to use philological and astronomical evidence to establish a cohesive and absolute timeline that differed dramatically from that which had been argued by church scholars before him, who reckoned time using dubious measures derived from scriptures, such as the extraordinarily long lifespans recorded in the Bible and other unreliable yardsticks. For example, pre-scientific chronologists looked to the prophetic data offered in the Book of Daniel, which lists numbers of days before the end times and the return of Christ, and since they couldn’t reasonably accept that Daniel had really meant them as days, since the prophecy would have long ago already failed to occur, they instead calculated these figures as numbers of years. Some forty years before Scaliger’s work, Martin Luther was writing his Reckoning of the Years of the World, which followed along these lines, and after Scaliger’s 1581 work De Emendatione Temporum, church scholars continued to tinker with their chronologies based on the Bible, computing all of history based on the notion that the world had been created only a few thousand years earlier and would come to an end within only couple more. Some of the religious chronologists to come around after the groundbreaking work of Scaliger and Petavius were English rabbinical scholar and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge John Lightfoot, who in the late 1640s proposed that the Earth had been created in the year 3929 B.C., and Irish Archbishop James Ussher, who in 1650, based on supposedly very precise calculations, published a book asserting that it had been created in 4004 B.C. on October 23rd, sometime in the evening. Now these weren’t revolutionary claims, for scholars had long thought the world began about 4,000 years before Christ, going all the way back to the Venerable Bede, who placed it in 3952 B.C., and even further, for it had long been understood that Abraham’s time was about 2,000 years after Creation, and 2,000 after that came Christ. Indeed, even the more scientific-minded Scaliger believed in a Creation date around this time, but his historical evidence also showed dynasties and events occurring long before the supposed time of Creation, a fact he struggled with and which provided his critics with their most effective ammunition against him, for here he was suggesting some history seemed to have occurred before anything actually existed!

Joseph Justus Scaliger, via Wikimedia Commons

But long before Scaliger’s time, there had been a different way of calculating history, using A.M. or anno mundi, the year of the world, a dating system derived from the Septuagint, the oldest Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, which reckoned time continuously since a date of Creation translatable to about 5500 BCE. Indeed, long before Dionysius Petavius popularized the use of B.C. and A.D. in his 1627 work De Doctrina Temporum, or On the Doctrine of Time, the reckoning of anno domini had first been coined in the 6th century by Scythian monk Dionysius Exiguus, or Dionysius the Humble, mainly, it seems, in order to deal with the issue of Christ’s return. A certain line in the Talmud had long ago established that the world would only exist for 6,000 years, so if the anno mundi reckoning had been accurate, and the Earth had been created in 5500 BCE, then Christ would have returned and the world would have come to an end 500 years after Christ was born, which it was clear by Dionysius the Humble’s time was not going to happen. Thus, it seems the first major chronological revisionists  were churchmen, shifting the date of Creation by more than a millennium in order to give Jesus some more time to come back, and when Scaliger found himself dating events previous to 4000 B.C., it proved to be an insurmountable problem precisely because prophecy forbade the date of Creation from being any earlier. So we already see here that chronology has long been inextricably entangled with Judeo-Christian doctrine. And as we shall see, by looking at the fascinating cases of Jean Hardouin and Isaac Newton in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when science developed by leaps and bounds but had not yet properly divorced itself from the realm of faith, it would remain the same for a long time after Scaliger and Petavius invented scientific chronology. And this may shed light on our modern day, when evangelical fundamentalists and biblical literalists look to these historical thinkers, and to the science denial of more modern revisionists, to justify their belief in the young age of our world.

Although today Jean Hardouin is mostly remembered as a crank or madman, this characterization does not do him justice, for before he published his chronological revisionist theories, he was perhaps the most preeminent antiquarian scholar of his age. Born in 1646 in Brittany, he was introduced to letters and a life of scholarship young, for his father was a printer and bookseller. After proving himself an adept and brilliant student at a Jesuit college, he entered his novitiate period of training in the Society of Jesus at just 14 years old, and early in his career as a Jesuit priest earned himself a reputation for encyclopedic knowledge. He took a position as the librarian of the Jesuit College of Paris, and he taught many subjects, from theology to philosophy to belles-lettres, a style of literary criticism viewed itself as an aesthetic artform. And it was here he found his calling, penning a brilliant five-volume translation and commentary on Pliny the Elder in only one year, an almost superhuman undertaking that won him fame upon its 1685 publication. From that moment on he was a towering figure not only in literary and historical scholarship, but in antiquarian studies as well, for he wrote numerous well-respected works on numismatics, or the study of ancient coins, as well, and patristics, or the study of early church writings and history. Indeed, in the latter field, he produced a massive 22,000-page edition recording the acts and decrees of church councils throughout history. And here we begin to see Hardouin’s willingness to provoke controversy with his scholarship, for some in the church, not liking the implications that some passages in the work might have regarding church law, tried to suppress it, ending up only delaying its printing. But this controversy is largely forgotten whereas another scandal he stirred up still intrigues and outrages three hundred years later.

A frontispiece for one of Hardouin’s works, containing one of the only portraits of the scholar, from Grafton, pg. 246

In 1693, in a little piece of writing about coins from the dynasty of Herod the Great, Hardouin dropped a tantalizing hint that he was in the process of uncovering a vast conspiracy. He claimed that in 1690, he had begun to “scent fraud in Augustine and his contemporaries,” and as he further investigated, discovered the dimensions of this fraud to be vast, encompassing the work of all writers of antiquity. In short, he concluded, based on evidence he would slowly tease the public with for the rest of his life, that “a certain band of fellows existed, some centuries ago, who had undertaken the task of concocting ancient history…there being at that time none in existence” (qtd. in Grafton 248). Essentially, this “impious cohort” of forgers, as he called them, whom he would eventually suggest were monks, mostly of the Benedictine order, working in the 14th century, had used the only genuine works of ancient literature (the works of Homer, Pliny, Cicero, and some but not all of the works attributed to Virgil and Horace) along with information they had from ancient coins in their possession, and set about falsifying vast numbers of ancient documents on a variety of different styles of parchment, taking care to demonstrate a variation in scripts for documents meant to have been written in different times and places, building not only a canon of work by ancient masters but also innumerable ancillary works that referred to the other forgeries and thereby bolstered their credibility. In short, he claims this Impious Cohort pulled off the biggest hoax in the history of humankind… that in fact their hoax was the history of humankind. The Jesuits at first approved the work in which Hardouin first hinted at his theory, but 2 months later, after the first reactions of readers to the passage in question brought all of this to their attention, they rushed to the printer to seize every copy of it, lest it give the enemies of the Society of Jesus more fodder against them. However, this only increased interest in it, for Protestants accused the Jesuits of a stunt, trying to increase the rarity of the work and thereby inflate its value. Soon enough, despite much sharp criticism, interest encouraged Hardouin to fully develop his theories in further writings.

If the sheer magnitude of the fraud that Hardouin suspected was not enough to make his suspicions seem unreasonable, then the evidence he offered to prove his theories certainly paints a picture of a genius with a disturbed mind, one who today would perhaps be diagnosed with paranoid delusions. To illustrate, we shall look at his criticism of literary works that he claimed gave themselves away through clumsy writing. According to Hardouin, some works of Virgil and Horace were genuine, but others gave themselves away as forgeries because they were more clumsily written and simply could not have been the work of those brilliant writers. In the works of the monks of his Impious Cohort pretending to be Virgil and Horace, whom he called pseudo-Virgil and pseudo-Horace, he remarks with the cutting wit of a master critic on awkward turns of phrase in Latin, arguing that not only would the real Virgil and Horace never phrase something that way, but also that this showed the forgers were using a much different Latin than the true writers used. And he would pick apart the logic of writing, pointing to a part in the Aeneid when Aeneas retraces his own tracks in the night and objecting that Aeneas wouldn’t have been able to see the tracks in the dark, a mistake that he believes the real Virgil never would have made. Beyond “evidence” like this, he also searched for apparent anachronisms, finding, for example, that the mention of a military loss to a “Parthian despot” in the Aeneid proved everything, because it was a reference to the Battle of Carrhae, which Hardouin placed in 19 BC, the same year that Virgil died and therefore asserting that he couldn’t have written the line. The problem there is that the Battle of Carrhae actually took place in 53 BCE, about 34 years earlier than Virgil’s death. Hardouin claimed it was in 19 BC because, like many antiquarians at the time, he placed far more stock in numismatic evidence than in any documents, especially since he suspected all documents of being frauds, and there happened to be a coin depicting a Parthian holding a Roman banner that was minted in 19 BCE. In Hardouin’s mind, coins provided the only unimpeachable evidence, and since it had been minted in that year, then that was the closest date attributable to it, despite the fact that coins can obviously be minted years after the fact to commemorate events long passed.

Denarius struck c. 19 BCE that seems to have been the basis of Hardouin’s miscalculation, courtesy Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. , licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

We see this over-reliance on numismatic evidence throughout Hardouin’s arguments. For example, Josephus tells us that Herod the Great rebuilt the Temple at Jerusalem, but Hardouin claims this cannot be, for there exist no coins to celebrate the act. Thus we see the absurdity of his argumentation throughout. His literary evidence is largely a matter of style and aesthetics, and therefore entirely subjective, and his numismatic evidence overestimates what coins can and cannot tell us. Obviously events may have transpired that weren’t recorded on ancient coinage. But when Hardouin explores the motivation of his Impious Cohort, that’s when we really get to see the craziness of his conspiracy theory. He asserts that, while these devious monkish forgers made errors that reveal them, they also purposely seeded their forgeries with clues meant to be discerned. Here Hardouin practices the kind of fast and loose etymology and philology that we have seen before in the work of Anatoly Fomenko that I discussed in Part One, and that of Alexander Hislop, the author of The Two Babylons, whom I discussed earlier this year. While Hardouin was no slouch in the language analysis department, he made a lot of dubious linguistic claims, for example arguing that the language of the Talmud is not Aramaic but rather Hebrew or that he could discern Gallic peppered throughout the ancient Greek in some works. Most doubtful, though, are his claims to have found secret codes that only he has ever deciphered. He states that many of the proper names in the ancient works he says are forgeries are actually references to Jesus Christ, and that in seeding hints about Jesus throughout the supposed works of antiquity, they hoped to undermine Christianity, for when it was discovered that ancient pagans and Jews had known all along about the messiah’s coming sacrifice and had been hinting about it in all the works of ancient literature, that this would somehow reduce the importance of the Bible. Honestly, even trying to explain it now, it’s hard to make sense of these delusions, and clearly they were paranoid fantasies of the sort that might today lead a psychologist to diagnose with a personality disorder. Of course, that has not stopped chronological revisionists like Anatoly Fomenko and Heribert Illig from pointing to him as if his work provides reliable precedent or evidence for the idea of fabricated eras of history. As for Hardouin himself, he continued to write about his conspiracy until his death of natural causes in his mid-eighties in 1729, still teasing that he had the damning evidence that would prove everything and would soon be publishing it, though of course no such proof ever emerged after his passing.

Two years before Jean Hardouin’s death, another incredibly famous and respected scholar passed away in Kensington, England, and among his unpublished works was found a manuscript called The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, a detailed argument using astronomical evidence to show that Scaliger and Petavius had erroneously created entire periods of Babylonian, Egyptian, and Greek history that never actually occurred. That man was none other than Sir Isaac Newton, and the following year, his amended chronology, which he had spent much time working on in his final years, would be among the first of his works to be published posthumously, and it would come very close to tarnishing the impressive legacy he left behind. But this was the culmination of Newton’s work on historical chronology, which he had taken an interest in early in his career, and he might have never made the effort of composing this extensive treatise had some of his earlier, far briefer writings on chronology not been pirated by unscrupulous sorts looking to make a name for themselves at his expense. Years earlier, Newton had entrusted a brief outline of his revised chronology with little indication of how he had arrived at his dates to the Princess of Wales. He called it “A Short Chronicle from the first memory of things in Europe to the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great,” and it soon found its way into the hands of a Venetian intellectual named Abbé Conti who liberally showed it to others. Soon a French scholar, Nicolas Fréret, translated it and composed some of his own arguments against Newton’s dates, and though Newton never gave his permission, Fréret’s Parisian publisher went ahead and printed the translation. Isaac Newton was livid and immediately penned an article defending his calculations for the Royal Society before getting to work composing the far more in-depth defense of his chronology in the volume that would be published after his death. In it, he showed himself to be brilliant, as expected, but the weaknesses of his argument invited much criticism. However, these weaknesses reveal perhaps less about Newton and more about the weaknesses of scientific chronology generally and how hopelessly entangled ancient history is with myth and religious faith.

Isaac Newton in old age, via Wikimedia Commons

To demonstrate Newton’s unfaltering genius, it should be noted that his work on chronology pioneered an astronomical dating technique that had never before been brought to bear. Scholars had been using astronomy to settle chronology since Mercator, but none before Newton had ever thought to use equinoctial precession to settle dates. Since the beginning of springtime comes a few minutes early every year, or in other words, the Vernal Equinox arrives a little earlier than it did the year before, then Newton realized that any ancient text that described the sun’s position in relation to the stars on the spring equinox could be accurately dated. It was a groundbreaking idea, but the problem, as we’ve seen before, is that it relied on descriptions from ancient texts, which could not be said to be very precise. For example, Newton looked to Hipparchus in the 2nd century CE, who describes the astronomical observations of Eudoxus in the 4th century BCE, so already it’s coming to the scholar secondhand, and Eudoxus maps meridians in the imagined celestial sphere on which solstices and equinoxes are tracked in relation to constellations, such as saying one curve passes through “the Tayl of the South Fish,” and “the middle of the great Bear.” It is clearly not an exact science when an astronomer is trying to place an exact meridian and the most precise direction they have is to place it somewhere “between the poop and the mast of the Argo” (qtd. in Diacu 74). But, as any dyed-in-the-wool mathematician would, Newton simply admits to some margin of error and then draws conclusions that he thereafter treats as though they are precise, when in fact they are anything but. Likewise, as with Scaliger and Petavius before him, his calculations often rely on estimates. When more definite records did not exist, Scaliger and Petavius reckoned much of their chronologies based on an average length of a king’s reign, which they reasoned would be about a generation, or 33 years. Newton, however, challenges this, arguing a better average would be about 20 years, which would mean Scaliger and Petavius added non-existent years all over their timelines. But the fact remains that all these arguments rely on best guesses and approximations, making it hard to justify calling this “scientific chronology.”

Even further demonstrating how unscientific this work sometimes was, we see that, even if Newton was not reckoning time according to scripture only, as had Ussher and the many religious scholars before him, he still based much of his understanding of ancient history on myth. He, like many in his era, accepted the ancient doctrine of Euhemerism, which asserted that the stories of mythology had some basis in truth, that the quests and adventures of Greek myth, for example, really occurred, and the major characters, including gods and monsters, had really existed, if only as normal human beings who had been deified or made monstrous in memory. So, when searching for a place to begin his chronology, Newton settled on the voyage of the Argonauts, arguing that the first Greek maps of constellations had been drawn by the first astronomer, whom he identified as Chiron, a wise and knowledgeable centaur in Greek mythology, in order to help the Argonauts navigate on their quest for the Golden Fleece. So, if he could date the first Greek celestial map based on constellation position, that would give him the date of the Argonautical expedition, and Herodotus writes that the Trojan War ended one generation later, so he could date the fall of Troy, which would then allow him to date the founding of Rome, and so on, all of it based on myth, speculation, and guesswork, but with a veneer of science. And lest one believe that Newton, known to be a very religious man, did not allow his faith to color his views on ancient history, think again, for it has been argued that his central motivation in rewriting ancient history was to minimize the contributions of pagans and give the Israelites primacy as the most important civilization of antiquity. Indeed, he does rearrange chronology to argue that there was no major Pharaonic kingdom in Egypt until after King Solomon’s time. While Scaliger and Petavius created their Egyptian timeline according to an ancient Egyptian history composed by a figure named Manetho, like Jean Hardouin, Newton dismissed Manetho’s work as a forgery and preferred to assemble his own chronology, in which Solomon was the world’s first king, and his Temple the first temple. According to his re-interpretation of myths, many figures could be identified as Judeo-Christian patriarchs; for example, Saturn was Noah, and Jupiter was Noah’s son, Shem. So after all, despite his innovation and his reputation as the father of modern science, when it came to trying to settle ancient chronology, Newton certainly relied on supposition and perhaps was driven by creed and prejudice.

A 1690 star chart used by Isaac Newton to reconstruct Chiron’s celestial sphere, from Diacu

Today we find that the most well-known and widely disputed aspect of our study of the past has to do not with human history so much, but rather with geological history and still stems from religious belief that the Earth was created about 6,000 years ago. Despite the fossil record, there are many biblical literalists who will argue that the earth cannot possibly be as old as science tells us it is, because the Bible tells us otherwise. Religious explanations usually run along the lines that God made our planet, 6,000 years ago, with inbuilt history, fossils included, so that our faith in His Word would be tested. And that is among the scriptural literalists who accept what science tells them, for there are many who don’t believe a word out of any academic’s mouth if he or she mentions dinosaurs or evolution. And this kind of science denial is common among chronological revisionists, as well, for there are methods of confirming dates and disproving revised chronologies that these revisionists must contend with. Invariably, they deal with them by casting doubt upon their accuracy. First, there is numismatic, or hard currency evidence, which in this edition we have seen can be misused or over-relied on, as was Hardouin’s mistake, but as we saw in the recent Blindside patron exclusive on Heribert Illig’s Phantom Time Hypothesis actually provides irrefutable evidence of Charlemagne’s existence, disproving the claim he was an invention. Then we have the two pillars of scientific dating: dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating. Dendrochronology consists of examining tree rings, which makes it possible to date a piece of wood found at an archaeological site, depending on its place of origin and the type of tree it’s from, by comparing it to a catalogue scientists have compiled that can determine dates based on shared attributes of certain rings, such as low growth in drought years. Some of these dendrochronological catalogues go back more than 10,000 years, exploding the notion of a 6,000-year-old earth.

Then there is radiocarbon dating or the carbon-14 method, which dates organic material based on the decay of a certain radioactive substance that all living organisms ingest by consuming food. This is the method that proved the Shroud of Turin was medieval, which of course led to a lot of objections about its accuracy. Then again, though, to a chronological revisionist, the Shroud being much younger than originally thought would not necessarily mean it wasn’t Christ’s shroud, if one were arguing that Christ lived not as long ago as traditionally believed. But I digress. Objections to both dendrochronology and carbon-14 dating almost always rely on suggestions that results depend on the sample used and the elaborate mathematics involved, suggesting that any date may be called into question by insinuating a mistake may have been made. And indeed, there have been plenty of errors made using these methods, but what these science denialists won’t point out is that they are almost all blunders made when the science was young, and today scientists check and double check using multiple samples and comparing radiocarbon evidence to dendrochronological evidence in order to reach verified conclusions. And beyond these foundational techniques of scientific dating we can now add mass spectroscopy, archaeomagnetic dating, collagen fiber analysis, fission tracking, and bioluminescence. The science of chronological dating is growing by leaps and bounds. It absolutely disproves young Earth dogma and can be relied on to refute the grand revisionist chronologies we’ve talked about. But can it settle each little disagreement about ancient history? Can it make firm every date in our timeline of antiquity? The answer is clearly no because it relies on objects that can be tested and identified as being associated with certain historical events or periods. While there may be many such samples, there is not a sample for every moment that we want dated. So while we may be able to refute these outrageous revisionist chronologies, are we ever able to finally be certain about dates in ancient times?

Andrew Ellicott Douglass, creator of the science of dendrochronology, from McGraw, pg. 441

As we have seen, revisionists like Fomenko and even Velikovsky actually had some shrewd criticisms of established chronology, even if their proposed revisions were even less believable. And looking at the basis and foundation of consensus chronology as received from Scaliger and Petavius, we see that much of it was tinged by Christian doctrine and built on conjecture and presumptions. One needs only look at the continuous disputes over Egyptian chronology to discern how uncertain we truly are about the order and placement of ancient history. In the 19th century, after the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone and the beginning of Egyptology as an academic field, many began to challenge the chronology of Egypt, which previously had always seemed ironclad because of Manetho’s list of pharaohs, heavily relied upon since Scaliger. In the 1890s Cecil Torr challenged some dates, suggesting the overlap of dynasties, and his work, as well as Newton’s, inspired a group of Egyptologists and archaeologists a hundred years later. In the 1990s, led by historian Peter James, they argued for an Egyptian chronology about 250 years shorter. And then one among them, Egyptologist David Rohl, using the kind of evidence that should sound familiar by now—a papyrus listing a certain number of generations of architects calculated into dates using Isaac Newton’s assumed generational timespan of 20 years—he shaved another century or so off of Egypt’s history. Interestingly, many of these later efforts seem to confirm Newton’s assertions, but as we see, they have the same unreliability at their foundation. So in the end, we come away flummoxed, not knowing what to believe and feeling much like Henry St. John, the first Viscount Bolingbroke, a political philosopher and Enlightenment thinker who, when he undertook studies in biblical chronology, expressed frustration and despair, writing, “Who can resolve to build with great cost and pain when he finds, how deep soever he digs, nothing but loose sand?” And this feeling, which I sadly come away with after my research in this taxing series, may be the most nihilistic expression of the theme of “historical blindness” that I have yet encountered.

Further Reading

Grafton, Anthony. “Jean Hardouin: The Antiquary as Pariah.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 62, 1999, pp. 241–267. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/751388.

McGraw, Donald J. “Andrew Ellicott Douglass and the Big Trees: The Giant Sequoia Was Fundamental to the Development of the Science of Dendrochronology—Tree-Ring Dating.” American Scientist, vol. 88, no. 5, 2000, pp. 440–447. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27858092.

Scott, James M. “Who Tried to Kill Nearly Everyone Else but Homer?” The Classical World, vol. 97, no. 4, 2004, pp. 373–383. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4352873.

The Chronological Revision Chronicles, Part Two: The Velikovsky Catastrophe

In this installment of what I’ve been calling the Chronological Revision Chronicles, I truly make of that title a misnomer by continuing to tell the story of those who challenge accepted timelines out of all sensible order. In this edition, I skip back in the timeline, after Nicolai Morosov but before Anatoly Fomenko, to another figure who challenged traditional chronology with a theory that reordered the known past. And he too happened to be a Russian intellectual, although it seems clear that, unlike those I profiled in Part One, he was not motivated by nationalism or any desire to rehabilitate the historical significance of Mother Russia, and he certainly was not motivated by anti-Semitism, for he was himself a Jew with a strong sense of his cultural heritage. Like other chronological revisionists, however, he inevitably ended up engaging in conspiracy theory, but the conspiracies he discerned were not among ancient scribes and establishment historians in the past but rather among his contemporaries. Unlike Morosov before him, his books became a sensation, and unlike Fomenko after him, he found success in America, where he would find himself the center of a controversy over the legitimacy of his ideas. Indeed, it cannot be denied that he ruffled more than a few feathers among not only traditionalist historians but, even more so, among respected scientists, setting himself against all establishment astronomers and physicists. Little wonder, then, that he believed all of academia was dead set against him, denouncing him and his ideas without even giving them their due consideration. But did his ideas deserve any serious consideration?

*

Before I introduce the principal character of this installment, I feel it may be worthwhile to look even further back, to the beginnings of historical chronology as a science, so that I do not give the wrong impression. Listeners to Part One of these “Chronicles” may have taken from the episode the notion that it was absolutely ridiculous and foolhardy for someone who was not a trained historian to presume to emend chronology based on astronomical and mathematical grounds. Upon further reflection, I don’t want to give that impression. In truth, the two Frenchmen traditionally credited with establishing the modern science of chronology were not historians, per se, and were themselves essentially challenging the accepted chronology established by men who were historians, in an ancient sense of the word. Before the 16th century, few works had attempted to place historical events on a cohesive timeline. The handful of historians who had essayed to forge a chronology, such as Theophilus of Antioch and Sextus Julius Africanus, were mostly concerned with the order of biblical events, and during the Council of Nicaea, Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea, became the most influential of ancient chronologists, establishing a method of measuring time according to the lifespans recorded in the Bible. Now, right away, anyone who’s not a biblical literalist sees the issue here, for the Bible gives us some life spans that are hard to believe, such as Adam, Noah, and Methuselah, who are all said to have lived for almost a thousand years, along with many others whose longevity far surpasses even the oldest living people in today’s modern age of miracle medicine. Through the Middle Ages, the art of chronology became little more than a tool for guessing when Christ would make His triumphal return, a date that kept getting pushed further and further into the future. It was not until the 16th century that Gerardus Mercator, not a historian but a geographer and cartographer, applied astronomical observations and the records of eclipses to the establishment of a chronology, and like Nicolai Morosov after him, his massive work on the subject would be banned by the sociopolitical powers that be—in Mercator’s case the Inquisition, which declared it heretical for its references to other forbidden works.

Joseph Justus Scaliger, via Wikimedia Commons

At around the same time as Mercator’s work was suppressed, a French philologist named Joseph Scaliger came to take an interest in chronology through his work on the linguistic analysis of calendars. Like Morosov and Fomenko so many years later, he was not a historian as such, although one might argue that a philologist, as a linguist focusing on historical texts, is far closer to a historian than is a geometer. As a philologist, he found that many of the answers he sought about what literary works had influenced others relied on a better understanding of when each author had lived, of who had preceded whom. At first, he set about arranging the chronologies he required by relying on genealogies, but soon, like Morosov and Fomenko after him, he looked instead to astronomy and mathematics, studying the work of Paulus Crusius who had assigned dates to time periods that Claudius Ptolemy had recorded in his astronomical work, the Almagest. But Scaliger revised Crusius’s findings and proposed a comprehensive chronology of known history in a massive seven-volume work whose title indicates that he was himself a chronological revisionist. It was called in Latin De Emendatione Temporum, or On the Amendment of Time. And also like Morosov and Fomenko, his work was not well-received. Throughout the rest of his career, he revised his theories and published further volumes to correct his mistakes and answer his critics, one of whom, the French theologian Dionysius Petavius, would go on to popularize the use of B.C. for dates before Christ, and A.D. or anno domini, the year of our Lord, for those after Christ’s birth, terminology that became standard until recently, with the use of BCE for Before Common Era, and CE for Common Era, the boundary between which remains the same as that between B.C. and A.D. It is useful, I think, when considering figures like Morosov and Fomenko and our figure of central interest in this installment, Immanuel Velikovsky, to remember that these two French researchers, who today are universally remembered as the fathers of scientific historical chronology, were in their own time scoffed at as out of their depth or doubted because of their use of astronomical and mathematical evidence. But it should also be remembered that Scaliger was caught making some clear errors. For example, because it disagreed with his calculations, he claimed there was no such thing as axial precession, the phenomenon of the slow wobbling of Earth’s axis of rotation, a phenomenon that all astronomers since Copernicus had agreed was a fact.  And rather than producing concrete and reliable astronomical observations and calculations as proof of his assertion, he pointed to some Egyptian texts that seemed to indicate certain constellations, such as Sirius and Arcturus, had remained constant in their movements for more than a thousand years. As we have already discussed in Fomenko’s case, making claims based on astronomical observations found in ancient records that are fundamentally fallible makes one’s own conclusions unreliable. And here we see a striking similarity to the assertions of our principal character, Immanuel Velikovsky, who hundreds of years later would also reject established astronomical science based on some clues he found in ancient literature.

Velikovsky and his ideas first came to the attention of the scientific community in January of 1950, when an article appeared in Harper’s ahead of the publication of his book, Worlds in Collision. Advance reviews from literary critics all seemed to indicate that this was a serious work from a learned man, to be published by the academic press Macmillan, and all signs seemed to point to it being a bestseller. However, after the Harper’s article, which offered some insight into Velikovsky’s actual assertions, the backlash began. Scientists and academics of every stripe took to their typewriters, excoriating Harper’s for praising such nonsense and detailing the many ways in which Velikovsky showed himself to be ignorant or his ideas to be ridiculous. Many of these critics had not even read his book, but that did not stop them from tearing it apart. And when it released and became a sensation, the publishing house Macmillan soon found that professors were boycotting them, refusing to adopt their textbooks. In an effort to save their business, they were forced to give the rights to Velikovsky’s work to Doubleday, who happily took over the publication of his books. It was a controversy unlike any in modern science before or since, and certainly it only helped make Velikovsky’s work world famous, and the takeaway today, among many critics, is that the scholarly community was unfair in attacking and suppressing Velikovsky’s ideas rather than addressing them as part of a larger, ongoing academic conversation. However, while it is true that scientists and historians should not suppress ideas simply because they run counter to consensus views… is that what really happened here? I’ve argued before that even outrageous ideas and claims must be given earnest, critical evaluations, but I argue that this is necessary specifically in order to stem the spread of lies and dubious ideas. Were Velikovsky’s ideas worthy of further consideration? Or was the response of scholars an appropriate countermeasure to slow what appeared to be a swiftly spreading lie, to unmask as pseudoscience ideas that they saw being hailed in a huge promotional campaign as revolutionary science that rewrites history?

Imannuel Velikovsky, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Immanuel Velikovsky, like others I’ve discussed in these chronicles, kind of fell backward into the study of the past. He was a witness to much upheaval and catastrophe in his lifetime, including one extraterrestrial impact very much like those about which he would eventually write: the Tunguska Event, the sky-darkening effects of which he surely saw as a boy of 13 living in Moscow in 1908, and he likely took great interest two decades later when it was confirmed to be an impact.  But many of the disasters he was witness to in his youth were decidedly man-made, such as Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, and the Revolution of 1905. Nevertheless, Velikovsky flourished, with the benefit of the finest private education, receiving a gold medal in high school for earning the highest possible grade in every subject. He entered medical school in Moscow, even though he was more interested in architecture and literature, because his mother insisted on it, and while studying there, he watched as the Russian Empire was dealt a grievous blow in World War I and thereafter collapsed into revolution and civil war. As the fighting spread, many found themselves and their families in danger, and Velikovsky’s family found themselves especially endangered, for they were “Zionists” who worked as activists promoting the creation of a homeland for the Jews in the Middle East, a quest that would eventually come to fruition with the establishment of Israel but was always met with opposition and scorn. When the Communist secret police arrested a member of the Velikovskys’ group and named Immanuel’s father as its ringleader, the family left everything behind and fled their home in Russia, eventually settling in Berlin. It was here that Velikovsky would first rub shoulders with the greatest mind of his time, for his family published a series of academic texts from Jewish scientists translated into Hebrew, and Immanuel, as its editor, worked directly with the authors, one of whom was the recent Nobel laureate Albert Einstein. And before the end of his career, they would meet again.

Immanuel Velikovsky married a violinist in 1923, and together with the rest of the family, they immigrated yet again, although this time it was more of a homecoming, for they made themselves a home in Israel, the Jewish nation his parents had long dreamed would be founded. In Israel, Immanuel practiced medicine, but like Alfred Russel Wallace, another scientist enamored of pseudoscience that I spoke about in a recent patron exclusive, he felt more drawn to metaphysical fields such as Spiritualism and parapsychology, taking an especial interest in mind-reading, and it was perhaps this interest that led directly to his study of psychiatry and Freudian psychoanalysis. With the means and connections at his disposal, he actually reached out to and picked the brains of the giants in this very contemporary field, like Carl Jung and even Sigmund Freud himself, before transitioning from practicing medicine to providing psychotherapy. And Freud can also be blamed for the bizarre swerve his career took years later. In his 1939 book Moses and Monotheism, Freud argued that Moses, a central figure in Jewish belief, was actually Egyptian rather than Jewish, a contention with which Velikovsky, as well as many other Jews, took umbrage, for it seemed to rewrite their history by changing the identity of a great leader they had always claimed as their own. Ironically, Velikovsky would go on to rewrite history to a far greater degree in his efforts to refute Freud’s assertion. The same year, Velikovsky moved his wife and his daughters to New York City so that he could make use of its libraries’ research materials in his work, and he set about investigating ancient Egyptian history, reasoning that he should be able to find some Egyptian records describing some of the catastrophic events detailed in Exodus—plagues, fiery pillars, disturbed seas, and a huge population of displaced Hebrew refugees—and if he did find it, perhaps he might find proof of Moses’s heritage and thus refute Freud. Scouring not only the Old Testament and the Talmud, but also translations of ancient Egyptian papyri and ancient Greek mythology, Velikovsky attempted to argue against Freud’s identification of the monotheist pharaoh Akhenaten with Moses by instead arguing that Akhenaten could be identified with Oedipus, another figure important in Freud’s psychoanalytical theories. However, for this to work, the accepted timeline of history had to be revised, so Velikovsky shelved his treatise on Akhenaten and Oedipus to concentrate on chronological revision, an undertaking encouraged when he became aware of an ancient Egyptian papyrus that he believed did indeed describe the events of Exodus.

Velikovsky’s 1947 passport, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

It was called the Ipuwer Papyrus, a document dated to between 1991 and 1803 BCE that recorded a sage’s complaints over the reigning chaos of his era, including mention of servants escaping and a river running red with blood, which of course Velikovsky identified with the departure of the Hebrew slaves and the first plague of Exodus 7: 14. The dating of this document to the Middle Kingdom disagrees with the traditional date given to the events of Exodus by religious scholars as well as by Egyptologists. The former contend the Hebrews left Egypt around 1440 BCE based mostly on scripture, while the latter argue that Exodus is largely myth, but based on mention of “Asiatics” enslaved in Egypt and on the first recorded mention of Israelites in Canaan, they would place such an event around 1290 BCE. Either of these dates is hundreds of years removed from the date attributed to the Ipuwer Papyrus. Many have challenged the validity of the hypothesis that Ipuwer was referring to those biblical events, for the papyrus itself mentions the “Asiatics” usually identified with the Hebrews as arriving, not leaving, and the river of blood business may be explained by the reddish hue the Nile takes on during flooding. But Velikovsky chose instead to question the validity of all ancient chronology because, of course, it helped his Oedipus/Akhenaten hypothesis. So he went to work, like Morosov before him and Fomenko after him, searching through ancient records for dynasties he would claim were duplicates of each other and pointing to the so-called Greek Dark Ages, the entire notion of which has been rejected by some scholars in the same way as the idea of the Western European Dark Ages has been. This “Revised Chronology” of Velikovsky’s, although written first, would not be published in its entirety until 1952, in his follow-up to Worlds in Collision, Ages in Chaos, and would not see a robust response from historians for another decade or more, when respected Assyriologists and Egyptologists would accuse Velikovsky of misleading and sloppy work, misconstruing cuneiform, over-relying on translations rather than original languages, and generally taking material out of context to support his claims, as we see he was already doing with the Ipuwer Papyrus. But the controversy of Velikovsky’s Revised Chronology was to be forever overshadowed by the subject to which he afterward turned his attention, for the resulting volume, which Macmillan decided should be published before his work on chronology, would catapult him into infamy.

As World War II erupted overseas and Velikovsky became a permanent resident of New York, his mind turned to catastrophism. Standing in contrast to uniformitarianism, which contends that changes to the earth occurred over vast stretches of time through slow processes like erosion, catastrophism suggests that changes may happen suddenly, disastrously, through natural upheavals. This view was championed by theologians who saw God’s agency in it and believed it corresponded well with biblical accounts of the flood, but in more recent years, with the Alvarez Hypothesis and the discovery of the Chicxulub Crater, it has been accepted as a cofactor along with slower geological processes in producing planetary change. Velikovsky’s ideas, however, were somewhere in-between biblical literalism and rational science. He claims that the idea struck him one crisp autumn afternoon, as he sat by his kitchen window reading Joshua chapter 10. In that passage, two miracles won the day for the armies of Israel: “great stones,” also referred to as hailstones, fell from heaven on their enemies, and then Moses’s successor, Joshua, “commanded the Sun and Moon to stand still in the sky,” thereby lengthening the day until the Israelites had routed their foes. With a bolt of inspiration, Velikovsky concluded that those stones were in fact meteorites, and the sun had stood still because the rotation of the Earth was somehow halted. This caused Velikovsky to go back to the drawing-board, as it were, and reimagine all of history, every miracle in Exodus and strange celestial account in mythology from every culture, as descriptions of terrible cosmic cataclysms. His eventual theory to encompass every odd description of catastrophe or celestial wonder he could scrounge from ancient records was that Jupiter had expelled a massive comet, which thereafter traveled around the sun on an extended elliptical orbit, passing extraordinarily close to Earth twice within about 52 years around 1500 BCE, such that their atmospheres and magnetic fields interfered with each other, causing Earth to temporarily stop rotating each time. After further interfering with the orbit of Mars, this comet eventually fell into a stable orbit, becoming what we now recognize as Venus. The theory was certainly cinematic, if nothing else, for he painted an astonishing picture of these close encounters, with gargantuan bolts of electricity arcing between the planetary bodies, and tempestuous disturbances of weather and the sea. But where was his proof?

"Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still" by Gustave Dore, via Wikimedia Commons

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as I’ve said before. So what evidence did Velikovsky present for his bold assertions? Well, he claimed that no historical documents mention Venus before the 7th century BCE, and he points to numerous mythological and religious texts whose descriptions of catastrophes and specifically of the Sun stopping its movement seem to support his hypothesis, but as we’ve seen before, relying on literary texts to support scientific hypotheses simply doesn’t work, and just as he had to ignore some aspects of the Ipuwer Papyrus to develop his chronology, he also ignores any portions of his evidence that contradict his catastrophist doctrine. For example, he points out that Herodotus, when visiting Egypt in the 5th century BCE, heard a story of the Sun twice moving in reverse—rising in the west and setting in the east—but this is hearsay of folklore, and Herodotus in the same breath says he was told that the strange motions of the Sun neither affected their crops nor was accompanied by any of the widespread devastation Velikovsky described, all of which Velikovsky omits from his analysis. As for the notion that Venus had never been seen before the 7th century BCE, that has been proven false. We have Babylonian cuneiform tablets detailing astronomical observations of Venus going back a thousand years before that, and we see Venus associated with the Sumerian goddess Inanna even further back in history. And these are just historical rebuttals; scientists provided manifold refutations of Velikovsky’s work, not the least of which was the simple fact that he did not go about his theorizing in a scientific manner. He never performed experiments or collected observational data; he did not maintain scientific objectivity. Rather, an idea occurred to him almost like a vision, and he made up his mind that it was fact, then set about searching for any evidence that might support it.

As for the scientific specifics, in 1974, the American Association for the Advancement of Science hosted a symposium on Velikovsky’s ideas, partly to save some face after the criticism the scientific community had received for their reception, or some would say repression, of Velikovsky’s work, but also to create an opportunity to once and for all refute his pseudoscience publicly. It was a well-attended affair, and Velikovsky himself appeared and engaged in debate with Carl Sagan and others. Sagan delivered what every scientist present believed to be a devastating debunking of Velikovsky’s principal claims, pointing out that the energy required to expel Venus from Jupiter’s gravitational pull would have been so great as to destroy Venus, that everything we know about planetary orbits suggests the proposed orbit of Venus after its expulsion that would have allowed for the collisions Velikovsky hypothesized would be absurdly unlikely and that its changing from an elongated to a circular orbit would have been impossible, and that the stopping and restarting of Earth’s rotation simply could not have happened. His further objections related to Earth’s geological record standing contrary to Velikovsky’s claims and the chemical composition of Venus being different than that of Jupiter. In reply, Velikovsky cited outdated and long refuted sources and quibbled over Sagan’s representation of his claims and back-of-the-envelope calculations to disprove them. The result was that, while scientists came away satisfied that Velikovsky had been exposed as a fraud, Velikovsky’s followers believed he had won the debate.

Sagan and Velikovsky, via everythingselectric.com

Velikovsky liked to portray himself as, and may have genuinely believed himself to be, a lone genius martyr standing against a tidal wave of reactionary ignorance with truth that he alone had surmised through great erudition and sheer perspicacity. In truth, though, just as Fomenko today owes much to the ideas of Morosov, Velikovsky owes a great deal to the ideas of one of the great writers of pseudohistory, Ignatius Donnelly. You may recognize Donnelly’s name if you’ve ever read or listened to a podcast about Atlantis, because he wrote the quintessential fringe text on the lost continent, Atlantis: the Antediluvian World. A year later, he published Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, which proposed that 12,000 years in the past, an advanced civilization was destroyed by a massive comet strike that had many of the same effects that Velikovsky claims occurred during Venus’s close passing. Unlike Fomenko with Morosov, though, Velikovsky doesn’t credit Donnelly, perhaps because he wanted to be taken more seriously than modern scholars took Donnelly. If that is the case, though, it is strange that Velikovsky made such hard to believe assertions in his work. For example, he asserts that the flood of Noah was caused by a cosmic cloud of water released when Saturn experienced a collision, and that when all this water reached Earth, it also brought with it alien plant life. And that is not the only alien visitor that probably arrived here in the wake of a collision, for he claims insects were introduced to Earth when their larvae rained down from the tail of the Venus comet. The story of manna, that miraculous food, falling from heaven when the Israelites most needed it he explains as an alien carbohydrate that just happened to rain down and be edible. Likewise, oil and diamonds fell from the sky during these planetary close calls, and the electromagnetic disturbances these passages caused once scrambled humanity’s brains, which is what really caused the confusion of languages described in the biblical Tower of Babel story. Not content to take on astronomers and historians only, he challenged the tenets of biology and geology and paleontology as well, claiming that rather than changing and evolving over extremely long periods of time, the Earth was changed suddenly. Dinosaurs went extinct only thousands of years ago in these catastrophes, which preserved their remains. There were no Ice Ages; mammoths had been flash frozen because of a tilting in the Earth’s axis. Worldwide fires created our coal deposits. Species evolved not slowly but abruptly because of radiation from these interplanetary calamities. Before his work’s publication in 1950, he encountered Albert Einstein once again, as the two both lived in Princeton, New Jersey, and he asked Einstein to read his work and give an opinion. Einstein suggested that Velikovsky might have a hard time finding a publisher, specifically because “every sensible physicist” would realize that the catastrophes Velikovsky described would have completely destroyed the Earth’s crust. Nevertheless, Einstein was kind about his criticism, and Velikovsky was undeterred. But years later, in Einstein’s very last interview, his opinion was less delicate: “[I]t really isn’t a bad book,” he said, laughing. “The only trouble with it is, it is crazy.”

He didn’t seem so crazy in the 1960s, though, when he and his followers began to claim that certain “predictions” of Velikovsky’s had borne out and thus proven him right. In his work, Velikovsky mentioned that some kind of radio emissions might be expected to emanate from Jupiter because of the electricity and heat that still remained after spitting out Venus. And lo and behold, radio astronomers had since detected radio emissions from Jupiter. Similarly, he had said that Venus must be hot because of its relatively recent ejection from Jupiter and collisions with other planets, and in 1962, the Mariner 2 had confirmed a surface temperature of more than 400 degrees Celsius. Finally, since Venus had supposedly been forged as part of Jupiter, Velikovsky predicted that it would have an atmosphere rich in hydrogen, and in 1963, NASA confirmed that the Mariner 2 had collected evidence of hydrocarbon clouds. So, indeed, science seemed to be turning Velikovsky’s way. The only problem was, a publicist at NASA had made the statement about hydrocarbon clouds in error, prompting NASA to retract. The clouds, it turns out, are mostly sulphuric acid. But Velikovsky refused to believe this retraction, claiming instead that NASA was out to make him look bad. So, it appears that claiming NASA is conspiring to hide the truth has long been a recourse of the pseudoscientist and conspiracist. As for the temperature of Venus and the radio emissions of Jupiter, he was right… but for the wrong reasons. Jupiter’s radio emissions are non-thermal, caused by ions trapped in its magnetosphere, not by its heat. And the high temperature of Venus appears to be caused by its proximity to the Sun and the fact that its clouds trap the heat—in other words, the greenhouse effect. But again, Velikovsky seems to have been in denial, ironic for a Freudian psychotherapist, for he refused to believe that the greenhouse effect could be responsible, claiming it violated thermodynamic laws and again resorting to conspiracy theory, suggesting this finding had been invented just to spite him.

Mariner 2, the world’s first successful interplanetary spacecraft, via Wikimedia Commons

So, our question was whether the scientific community was out of line in opposing the publication and popularity of Velikovsky’s work. By my own argument on this topic, which I spoke about at Harvard last year, it should be considered the duty of experts and journalists and educators to confront and examine dubious ideas, and not to ignore them for being too fringe to take seriously. So in that sense, given that Velikovsky’s claims were clearly disprovable and pseudoscientific and yet seemed poised to be taken as genuine science by a great many readers, I would argue that scientists and scholars acted according to their convictions in keeping with the principles of their calling when they exposed the problems in Velikovsky’s theories. But I also think that Velikovsky composed his work in earnest, even if he was often myopic and driven by confirmation bias. Notwithstanding his eventual cosmic craziness, how crazy were his ideas about history at the beginning of his research? How unbelievable was his Revised Chronology after all? Must all attempts to revise chronology be dismissed out of hand as ridiculous? Our discussion of the genuine questions raised by Fomenko in Part One—questions posed because of solid work in the hard sciences of astronomy and celestial mechanics, show us chronologies might be justifiably questioned in some cases. And Velikovsky himself raised some seemingly valid points about Egyptian chronology having been settled before the Rosetta Stone made the translation of hieroglyphs possible, and using the Sothic dating system, which relied on observations of the star Sirius and had been the object of criticism for a long time, being already seen in Velikovsky’s day unreliable. Our discussion of Scaliger demonstrates that revising chronology is what led to our current understanding of history. While today, Scaliger is remembered as the founder of scientific chronology, he was doubted and criticized at the time, just like Velikovsky and Fomenko, a fact that may encourage us to view Velikovsky’s intentions in drafting a Revised Chronology with a bit more respect. Indeed, Scaliger and Petavius did not have the final word in chronology until the rise of these 20th century revisionists. Rather, there has been a long line of chronological revisionists, some of whom were untrustworthy while others are still recognized today as the greatest intellectuals in history. Find out who else challenged the timeline and why next time, in the final installment of my Chronological Revision Chronicles.

Further Reading

Bauer, Henry. “Velikovsky and Social Studies of Science.” 4S Review, vol. 2, no. 4, 1984, pp. 2–8. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/690283.

Diacu, Florin. The Lost Millennium: History’s Timetables Under Siege. Knopf, 2005.

Gillette, Robert. “Velikovsky: AAAS Forum for a Mild Collision.” Science, vol. 183, no. 4129, 1974, pp. 1059–1062. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1737973.

Grafton, Anthony T. “Joseph Scaliger and Historical Chronology: The Rise and Fall of a Discipline.” History and Theory, vol. 14, no. 2, 1975, pp. 156–185. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2504611.

Morrison, David. “Velikovsky at Fifty.” Skeptic, vol. 9, no. 1, Mar. 2001, p. 62. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=5430835&site=ehost-live.

“The Ping-Pong Planets of Dr. Velikovsky.” Skeptic, vol. 18, no. 4, Dec. 2013, pp. 64–73. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=93259551&site=ehost-live.

The Chronological Revision Chronicles, Part One: The Fomenko Timeline

In this edition, we will transition from discussing the nationalist myths of Nazis and the conspiracy theories attempting to negate their history, and we will look at… nationalist myths of Russians and conspiracy theories attempting to rewrite history in their favor. But this subject is more than just a comparison of strains in contemporary Russian culture with the German culture preceding the rise of Nazism, and it will comprise more than one installment, for the topic branches to other theorists who have made challenges to accepted history and science, and not all of them with clear nationalist agendas. In the post-truth era, when facts can be disproven in the eyes of many simply by shouting that they are lies, when journalism can be discredited merely by calling it fake, and when history may be negated through hard-headed denial, perhaps it should come as no surprise that there are some who theorize that the entire timeline of history as it is accepted by academics everywhere is completely wrong. And perhaps it is even easier to believe that there are many who take them seriously. To be clear, I am not talking about alternate interpretations of certain historical events or even theories suggesting that those events have been exaggerated or misrepresented. I am speaking of fundamental doubts about entire swathes of history, raising objections about the number of years between historical events, about whether some separate episodes in history were actually the same events, and even about whether entire eras and epochs ever occurred! More than the claims of Holocaust deniers, who purport to practice the techniques of historians and whose false assertions still indicate a respect for the notion of legitimate historiography, the theories I’ll be discussing in this series represent a direct and serious challenge to all historians and to the very idea of historiology. Like other denialist ideas, these rely implicitly on conspiracy theory, giving the impression or even directly making the accusation that the academic community, in consistently promulgating the consensus view of history, is involved in what would have to be considered the most massive cover-up of all time.

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As we are exploring ideas that scramble time and throw our understanding of the sequence of historical events into disarray, I will be following suit by not discussing chronological revisionist theories in a chronological order. Instead, I’ll start with the most recent influential writer on the topic, Anatoly Fomenko, but before I delve into his New Chronology, I feel it necessary to examine the genre of alternate history in Russian culture from which Fomenko’s work seems to have evolved. This will serve as something of a transition from my series on the occult origins of Nazism, as well, for many of the same veins that throbbed in German society in the early 20th century seem to throb also in modern Russia. For example, many of the New Age occult ideas and societies swirling among the literati in Austria and Germany that I spoke about, such as theosophy, anthroposophy, astrology, etc., have found a strong foothold in Russian culture as well, and since the collapse of the Soviet Union, this has led to some prominent theories in alternate history. For example, as it did in Germany, this New Age movement has led to some curious historical mythmaking tying Russian prehistory to lost civilizations, such as Atlantis. Inspired by great Russian poets who had long used Atlantis as metaphor, some have made the serious assertion that the mythical continent was located in Russia. Also like Germany, there has been a resurgence of neo-paganism. Some more nationalist Russians, recoiling from transnational Christianity, have looked to their ancient, pre-Christian roots for inspiration. From their view, the beginning of the Russian people’s downfall came when Prince Vladimir Christianized them in 988. Indeed, just as the Germans looked to that hoax the Oera-Linda Book to confirm the superiority of ancient Germanic peoples, so Russians have their own forgery, the Book of Vles, a hoax that presented itself as an authentic manuscript written on wood planks describing the greatness of a pre-Christian Slavic civilization. The neopagans who hold this book sacred may not be so great in number as the neopagans of interbellum Germany, and may be no great worry to the dominant Orthodox Church, but they do exist, and they push to normalize their alternate view of history, as can be seen by the fact that the Book of Vles can be found in the history section of many Russian bookstores.

Contour copy of the only known photograph of a plank from the Book of Vles, via Wikimedia Commons

Likewise, just as German neopagans tied their notions of a pre-Christian golden age to notions of racial superiority, so in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union we have seen an apparent rise in belief in the myth of the Aryans and with it, unsurprisingly, renewed anti-Semitism, which as I’ve discussed in the past, has a long history in Russia. There has always been something of a controversy over whether the original Russians were Scandinavians or Slavs. Unlike the Germans, however, Aryanists in Russia have chosen to argue that Slavic peoples, rather than Nordic peoples, were the superior root race of humanity, crafting various alternate narratives of history in which the Slavs introduced all the great advancements of humanity to different cultures, teaching Greeks how to philosophize, Indians how to farm, and Europeans how to write. As Ariosophist Germans believed every great ancient civilizations must have been founded by Aryans, so these Russians will claim that Sumerians, Hittites, Egyptians, and Etruscans were all really Slavic. And just as Ariosophy was racist and specifically anti-Semitic to its core, so these Russian Aryanists recast history as a struggle between the superior and noble Slavic Russians and a villainous conspiracy of “world Jewry” bent on weakening and subjugating Russia. Much of the alternate Russian history pushed by anti-Semites focuses on Khazaria, a polyethnic kingdom on the Caspian Sea that flourished as a kind of buffer state and crossroads during the second half the Common Era’s first millennium. The anti-Semitism surrounding it stems from medieval sources indicating some of the state’s elite converted to Judaism. This has led to theories of Khazaria being a predominately Jewish homeland whose Jews survived its destruction as the Ashkenazi Jews, a diasporic population that made a home in the Holy Roman Empire. Anti-Semites see in this version of Khazarian history a cautionary tale against the supposed danger of Jewish immigrants who scheme to undermine Christian nations, as many Russians believed they did in the form of Bolshevism. More brazen purveyors of anti-Semitic alternate Russian history will even go so far as to suggest, without a shred of proof or even valid reasons to suspect it, that the entire historical record has been falsified by Jews, that rather than being subjected to the rule of Mongol invaders from the 13th to the 15th centuries, Russia was actually conquered by Khazar Jews, but, as the conspiracy theory goes, “world Jewry” would rather the Russians forget who their true enemy has always been and thus altered the historical record somehow.

It has been suggested, for example in one of my principal sources, “Conspiracy and Alternate History in Russia,” written by Marlène Laruelle for The Russian Review, that the modern Russian phenomenon of radical historical revisionism or even the reimagining of history, especially through the lens of conspiracism, can only be understood as an effect of the Soviet Union’s collapse, and in a broader sense as a reaction to its politics. Firstly, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, artists, academics, and lay researchers suddenly enjoyed a greater freedom of speech, and along with it the possibility of publishing work that previously would have been squelched by the state, or by publishers beholden to the state, for failing to conform to official discourse. Add to this a newly privatized publishing market searching for material that will sell well, and you have the makings of a possible renaissance in new Russian historiography. The fact that this “genre” of alternate history has proven to be so popular among those now writing and buying books on history can be contextualized by considering the fact that in Communist Russia, the people knew no such thing as established, unassailable consensus history. They regularly saw their history rewritten by those in power. From the nationalist revision of history prevalent in Stalinist propaganda to the disingenuous rehabilitation of Stalin by his more modern apologists, they have seen history as not a scientific pursuit but as a malleable tool of politics. And rather than declining in the new era since the Soviet Union’s collapse, they have seen former Communist states engaging in “memory wars,” protesting the historical representation of the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, the Soviet victory in World War II, and the incorporation of Baltic states, culminating in 2009 when Russian President Dmitri Medvedev established a “Commission for Countering Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests.”  

Dmitry Medvedev takes part in memorial ceremony at Russian Orthodox Chapel for Russian soldiers who died in WWI, via The Government of the Russian Federation

When I speak about alternate history as a genre of literature in Russia, I don’t mean alternate history as we tend to think of it in America, as a style of speculative fiction that imagines a world in which history took a different path. Certainly works such as those are popular in Russia as well, but I refer more specifically to a strain of academic and pseudo-academic historiography that does something quite similar but for scholarly purposes. The first such works came in the mid-1980s from a mathematician named Ivan Koval’chenko, who suggested that math and history were more closely related than is often thought, and that historians should study their subject like scientists—a suggestion with which many of the theorists and researchers we will review would heartily agree. Koval’chenko originated a brand of historiography that explores hypotheticals in detail, academic historiological studies of “what if” scenarios: what if Prince Vladimir had not Christianized, what if Ivan the Terrible had instituted democracy, what if the Bolshevik Revolution had been avoided, what if Lenin had lived longer? And these books are common and popular. It seems that the longtime distortion and corruption of history in Russia and the yearning to take history back from establishment authorities who use it as a tool of repression has created such an appetite among Russians for non-traditional and non-conformist historical narratives, especially when they favor Russia’s importance in world history, that it has created a bastardized field of history, one that peddles fiction as history with no qualms about making sweeping changes to prove a point. Now the alternate history of Koval’chenko and those who came after him may admit to being hypothetical, but there are others who make revisions just as sweeping and assert that their changes are accurate.

 In the early 1970s, a young and promising mathematician and geometer named Anatoly Timofeevich Fomenko had taken an interest in astronomy, or more specifically, in celestial mechanics, the study of the motion of objects in space. What had captured his interest was a problem with the orbit of the moon having to do with its elongation, the angle separating it from the sun, whose acceleration should be relatively constant when charted through history according to records we have of eclipses. The issue with this is that, when taking into account data on eclipses from the Early Middle Ages, about 500 to 900 C.E., it isn’t constant at all, with its acceleration showing a massive, unexplained drop in graphs. One of the foremost authorities on this problem in the late 1970s was Robert R. Newton, who dealt with such problems  first by accusing Claudius Ptolemy, author of the most important record of ancient astronomy, the Almagest, of falsifying observations to make his data agree with his theories, and then by suggesting that any remaining variations in the acceleration of the Moon’s elongation must be attributable to unknown forces. Anatoly Fomenko, however, had a different idea. He had attended a lecture on a little known Russian autodidact named Nicolai Aleksandrovich Morosov who between 1907 and 1932 had published numerous works challenging the chronology accepted by historians. Over the course of his interesting lifetime, Morosov had gone from being an imprisoned revolutionary to a respected polymath and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, but his works on chronology were not well-received. They asserted that much of ancient history had been expanded, or made longer than it actually was, because the same events were mistakenly repeated and attributed to different eras, errors that were thereafter cemented as historical fact and never challenged. For proof, Morosov relied on linguistic evidence, data about constellation positions taken from ancient horoscopes, and statistical analysis of records that he argued proved an overlap existed between the reigns of certain sovereigns who had previously been thought to rule successively. Perhaps it was this application of mathematics to history that so inspired Anatoly Fomenko in the 1970s, or perhaps it was the fact that challenging accepted chronology made for a simple solution to the problem of the Moon’s motion, since it suggested the eclipses of the Early Middle Ages may not have actually happened in those years. By shifting the problematic period of time, Fomenko was actually able to get the graph depicting the acceleration of the Moon’s elongation to flatten out into something resembling a constant variation. For the mathematician Fomenko, this constituted absolute, unimpeachable proof that history was wrong, and ever since, he has followed in Morosov’s footsteps and relied on many of his methods, but has taken his conclusions even further, suggesting that world history may be as much as a thousand years shorter than we have always been taught.

Nicolai Alexandrovich Morosov in 1910, via Wikimedia Commons

Certainly Fomenko brought a greater and more modern understanding of mathematics to bear in his arguments than had Morosov before him. Moreover, modern astronomy can determine with a far greater degree of accuracy when certain planetary configurations such as lunar and solar eclipses did or did not occur. Because of that, Fomenko could be far more certain in his conclusions regarding whether a historical record of a celestial event could or could not have occurred in the year historians accept that it occurred. He looked first to the Peloponnesian War, during which, according to the contemporary Greek historian Thucydides who chronicled it, there occurred three eclipses, two solar and one lunar, within about 18 years. Based on Thucydides’ descriptions of the eclipses, the first of which seems to have been a total eclipse because of the fact that, during it, Thucydides says, “stars became visible,” Fomenko identified a series of eclipses visible in Greece starting in 1039 C.E. that better match the description, thereby shifting the beginning of the Peloponnesian War forward in time some 600 years. Likewise, he and his associates found alternative eclipses for those described by Livy and Plutarch, as well as one recorded in the New Testament Gospels as having occurred during Christ’s crucifixion. There was indeed an eclipse that occurred in 33 C.E. and was visible in Jerusalem, but it would have been of short duration, while both Mark 15 and Luke 23 tell us the event lasted three hours. So, looking for a better alternative, Fomenko argues this event was one and the same as an eclipse that occurred in 1075 C.E., more than a millennium after historians agree Christ was crucified. Likewise, his team challenged the date of the Council of Nicaea based on lunar cycles and the rules set out by the council for establishing the dates on which Easter would be celebrated, rules which, if the council had been held in 345 as tradition tells us, were not all followed until almost 500 years later.

Fomenko’s efforts to use astronomy to establish an alternate chronology represent his most scientific and most irreproachable work… but there are nevertheless big problems with the conclusions he reaches. Not the least of these is the fact that he treats throwaway lines in ancient manuscripts as though they are unimpeachable and exact astronomical observations. He accepts Ptolemy’s work in the Almagest as reliable when it has been found dubious time and time again, and not just because it doesn’t line up with traditional chronology. As for Thucydides, Fomenko insists that the eclipse traditionally identified as that which took place at the start of the Peloponnesian War could not be the one described because of the detail of stars being visible, when it’s perfectly plausible that Thucydides exaggerated the totality of the eclipse or mentioned the twinkling of stars during the eclipse for purely aesthetic reasons. While his calculations may be sound, they are based on the questionable premise that historical reports of eclipses were rendered with pinpoint accuracy. But even if we accept this, there is the muddled mess that he makes of history in reordering it. For example, by his team’s best calculations, the Council of Nicaea, at which was debated the nature of Christ and his importance in relation to God the Father, took place in 876 or 877 C.E., while Christ himself was crucified, at 33 years old, in 1075 C.E. So in his garbled chronology, the council debated the nature of Christ more than 150 years before Christ would even be born.

Likewise his other approaches to analyzing and proposing changes to settled chronology rely on sound mathematics but rest on unstable foundational assumptions. For example, like Morosov before them, Fomenko and his assistant researchers looked at a number of Egyptian artifacts with horoscope representations carved on them, such as the Denderah stones and other bas-reliefs and paintings in a variety of tombs. After analyzing the sky configuration represented by these zodiacs, Morosov had determined that they depicted the night sky as it appeared not in the 1st century B.C.E. but rather the 6th century C.E.. As usual, Fomenko and his team go further, asserting that actually, a more accurate placement would be the 12th century, making of the Egyptians a medieval culture.  But as before, their exact and scientific calculations stand on infirm ground. These zodiacs were illustrations with figures like people and animals representing planetary bodies, and as such, each figure and the significance of its placement was open to interpretation. To illustrate the uncertainty involved, one point of debate was whether a man holding a stick was or was not meant to represent a planet, a dispute that came to depend on whether his stick had or did not have a handle, because if it were a walking stick, then he was being depicted as a traveler and could thus be interpreted as a planet. Clearly this is not an exact science, and issues of interpretation like this abound and are not always treated consistently by Fomenko and his team. For example, in interpreting the Denderah zodiac, he asserts that a star over the head of a planetary figure means that it was visible, but in interpreting bas-reliefs at Esna, he says just the opposite, claiming the standard artistic representation had changed. And sometimes, when they had no interpretations for certain figures, they came up with novel solutions, such as that smaller figures represented partial horoscopes, depicting some of the same planets already on the zodiac but in different context. But the suggestion made by many Egyptologists that these weren’t necessarily accurate astronomical diagrams but rather works of art, they dismiss out of hand.

The Denderah Zodiac, via Wikimedia Commons

Taking another cue from Morosov, Fomenko deals in the same way with the principal objection to his New Chronology, that it simply doesn’t gel with the known sequence of events, usually counted according to the reigns of different rulers, such as pharaohs in Egypt and sovereign dynasties elsewhere, or even popes in Rome. There is a wealth of records for nearly every era and in nearly every region showing us who took power, how long they held it , and who succeeded them. As did Morosov before him, Fomenko argues that some of these reigns must have overlapped, that some of these rulers must have been the same person called by different names, thus collapsing the timeline to suit his shortened version of history. Unlike Morosov, however, Fomenko takes pains to support his assertions with math, or more specifically, statistics. He takes the intervals of how long a king reigned, in conjunction with those who reigned afterward, and attempts to match them with the lengths of other reigns. To explain further, he doesn’t say, These two kings both reigned ten years, so they must be the same. Rather, he argues, Here we have a reign of ten years, followed by a reign of five years, another of 20 years, and then one of 7 years, and these match well with the lengths of another series of four consecutive reigns thought to be different. His argument is that such similarities, which he claims to have found numerous examples of, are mathematically improbable, suggesting the rulers may have been the same, recorded under different names by different scribes and thereafter assumed to be different people. He even goes so far as to create painstaking statistical analyses of ancient records, recording the number of words used to describe events in a period or the frequency of names mentioned over a period, and in comparing these finds corresponding patterns that he also argues prove the records are talking about the same time and the same people. This latter method is hard to comprehend as useful unless one is a statistician, and so Fomenko cows many critics with a proof by intimidation, a sort of logical fallacy that, like proof by verbosity, relies on the assumption that all this mathematical jargon that’s so difficult to follow must represent a valid and ironclad argument. However, we can look closely at Fomenko’s method in determining supposedly identical monarchs to see how much water it really holds. It appears Fomenko omits certain kings from his sequencing when they reigned for a statistically insignificant length of time, suggesting that any issues this omission creates fall well within an acceptable margin of error. But this shows that the sequences he is comparing don’t actually match, that one era or dynasty he’s saying is the same as another actually records a different number of rulers than its supposed doppelganger. Also, he takes it for granted that these figures are simply numbers on a page, when in fact, in many cases, each has extensive biographical information that doesn’t line up with the other, fighting different wars with different enemies for different lengths of time, marrying different numbers of spouses and fathering different numbers of children, and finally, being laid to rest in different burial places, some of which can still be visited today.

Perhaps out of an inflated self-assurance, which my principal source, The Lost Millennium by mathematician Florin Diacu, suggests may have been cultivated by the prominence and prestige accorded to mathematicians in Russia, Fomenko focuses not only on mathematical proofs of his theories, venturing also into fields of which he is no expert. In 1996, Fomenko and his associates published a book on the ancient history of Rome, England, and Russia, and in it, they rely mostly on linguistic arguments to assert that English history is far shorter than tradition claims, and that much of its history actually occurred in the Byzantine Empire. As we have seen in, for example, our examination of The Two Babylons, etymology is a shaky ground on which to build a vast conspiracy theory or alternate history, especially when one is only an amateur etymologist. In fact, true etymologists have taken some joy in absolutely destroying Fomenko’s work here, such as A. A. Zalyzniak, who belittled it as “mountains of amateurish nonsense and phantasmagoric fabrications” which he suggested “bears the same relation to a scientific investigation as a report on the authors’ dreams” (qtd. in Diacu 206-208). What specific errors were made? Well, he reduced most words to consonants only, which while valid in the analysis of some ancient languages is not suitable for English, Russian, and Latin—the pertinent languages in this case. So we see Fomenko making false assertions, such as that “Turk” reduces to the root TRK, and Trojan to TRN, so because of a superficial similarity of consonants, the Trojans must have been the Turks. And the Russian city of Samara, read backwards in some languages could be “Aramas,” and as it shares the R and M of Rome, then Rome was in Russia. It is absolutely flabbergasting that an otherwise brilliant man would make such patently false claims with such weak proof. Unless he had some ulterior motive…

Anatoly Timofeevich Fomenko at the chalkboard, via Black Bag

Fomenko has been roundly criticized by much of academia, but based on his scientific credentials and approaches, he is also defended and often given the benefit of the doubt. Indeed, even when scholars disagree with his conclusions, they will suggest that he has raised valid points about certain weaknesses in our chronology that should be further explored. In dealing with those who seek to refute or debunk his theories, Fomenko retains a position of logical advantage, for almost anything a historian might bring up to counter his claims, Fomenko can cast doubt on as being itself part of a flawed chronology. So, for example, there are records linking Christ to the time of Tiberius, a Roman emperor from 14 to 37 C.E., but Fomenko can easily point out that Tiberius’s reign may have also been misplaced on the timeline, or that he may have never existed at all, for as with many challengers of tradition, Fomenko also relies on conspiracy theory, suggesting that many records have been falsified to support traditional chronology. But as much as Fomenko may argue that traditionalists have a bias toward accepted chronology and cherry pick evidence that supports their view, he is guilty of the same. For example, the eclipse he settled on as taking place when Christ was crucified actually had as short of a duration as that which took place in 33 C.E., making it just as problematic as the one the traditionalists cite, but Fomenko likes it better because it fits his timeline. And when his techniques return impossible dates, such as when his analysis of one Egyptian zodiac indicated it represented a 19th century sky configuration, he simply discards it. As for his agenda, as with the less influential and less notorious writers of Russian alternate history, it has been argued that he seeks to rewrite history in order to place Russia in a more prominent position, or in order to reclaim the historical significance that has been supposedly taken from her by her enemies who falsify the past to minimize Russia’s contributions. While Fomenko never breaks from his scientist character to indicate this agenda, it does seem apparent in the 1996 work I mentioned. His argument that English history is really Byzantine history equates to an argument that Russia should be given credit for England’s historical accomplishments, for because of its shared Orthodox faith, Russia has long been seen by Russians as a successor to the Byzantine Empire, its tsars a continuation of the empire’s Caesars. This agenda is hard to discern in much of Fomenko’s other chronological work, but it does provide some clear motivation for why he would take his career in such a strange and controversial direction, and why his books sell so well in Russia, where his devotees have dedicated internet forums to disseminating and furthering his theories. But Fomenko was not the only Russian figure to set off a movement to revise chronology and challenge traditional scholarship, as we shall see in our next installment.

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Further Reading

Diacu, Florin. The Lost Millennium: History’s Timetables Under Siege. Knopf, 2005.

Laruelle, Marlène. “Conspiracy and Alternate History in Russia: A Nationalist Equation for Success?” Russian Review, vol. 71, no. 4, 2012, pp. 565–580., www.jstor.org/stable/23263930.

The Wrong Side of History: Holocaust Denial and Its Fallacies

In the preceding series, I discussed conceptions of the Nazis as occultists, suggesting that some such depictions of them may have been exaggerated while others were mostly accurate, and I further explored Nazi views on history, which gave credence to an assortment of myths and legends. Now, I am obliged to confront a modern myth that both falsifies history and attempts to revise our conception of the Nazis. I am speaking, of course, of Holocaust denial, a term that has become standard among academics discussing the phenomenon despite the purveyors of such pseudohistory preferring the more innocuous term “Holocaust revisionism,” as it presents them more as legitimate academics engaged in genuine historical revision. While the history of Holocaust denial stretches all the way back to the time of the Nuremberg trials, with the advent of mass media and especially the Internet, it seems to have gone…perhaps not viral, but bacterial, growing slowly and in secret until simple measures are useless at eradicating it. Like other denialist claims symptomatic of the so-called Post-Truth Era—like those of anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, creationists, climate change deniers, and a host of other conspiracy theorists—Holocaust denial has built up a body of supportive literature and talking points that encourage believers—or rather, deniers—to continue doubting empirical historiography and consensus history no matter how conclusive the evidence presented to them. That, however, does not mean we should give up on them, or that the topic should be anathema. As I’ve argued before, no claims, however absurd or fringe or downright disgusting, should be considered beneath critical consideration. Indeed, those are the claims that most require critical response.

One may argue that only the willfully obtuse, or those with ulterior motives, make or believe such claims about the Holocaust, our shorthand label for the systematic extermination of Jews by the Nazis in World War II. After all, this is taught in every school’s history class, is featured prominently in every textbook that covers that period, and has entered the popular imagination through well-known books and films. Therefore, why would one waste breath dignifying a view that only a misguided minority credit. The truth is that some studies indicate people are far more open to notions associated with Holocaust denial than one might think. In 1993, the Roper Organization released the results of a poll it had conducted to examine American knowledge of and views on the Holocaust. Shockingly, they concluded that about one-fifth of Americans were open to the idea that the Holocaust never happened (Smith 269-270). Now, these results have been strongly challenged due to some awkward phrasing in the survey questions that may have caused confusion. Nevertheless, the poll stands as evidence of a general openness among many to the plausibility of Holocaust denial claims, and psychological studies have tended to indicate that Holocaust denier propaganda is quite effective at persuading such undecided minds (Yelland and Stone). And so, perhaps a little reluctantly, I will address the claims, and I will detail them so that they lack any mystique or ambiguity, but in no way is my intention to dignify them.

In order to refute a claim, one must first understand it precisely, for raising up and then knocking down a straw man is itself a waste of effort. Surprising to some is the fact that these so-called revisionists do not deny the mistreatment of Jews under the Third Reich or even the fact that many died as a result of this treatment, nor for the most part do they reject, at least explicitly, that such mistreatment was wrong or even evil. Some have even conceded that it could justifiably be called a holocaust. Holocaust denial literature and rhetoric stands firmly on three cornerstones: 1) the estimate of six million Jews being murdered is an exaggeration, and a more accurate accounting would be 1 or 2 million or even as few as 300,000; 2) these deaths resulted through mere unfortunate circumstances and were never intended by Nazi leadership; and 3) the circumstances that caused these deaths in concentration camps were starvation and disease, which can be blamed on the Allied powers cutting off German supplies. Crematoria were used only to burn the dead, and Gas chambers either didn’t exist or were used only delouse blankets and clothes. I will rebut all three of these false and insidious claims in due course. But before coming to grips with the claims of Holocaust deniers, we should first understand who they are and what agendas lie obscured beneath their claims, for knowing this, their claims lose the tinge of genuine revisionism and take on the smack of racist propaganda.

The “selection” of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz either for labor or extermination, via Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps the first denier of the Holocaust was a Scottish anti-Catholic firebrand named Alexander Ratcliffe, who, while serving as a Glasgow councilor in 1945, the year the Nuremberg Trials began, wrote in his magazine Vanguard that the concentration camps had been dreamed up by Jews, who had even faked newsreel footage. It is incomprehensible that even so soon after the atrocities of the Nazis came to light, such conspiracy theories sprang up, but perhaps expected when looking at the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories he had already publicly subscribed to and promoted. He appeared to be a believer in the old Protocols of the Elders of Zion hoax, that long discredited lie of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, and indeed, one finds this to be a rotten vein running through most organizations that publish Holocaust denial literature, for the fact that all of mainstream, legitimate historiography stands opposed to your claims is much easier to explain away if all historians are under the thrall of the Jewish cabal that holds sway over everything. Beyond Ratcliffe, Holocaust denial claims did not really appear until the late ‘60s with some German books like Franz Scheidl’s History of the Ostracism of Germany and Emil Aretz’s Witches’ Multiplication of a Lie. The early 1970s saw further German works establish the cornerstone argument that gas chambers weren’t used for execution, including Thies Christophersen’s Auschwitz Lie and Wilhelm Stäglich’s Auschwitz Myth. Then throughout the 1970s appeared further books, outside of Germany, with titles that clearly indicate their contents, like Did Six Million Really Die?, Six Million Swindle, Hoax of the Twentieth Century, and Debunking the Genocide Myth. The notion of a “Holohoax,” as some called it, was beginning to take shape, and in an effort to establish their literature as credible historiography, they began dissociating themselves from the fringe and the anti-Semitic and cultivating an image of academic legitimacy. Thus, in the late 1970s, the Institute for Historical Review was born, as was its Journal for Historical Review.

The IHR is a curious organization. Obviously its members yearn for their academic credentials to be recognized and for their institute to be accepted into the ranks of other scholarly associations, but they simultaneously must appeal to a base comprised of far right extremists, neo-Nazis, and bigoted conspiracy theorists in order to keep their coffers full of fresh donations. This wasn’t always the case, though. Toward the beginning of their existence, they enjoyed generous funding from, of all places, the estate of Thomas Edison, but the $15 million that Edison’s granddaughter bequeathed them was quickly squandered and lost. Now it appears they keep themselves in money solely through the publication of their literature and through donations from like-minded individuals, which are tax-deductible because the IRS recognizes them as a 501(c)(3) group, a not-for-profit operating in the public interest. In fact, like true ghouls, their About Us page ends with the unusually forward suggestion that their supporters “[p]lease also consider a bequest in your will.” They describe themselves as a publisher and “an independent educational center,” an odd characterization considering they have kept their headquarters’ physical address a secret ever since their offices were firebombed in 1984. The IHR has become, essentially, the point of the spear for the holocaust denial movement, its undeniably clever and learned researchers, such as Mark Weber and David Irving, providing a great many talking points for deniers the world over through articles in the Institute’s journal and lectures at their annual conference.

The Institute has gone to great pains to try to divorce itself from white supremacist and anti-Semitic groups, but their beginnings make their agenda evident. It was founded by Willis Carto, a known anti-Semite and far right political booster of George Wallace’s presidential campaign who went on to found the Populist Party, which ran Ku Klux Klan members for office, like David Duke whom they nominated for president in 1988. Then there was the Institute’s co-founder and first director, William McCalden, a man with a long list of known aliases who had been a leading figure in Britain’s neo-Nazi political movements, the National Front and the National Party. While it is true the Institute has broken with Carto and McCalden, a simple perusal of the literature they peddle is sufficient to indicate that the organization’s stock-in-trade is still anti-Semitic conspiracy trash; their website’s front page is peppered with an array of articles whose titles indicate “The Danger and Challenge of Jewish-Zionist Power” and promise “Straight Talk About Zionism” and revelations on “What Christians Don’t Know About Israel” and the “Tactics of Organized Jewry,” a phrase that hearkens clearly to the old Jewish world conspiracy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Members and contributors to the IHR may use a variety of terms, from those as overt as “Zionists” and “the Jewish Cabal” to more circumspect and coded phrases like “the traditional enemy,” but it is abundantly clear, read between the lines of all their literature, that they believe, or at least choose to spread the notion, that the “Holohoax,” as they sometimes call it, was perpetrated by an international Jewish conspiracy that now actively works to destroy them for daring to question it.

But of course, their claims have been soundly disproven, their objections addressed and shown to be groundless, and not just in history books but in courts of law. Numerous times, holocaust deniers have had the three cornerstones of their ideology overturned by witnesses and experts in legal settings. One of the first was in 1981, after the IHR offered a $50,000 award to the public for evidence of Jews being gassed at Auschwitz, and after one Mel Mermelstein came forward with evidence in the form of numerous survivor testimonies, the IHR refused to pay and Mermelstein sued. A judge found the evidence convincing and forced the IHR to pay the promised sum as well as further damages. Another came in 1996, when the aforementioned David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for libeling him by calling him a Holocaust denier. English law placed the burden of proof on the defendants to prove the claims in Lipstadt’s book had been accurate and therefore not libelous, and so, essentially, the Holocaust was put on trial, with the defense endeavoring to show Irving’s connection to white supremacist groups, demonstrate how he had knowingly distorted and falsified the historical record, and finally present evidence on the Holocaust directly to prove that Irving was not a reasonable or fair-minded historian. This they did, with gusto, and the judge found in their favor. Some of the best evidence to refute Holocaust deniers can now be found collected in the numerous books written about this trial, some of which were composed by the expert witnesses themselves, such as Richard Evans’s Lying About Hitler and Robert Jan van Pelt’s The Case for Auschwitz.

Jews rounded up and searched in Warsaw Ghetto (photo discovered on the body of a Nazi officer), via Wikimedia Commons

So let us examine the evidence refuting Holocaust deniers’ claims, in outline and broad strokes only, for to raise each point they make in detail and offer a comprehensive rebuttal, I would have to write a lengthy volume or two, as several historians have done already. First, let us address the claim that the number of Jewish victims, six million, is inflated. Holocaust deniers will gleefully point to any revisions of the numbers of victims as evidence that this estimate is exaggerated, but they fail to take into account the fact that legitimate historians are engaged in a continuous academic debate and may revise the number of victims in one camp based on strong evidence while also taking into account further evidence of deaths elsewhere. So, for example, it has turned out that the number of those murdered in some death camps was exaggerated; the Department of Holocaust Studies at Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has revised the total number of victims at Auschwitz from 4 million all the way down to 1 million. However, the larger view of the Holocaust we now have also takes into account the vast numbers of Jews and Slavic peoples exterminated by the Einsatzgruppen during and after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. While some tallies have been lowered, others have been added, and the estimate of six million remains the same. Nor do we limit our accounting to only those who were gassed in camps or shot by the Einsatzgruppen, for any reasonable tally of the murdered includes those who died from starvation and disease in the ghettos. There are a wealth of sources corroborating these atrocities and the numbers of the dead, including census data, Nazi records, and eyewitness testimony not only from the victims but from the perpetrators themselves. Through these overlapping proofs can be discerned a stark and horrifying truth that no real historian can ignore. Regardless of how the numbers are revised one way or another, give or take some tens of thousands of murdered people, the vast contours of this atrocity cannot be reasonably denied.

The further claim of Holocaust deniers that Hitler and others in the Nazi leadership were unaware of the extermination going on, that rather than a systematic genocide it was just a result of the unfortunate conditions of war and the zealous actions of the rank and file, can also be clearly refuted with a conscientious examination of the historical record. First, it should be conceded that, as Holocaust deniers are fond of pointing out, the actual order for the Final Solution, signed by Hitler, does not exist in the historical record. But it should also be pointed out that the Nazis went to great lengths to destroy evidence of their crimes against humanity, especially when it appeared the world would soon be holding them to account. Nevertheless, in speech after speech and document after document, leading Nazi figures implicate their guilt. Holocaust deniers will claim the Final Solution was actually referring to deportation, but consider the following quotation from Heinrich Himmler to the commandant of Auschwitz, indicating that Hitler had directly ordered the Final Solution: “You have to maintain the strictest silence about this order, even to your superiors. The Jews are the eternal enemies of the German people and must be exterminated. All Jews we can reach now, during the war, are to be exterminated without exception.” This certainly doesn’t sound like a deportation order. Then consider Himmler’s speech to the SS in Poznan, 1943: “I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jews. This is something that is easily said: “The Jewish people will be exterminated”…Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when 500 lie there or when 1,000 are lined up.” Himmler directly refers to the grisly reality of the Final Solution here, praising the executioners of Jews as being hard and honorable for taking on the task. Again, it is hard to mistake this for a reference to deportation. Nor was Himmler alone in making such references. Joseph Geobbels, the Reich minister of propaganda, wrote in his diary in 1941 of the “liquidation” of Jews, and even wrote after a visit with Hitler in 1942 that “The Führer again voices his determination to remorselessly cleanse Europe of its Jews. There can be no sentimental feelings here. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that they are now experiencing. They shall experience their own annihilation together with the destruction of our enemies. We must accelerate the process with cold brutality,” a clear indication of the systematic and calculating nature of the Final Solution. Indeed, the words translated as “extermination” and “annihilation” were used multiple times by Hitler himself, in speeches at the Reichstag and elsewhere, for Hitler had always maintained, in what he called a prophecy but what should more accurately be called a threat, that if Germany became embroiled in an international world war—apparently even if he provoked it himself—it would result in the destruction of European Jewry. No sane historian can read the words of these men, in conjunction with the evidence of how many Jews were murdered, and maintain that because the paper order hasn’t been found, most likely because it was destroyed, that means they didn’t know what was happening under their auspices.

A mass grave like those referred to by Himmler in the speech quoted above, via Wikimedia Commons

Finally, Holocaust deniers’ favorite claim has to do with the specific actions taken at Auschwitz. Sometimes called the Auschwitz Lüge, or Auschwitz lie, they claim that there were no killing centers at Auschwitz, that the gas chambers there were only used for destroying the lice in blankets and clothing, and the crematorium used only for burning those who had died from disease and starvation—essentially, like all other denier claims, an attempt to exonerate Nazis. The support most often cited comes from the 1989 Leuchter Report, a supposedly scientific engineering report that concluded the chambers could not have been used for gassing prisoners. These are the most insidious pieces of “evidence” cited by deniers, since they have a convincing veneer of scientific legitimacy that is hard to refute unless one is a scientist or has done the necessary research into other scientists’ findings. In short, deniers claim that traces of Zyklon-B, the hydrocyanic acid used to gas prisoners, were stronger in delousing chambers than in chambers that historians claimed were used to kill prisoners, and their claim is that if those chambers truly were used to gas millions of Jews and other prisoners, there would have been far higher traces and the walls would be stained a dark blue. In truth, it makes perfect sense for delousing chambers to have higher traces, since lice take longer to die from Zyklon-B exposure than people, who absorb it through their lungs. Their very testing for Zyklon-B traces, and therefore their findings, are also suspect, for the gas chambers at Auschwitz were reduced to rubble long ago, and the undressing rooms and gas chambers that do stand are partially reconstructed and not reliable for testing. Then there is the fact that deniers have been caught making false or disingenuous claims, such as Fred Leuchter, author of the Leuchter Report, who asserted that Nazi officers dropping the Zyklon-B pellets down through the roof into the chambers would have been committing suicide. Later, he admitted, during yet another Holocaust denier’s trial, that this was not true at all, and that the gas would have taken several minutes to reach them on the roof, by which time they would have closed the hatch through which they’d dropped it and left the area, all while probably wearing a gas mask for protection. Then there was a further claim that the gas being used near a crematorium would have caused an explosion, when in fact crematoria were well-sealed, and the amount of Zyklon-B used to murder prisoners would have been too small to cause an explosion. These flaws and misrepresentations, as well as links between Leuchter and other Holocaust deniers that prove he was no impartial scientific authority on the matter, taken together discredit the Leuchter Report as well as other supporters of the “Auschwitz Lie” conspiracy theory.

Scientific rebuttals and logical counterarguments aside, as with the other claims of deniers, there exists a wealth of further convincing evidence to prove them wrong. One piece alone cannot be relied on to prove or disprove the Holocaust. Instead, one must see the forest for the trees. There are eyewitness accounts of Nazis marching their prisoners into the gas chambers and burning their bodies afterward, but if you doubt survivors’ testimonies, there exist photographs as well, taken secretly by a Greek Jew in Auschwitz. If these you still find dubious, there are the confessions of the camp’s guards, who corroborated all of it. Some Holocaust deniers point to aerial photographs taken by Allied reconnaissance to suggest that since no smoke is seen emerging from smokestacks, the Holocaust must be a hoax, for in order to kill so many, they would have had to be gassing and burning them 24 hours a day. First off, the underlying assumption here is false, for the total killed, as previously stated, includes millions shot and starved elsewhere, and second, we have camp records that were entered as evidence in the trials of Nazis that can verify that, on the days when aerial photos were taken, there happened to be no gassings. Of course, Holocaust deniers go on denying, finding or inventing details to quibble over and reject, all while the great mass of evidence stares them in the face. They put on blinders, focusing only on the bits they think they might be able to cast doubt on and ignoring all that they cannot.

Aerial photo taken Augus 23 1944 of the extermination camp Auschwitz II–Birkenau at Brzezinka in which the smokestacks do indicate the running of the crematorium, via Wikimedia Commons.

Further Reading

Evans, Richard J. Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial. Basic Books, 2002.

Petropoulos, Jonathan. “Confronting the ‘Holocaust as Hoax’ Phenomenon as Teachers.” The History Teacher, vol. 28, no. 4, 1995, pp. 523–539. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/494640.

Shermer, Michael, and Alex Grobman. Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened, and Why Do They Say It? University of California Press, 2000.

Smith, Tom W. “A Review: The Holocaust Denial Controversy.” The Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 2, 1995, pp. 269–295. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2749705.

Van Pelt, Robert Jan. The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial. Indiana University Press, 2002.

Yelland, Linda M., and William F. Stone. “Belief in the Holocaust: Effects of Personality and Propaganda.” Political Psychology, vol. 17, no. 3, 1996, pp. 551–562. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3791968.

Nazi Occultism, Part Three: The Hunt for a Hyperborean Heritage

As a boy in the 1980s, there were no movies I loved more than the Indiana Jones films. I had myself a fedora and whip, and I used to stand in my front yard trying to wrap it securely around a tree limb. So I grew up under the assumption that Hitler was obsessed with finding relics of power, like the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail. As I grew up and learned more about who Nazis were, I thought that, if those jackbooted boogeymen were real, then perhaps those powerful talismans were also real, a notion my Sunday school teachers were all too happy to reinforce. So, just as I tried to wrap that whip around that branch, I tried to wrap my head around the idea that Judeo-Christian artifacts imbued with God’s magical power might somehow aid in evil men’s plans of world domination and genocide. A tale like Ravenscroft’s about the Spear of Destiny would have drawn me in and convinced me entirely, as it has so many others. But returning to this topic with a more critical perspective, and finding legends like Ravenscroft’s to be entirely implausible and impossible to credit, I had been ready to accept that Nazis weren’t the archaeologists of the weird that Raiders and Last Crusade made them out to be. Imagine my surprise, then, when through my research, as the story of the neo-pagan and occult notions behind Nazism unfolded to me, I discovered that, in many ways, this legend was entirely true.

Long before the rise of the Nazi party, the development of the myth of an Aryan race that came from some mysterious northern homeland and spread southward over the world, propagating their Indo-European language, led to the identification of the imagined Aryan race with certain lost civilization myths. It was these myths that drove Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, the dark pontiff of the SS Death’s Head Cult, and his archbishop Karl Maria Wiligut, to organize and bankroll numerous pseudoscientific archaeological and anthropological expeditions. Essentially, their interest in the ancient past extended only as far as proving their occult theories about their racial heritage, and that meant seeking to prove the existence of places long held by empirical historiography to be mere myth. One of these places was Atlantis, the history of whose myth is so rich and byzantine that I could not hope to do it justice in one short passage here. Suffice to say, then, that Atlantis was a mythical mid-Atlantic lost continent and civilization that originated in an allegorical story told by Plato. I encourage you to listen to Sebastian Major’s coverage of Atlantis in Our Fake History for a better understanding of the myth. What is relevant here is that to some, the idea arose that Atlantis could have been the homeland of the Aryans, even though a Mid-Atlantic continent could not be considered as being to the north of Europe. The reason for the connection is the Oera-Linda Book, which I covered in my last patron exclusive Blindside podcast episode. That seemingly ancient Frisian text, believed to have been written in a runic script, told the tale of a Northern European, Nordic civilization descended from Atlanteans that would go on to be the progenitor of the Germans and basically all white Europeans. Despite the fact that, after the book first came to light in the late 19th century, it was conclusively proven to be a forgery and hoax, its ideas were so appealing to German believers in the Aryan myth, that in 1933, a Völkisch pseudo-scholar named Hermann Wirth published a translation of it. This version so caught the imagination of Heinrich Himmler that in 1935 he recruited Hermann Wirth to be the head of his newly formed Study Society for Primordial Intellectual History and German Ancestral Heritage, later renamed Research and Teaching Community for Ancestral Heritage, Das Ahnenerbe, for short, a word ostensibly meaning ancestral heritage, but which amusingly is translated by Google as “guessed heritage,” as in heritage about which one is only guessing. For years, until the beginning of World War II, the Ahnenerbe would devote much time and research to attempting to prove the Oera-Linda Book genuine, at which task, of course, they failed. But this was far from the sole focus of the Ahnenerbe, for to begin with, the Atlantis of the Oera-Linda was not the only mythical land believed to have been the Aryan origin place.

1665 map by Athanasius Kircher placing Atlantis in the mid-Atlantic, via Wikimedia Commons

One purveyor of myths about ancient lost civilizations who had a tremendous influence on Nazi occult pseudohistory was Madame Helena Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society, whose contributions to Ariosophy I’ve already discussed. In her 1888 book The Secret Doctrine, she outlined her cosmogony, or version of the origin of the universe, as well as her claims about anthropogenesis, the origins of mankind. By her reckoning, there had been multiple ages, during which different root races of mankind had seen their rise and fall on continents now lost to time. She claimed that mankind as we knew it, the Aryans or fifth race, were descended from the fourth race, Atlanteans, a race of giants with psychic powers. The Atlanteans, in turn, before being nearly wiped out by the sinking of their continent, had been descended from the third race, who had lived in the lost southern civilization of Lemuria. And before them, had been the second race, who lived in Hyperborea near the North Pole, as so on. Hyperborea, meaning “beyond the North Wind,” had been a mythical place since time immemorial. The earliest surviving mention of it was in Herodotus, who indicated other, now lost records of the continent, such as in a lost work of Homer’s. Poets, philosophers, and geographers of antiquity all had their own ideas about the location of Hyperborea. It was a northerly location, as the very name suggested, and the myth tells us it was beyond the Riphean Mountains, but no one was quite certain of those mountains’ location. Despite what you might find written about it online, none thought of it as an arctic or polar island. Diodorus Siculus, Pliny the Elder, and Pomponius Mela described Hyperborea as a utopian paradise, which of course doesn’t square well with the Arctic’s less than temperate climate. Actually, most scholars believe the myth of Hyperborea may represent evidence of Greek contact with Celts on Britain. French occultist Antoine Fabre d’Olivet appears to be the first to propose the Arctic north as the location of Hyperborea and the origin of the “white race,” and from there it passed through the writings of countless occultists, who like Blavatsky are an incestuous group, metaphorically, in that they seem to have little qualm about repeating claims, source unseen, and even plagiarizing lengthy passages.

The idea of Hyperborea being located at the farthest point northward, beyond the Arctic circle, seems to have come from a conflation of that lost civilization with another mythical northerly island: Ultima Thule. Like Hyperborea, the myth of Ultima Thule originated in antiquity, and its location was likewise debated by many of the same names, such as Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Pomponius Mela, and Claudius Ptolemy. However, Thule had a much stronger claim to actually be a land in the Arctic north. It was first written about during the time of Alexander the Great’s conquests by Pytheas of Massilia, a mariner exploring the Atlantic. Only a few quotations of Pytheas’s writings have survived, but enough that we know he described Thule as “the place where the sun sets. For it happened that in these parts the night becomes extremely short, sometimes two, sometimes three hours long, so that the sun rises a short while after sunset” (Cassidy 595). The myth of Ultima Thule—this ultimate, as in utmost or farthest, island—presents the greatest evidence that mankind indeed penetrated the Arctic circle in ancient times, for it is a clear description of the midnight sun phenomenon now known to occur there. However, even some geographers in antiquity doubted Pytheas, such as Strabo, who called him an “archfalsifier” (Cassidy 595). Doubt is understandable, for just as Hyperborea was said to be icebound yet to enjoy a comfortable climate, so Ultima Thule was described by some, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, to experience “an eternal spring, green throughout seasons” (Cassidy 600). Among those who gave him credence, Ultima Thule’s location was debated with just as much verve: it was variously seen as being somewhere northwest of England, then to the northeast, then far out west into the Atlantic, and once, a confusion of names had some thinking it was in the Persian Gulf! Today, most believe that if it ever existed, it was likely a Shetland Island, or Iceland, whose evergreens would go a long way toward explaining claims about its year-round greenery. (Cassidy 597-599). Of its inhabitants, however, little was claimed beyond them being barbarians, and later, that they enjoyed a perfect utopian existence. In another indication that myths about Hyperborea have become confused with myths about Ultima Thule over the years, we see Pomponius Mela state that Hyperboreans did not die but rather “laughingly” cast themselves into the sea “when sufficiency of living…has come upon them,” while in the 15th century English encyclopedia The Mirror of the World, it is claimed that the Thuleans only die “whan they ben so olde & feble that…they had [rather] dye than lyve” (Cassidy 602).

1623 map of a mysterious Arctic continent by Gerardus Mercator, via Wikimedia Commons

Just as occultists took the myth of Hyperborea and asserted its connection to their notions of racial descent, so German Ariosophists took the myth of Ultima Thule and claimed it as part and parcel of their Aryan myth. Among these, of course, were the members of the aforementioned Thule Gesellshaft, or Thule Society. The Thule Society did not necessarily hold fast to the notion that a green and verdant land that enjoyed a perpetual spring had ever existed at the North Pole. But they thought, perhaps, it could have existed beneath it, and so throughout their literature can be seen references to Hohlweltlehre, or Hollow Earth Theory. The idea that the earth might be hollow, and that conditions beneath the surface might possibly support life was not exactly new. The astronomer and explorer Edmund Halley, for example, had developed a detailed theory about it. I spoke of this briefly last year, in my discussion of the Green Children of Woolpit, and I guested on an episode of the podcast The Conspirators with host and friend of the show Nate Hale in which we spoke all about it. I encourage you to go listen to those episodes for more on the notion of the Hollow Earth. Here, what is most germane to mention is that the Thule Society, along with other proponents of the Hollow Earth theory, looked to Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth as inspiration, which featured a German scholar deciphering the ancient rune script of a Nordic saga to discover the hidden entrance to the inner realms of the earth in Iceland. One imagines the members of the Thule Society finding this fiction not only plausible but almost a revelation, perhaps theorizing that Verne had some occult knowledge that they might uncover themselves with further research. Other novels featuring a civilization inside a hollow earth that they might have taken inspiration from include the Pellucidar novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the satirical Utopian novel The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Indeed, Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, which revolved around a race of subterranean superbeings called the Vril-ya, was accepted by numerous occultists, including many of Blavatsky’s Theosophists, as revealing some hidden truth about the world. And in the 1930s Willy Ley, a German rocket scientist who defected to America and wrote about Nazi pseudoscience, offered the supposed revelation that another secret German society, called the Society for Truth, existed for the sole purpose of discovering and harnessing Vril, the mysterious force wielded by Bulwer-Lytton’s hollow earth dwellers. This has turned Bulwer-Lytton’s fiction into a touchstone for Aryan theorists and enthusiasts of occult Nazi myths ever since, resulting in legends of Vril-powered Nazi UFOs, of course. Ironically, another important literary legacy of Edward Bulwer-Lytton has to do with bad writing, for he famously coined the ultimate cliché, “It was a dark and stormy night….”

Whether or not the Hollow Earth theory was given credence by a great many Nazis or only a few, it is evident that among Nazis and occultists in Germany at the time, eccentric conceptions of how the earth was formed seem to have been prevalent. One such theory, proposed by Dr. Cyrus Reed Teed after a series of surveys he completed in 1890s Florida, suggested that the earth was concave. Some researchers have argued that both Hitler and Himmler had become convinced of this “Cellular Cosmogony,” as it was called, which had seen a resurgence in the weird atmosphere of early 20th century Germany. Essentially, this theory holds that there is a hollow earth, and we are on its concave inner surface, looking up at a gaseous blue cloud lit by a small sun, on the other side of which could possibly be seen the far side of the world. Supposedly, Hitler sent a radar expert to the Baltic Sea to aim his radar equipment into the sky at a certain angle in hopes of tracking the British fleet in the Atlantic. While this theory and projects undertaken based on it might seem ridiculous, another, no less absurd, might even make it seem sensible by comparison. It seems that Himmler and Hitler both also became enamored of Welteislehre, or World Ice Theory, the brainchild of one Hanns Horbiger, an engineer and inventor. He seems to have been a man of science, until one day, while gazing at the moon, he claimed to have had an epiphany—almost like the visions of Guido von List, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, and Karl Maria Wiligut—that all planets were composed of ice and that ice was the basic building block of all things, making the Milky Way not a galaxy of stars but a vast swathe of icebergs. In 1912, he published his theory of “Glacial Cosmogony,” and some elements of it were actually prescient. For example, he suggested that the universe had begun in an explosion like the Big Bang. Other aspects of his theory, however, definitely show it to be a product of the Austro-German revival of occultism and esotericism at the time, such as that the ancient and superior races of man had arrived on earth when moons of ice had crashed into it, and that impacts of these sorts had further resulted in the sinking of Atlantis and in Noah’s flood. Particularly appealing to Ariosophists and specifically to Heinrich Himmler was this notion of a master race originating from an icy world, for this struck his ear as very like the myth of Ultima Thule being the frozen homeland of the Aryan master race.

Depiction of our galaxy according to Horbiger’s World Ice Theory, via the Moscow Society of Astronomy Lovers

Much of the work of Himmler’s Ahnenerbe was directed toward finding evidence to support these various Ariosophist pet theories of anthropogenesis and cosmogenesis, but of course, by the time the Second World War came around, when Himmler and his Death’s Head Cult took on far more horrific tasks and put their academic undertakings on hold, they had nothing to show for their research. One should attribute this to the fact they were seeking evidence of something that only existed in their minds, though, and not to any lack of effort on their part. In search of archaeological proof of German superiority and lost Aryan civilizations, the Ahnenerbe sent teams all over the world. In order to gather more Nordic folklore to pore over, teams visited Scandinavia in 1935, recorded the traditional songs of pagan forest dwellers, and met with a legendary sorceress named Miron-Aku. Perceived similarities between prehistoric petroglyphs and runes led to numerous expeditions to Sweden, the Baltic Sea, and Italy, and the theory that Aryan paganism was the progenitor of all Middle Eastern religions led to an expedition to Iraq to study the ancient sites of Babylon. The Ahnenerbe truly were the villainous archaeologists portrayed in Raiders of the Lost Ark, exploring prehistoric Celtic settlements close to home in the Black Forest and planning expeditions as far afield Iceland, where they hoped to study the culture for any echoes of their mythological Ultima Thule and the Aryan race, and Bolivia and Peru, where they believed they saw parallels between the ancient Incans and Nordic culture. Perhaps the most far-flung operation ever taken on by the Ahnenerbe was their mission to Tibet in hopes of finding there the source of their imagined master race. There was a theory at the time that plant and animal life had all come from a common source up in the Himalayas, an idea that resonated well with Ariosophist notions of a root or master race of human beings coming from some icy realm. Tibet wasn’t exactly to the north of Europe, but there was another legend, of the so-called Mountain of Tongues, called Jabal al-Alsinah by medieval Arab geographers who claimed it was the birthplace of Indo-European languages. While this mythical mountain had long been supposed to be in the Caucasus, Himmler thought that perhaps the tales had been mistaken and it might be in the Himilayas. Moreover, the mad mystic Karl Wiligut was apparently very interested in stories he’d heard about Tibetan women keeping magical stones in their vaginas, so off they sent a team to Tibet, where after an arduous seven-month journey, they eventually reached the forbidden capital city of Lhasa… and of course found no sign of any blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryans.

True to the image of Nazi archaeologists in Raiders and The Last Crusade, though, the Ahnenerbe did more than sift around in ruins and squint at glyphs. They were on the lookout for artifacts of legend. Perhaps the earliest such artifact to interest Himmler and Wiligut was the Irminsul, a great pillar said to be sacred to the pagan Saxons, that legend says was destroyed by Charlemagne. Völkisch neo-pagans associated the Irminsul with Yggdrasil, the World Tree of Nordic mythology, and saw parallels to the object in numerous world religions, such as Christianity’s Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden, the sacred Hindu fig tree the Ashvastha, and the bodhi tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment. Völkisch pseudo-scholars like Karl Maria Wiligut believed that the Irminsul was none other than the Externsteine, a formation of natural sandstone pillars in the Rhineland that Roman historian Tacitus had written about as the Pillars of Hercules. At this site are a number of 12th century Christian carvings, the most prominent of which depicts Christ’s descent from the Cross, but Karl Maria Wiligut and other neo-pagans believed that long before these carvings were made, it had been a pagan place of worship and appreciated it as such, coaxing Himmler and other SS officers to make pilgrimages out to the site. In fact, Himmler came to be so preoccupied by it that before he established the Ahnenerbe, he established a precursor organization called the Externsteine Foundation whose focus was to study the stone outcropping he and WIligut believed was the Irminsul. In those early years, the madman Wiligut was far more influential in the archaeological undertakings of the SS, mounting expeditions of his own to places where he believed there to be intersections of “energy lines,” like planetary chakra points or ley lines, and digging up stone ruins from which he felt “vibrations.”

A depiction of Charlemagne having the Irminsul destroyed, via Wikimedia Commons

While the story of Hitler’s obsession with taking possession of the Spear of Destiny may be dubious, there are plenty of real stories involving the Ahnenerbe seeking out and sometimes snatching historical artifacts. The war put one plan on hold, to photograph the Behistun Inscription carved into a mountainside in Iran using a balloon-mounted camera, but as the Reich invaded other countries, the chance to loot relics was always seized on by the Ahnenerbe. They took possession of Gothic artifacts such as the Veit Stoss altarpiece and the Crown of Crimea, and they took great interest in the Bayeaux Tapestry upon invading France, believing it offered evidence supporting the notion of Germanic superiority. And the one probably mythical, supposedly magical artifact that actually did seem to cast a spell over Himmler and his black-clad archaeologists was the Holy Grail of legend. Spielberg and Lucas seem to have gotten this one spot on. Ever since Wagner based his opera Parzival on the 13th-century story of Percival, the Knight of King Arthur’s Round Table who quested after the Holy Grail, Germans and neo-pagan occultists had taken great interest in Grail mythology. As mentioned in the last episode, entire reading rooms at Wewelsburg had been dedicated by Himmler to the study of Arthurian Legend and the mythos of the Holy Grail, and some have said he envisioned the castle as a kind of twisted Camelot, with an almost 15,000-square-foot dining hall equivalent to Arthur’s Round Table. And within the ranks of the Ahnenerbe was a slick-haired, weaselly man named Otto Rahn who, like a quintessential Indiana Jones villain, had been obsessed with the Grail all his life, believing that the Gnostic French Cathar sect wiped out in a Catholic Crusade in 1244 had actually secreted the Grail away somewhere in the Languedoc region of western France. If you’re thinking that this sounds an awful lot like Holy Blood, Holy Grail or The DaVinci Code, you’re absolutely right. These kinds of conspiracy theories of hidden history are endlessly recycled. Like many who would come after him, he searched the castle at Montségur and various remote caves throughout the Pyrenees Mountains, finding nothing more concrete than material for a 1933 book. Himmler, it turned out, was a fan of his writings, gave Rahn a black uniform and an impressive rank, and bankrolled his Grail quest. But Otto Rahn was no Parzival and only ever produced some further writings about his search.

In the end, it may seem surprising that Himmler and the Ahnenerbe’s undertakings live in on legend, for they never turned up anything supportive of their pseudohistorical views, nor is there any evidence they ever discovered a mythical artifact and proved it to be true. The most they ever accomplished was turning up some remains or artifacts of passing historical interest, something it may have been hard not to do when sifting around through prehistoric sites. But enduring legends of Nazi survival remain to tantalize us. These unsupported and fantastical speculations suggest that perhaps the Nazis did discover objects of power or the secret places of the earth and kept their discoveries a secret, establishing what some call a breakaway civilization, an idea encouraged by the fact that some Nazis did escape Germany and take refuge across the world in South America. But these theories go further. They claim that it is all too suspect that entrances to the hollow earth were said to be located in Tibet and Antarctica, and the Germans mounted expeditions to both places. The Tibet expedition I have already discussed; as for Antarctica, the Nazis sent one Captain Alfred Ritscher to there in 1938 to claim 230,000 square miles in the name of Germany. If you dare visit the underbelly of Internet conspiracy and paranormal pseudohistory websites, you’ll find it said that, clearly, the Nazis found a path to the hollow earth, harnessed the power of Vril, and used it to found a new, underground society and power their flying saucers. The problem is there are far simpler explanations and more reasonable conclusions. The Tibet expedition was well documented, with surviving film and photographs, and it is apparent that the Nazi pseudo-anthropologists who undertook it did little more than place calipers on the heads of everyone they encountered and record their craniometric data. There is no indication that they did any sort of cave exploration or excavation. As for the Antarctic mission of Captain Ritscher, it was a territorial claim, pure and simple. Many nations had sent similar teams to the South Pole before them, including Norway, France, Britain, and the U.S., whose Admiral Richard Byrd had famously flown over it. It was only because of the Nazi’s aggression and the clear rumblings of war that Ritscher’s expedition raised eyebrows. But legend always finds a way to grow. Two years after the Reich fell, Admiral Byrd organized a task force of 13 ships, 33 aircraft, and nearly 5,000 men and went back to Antarctica in Operation Highjump, with a mission of training personnel in cold conditions, gathering information, and extending sovereignty. Conspiracy theorists, however, will tell you that it was a military operation to attack a secret Nazi UFO base. With their customary lack of supporting evidence, they won’t even try to prove their claims, looking instead to skeptics to somehow prove them wrong.

Emblem of the Nazi expedition to Antarctica, via Wikimedia Commons

Further Reading

Cassidy, Vincent H. de P. “The Voyage of an Island.” Speculum, vol. 38, no. 4, 1963, pp. 595–602. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2851657.

Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology. New York University Press, 2004.

Shnirelman, Victor. “Hyperborea: The Arctic Myth of Contemporary Russian Radical Nationalists.” Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics, vol. 8, no. 2, 2014, pp. 121-38. Directory of Open Access Journals, doaj.org/article/a20b5cfd725d4cdaa864118d815444c0.

Yenne, Bill. Hitler’s Master of the Dark Arts: Himmler’s Black Knights and the Occult Origins of the SS. Zenith Press, 2010.

Nazi Occultism, Part Two: The Death's Head Cult

In part two of this series, we will look at the dark messianic figure saluting at the head of the Nazi columns, Adolph Hitler, and beyond him to the figures in his orbit who most involved themselves in mystical and occult practices. At the end of Part One, we introduced him as an art student and army corporal who took an interest in the writings of Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels. After the conclusion of World War I, when the Treaty of Versailles forbade the reconstitution of the Imperial German Army, unemployed veterans joined up with a number of paramilitary militias called freikorps, or like Hitler, joined the national police force known as the Reichswehr. This was a time of great unrest, with communists on the far left and nationalists on the far right all displeased with the democratic compromise of the Weimar Republic, a disaffection exacerbated by a general economic collapse. Just as numerous mystical creeds had vied for ascendancy in the Austro-German New Age, in 1919, in Munich, numerous fledgling political groups struggled to capture the attention of the German people. The Reichswehr sent young Hitler to spy on one small party, the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP), or the German Workers’ Party, but Hitler, an avowed anti-Semite already, liked what the DAP had to say about Bolsheviks and the Jews being responsible for Germany’s recent defeat and ended up joining the party instead. Before the end of the year, the DAP became the NSDAP, or National Socialist German Workers’ Party, but don’t let the name fool you. They were a far right nationalist group seeking to expand their appeal to their base with watchwords; they were only “socialist” insofar as they heaped scorn on Jewish capitalists. Thus the Nazi party was born, their name a shortening of Nationalsozialistische, and by 1921, the orator Hitler was its chairman, and by 1923, its Führer, the dictator of a political party with some 20,000 members and its own freikorps of storm troopers, the SA, called brownshirts after their uniforms, who went around intimidating and brutalizing enemies of the party. It was late that year that Hitler attempted a coup in Bavaria, fomenting the overthrow of the government with a speech at a beer hall and marching on Munich’s city hall, a gambit that failed and landed him in prison, where he solidified his doctrine of racism and nationalism by writing Mein Kampf and prepared himself to resume leadership of the Nazis and continue his inexorable march to absolute power over Germany and Europe. But while it is overtly clear that Hitler was driven nationalist and racist ideals, it is not as clear whether he subscribed to the occult, mystical, and neo-pagan notions of the Austro-German New Age or how ingrained these elements were in the culture of Nazism.

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Once again, as I discuss the rise to power and beliefs of Hitler and his lieutenants, I do so with a purpose: to examine the veracity of claims that Nazis were an occult group. If I suggest that perhaps there are myths surrounding him or other Nazi figures, it is not in an attempt to exonerate him or revise history to his benefit. Hitler was a racist and a despot and a mass murderer the likes of which I don’t believe have never been seen before or since in human history, and the same can be said for all his cronies or accomplices. If you are listening to this searching for fodder to use in Nazi apologism, unsubscribe, delete your accounts, go outside and get to know the people you fear and blindly hate.

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Clearly Hitler identified with völkisch and Ariosophist ideas, but that does not mean that he was a mystic pupil of Guido von List and Jörg von Liebenfels. He was a clear nationalist, but the völkische movement did not invent German nationalism; there was plenty of that in the Imperial German Army to which Hitler had previously belonged. Certainly he appreciated völkisch notions, such as Drang Noch Osten, the eastward urge, which suggested Germans held a manifest destiny to settle in lands to the east, a notion addressed in Hitler’s doctrine of lebensraum, or the German need to spread eastward for living space. And of course, ideas of German racial superiority, specifically over Jews, appealed to Hitler’s very apparent and rabid anti-Semitism. There is, however, some justified debate over whether he subscribed to the racial theories of Aryan superiority as some others held them, for although he did seek to absorb all Germanic peoples into his Reich, he appears to have been more skeptical about accepting those of other ethnicities even when his racial pseudo-scientists insisted on their Aryan characteristics, which would suggest Hitler maintained more of an Imperial nationalism than some other true believers. Then there is the fact, strange if Lanz von Liebenfels was such an influence on him through his writings in Ostara, that Hitler never drew von Liebenfels into the Reich or awarded him any position. Some have claimed that Hitler may have visited the offices of Lanz’s magazine in 1909 to buy some issues of Ostara, and that he may have spoken with Von Liebenfels at the time, but there is no evidence of a significant influence on the Führer. Indeed, in Mein Kampf, Hitler even warns against “wandering völkisch scholars” and “so-called reformers of the ancient Germanic type,” calling them “the greatest imaginable cowards” and “comedians,” suggesting “that they are sent by dark forces who do not desire the rebirth of [the German] people. For their entire activity leads the Volk away from its fight against the common enemy, the Jew, in order that it may expend its energy in internal religious struggles.” These are certainly not the words of an initiate in pagan mysteries or a true believer in the occult or the mystical.

There exist numerous unsupported claims about Hitler being the pawn of occult agents bent on grooming him for evil purposes. One example comes from English occult writer Victor Neuburg, who claimed to have been present at a conversation in which infamous magician Aleister Crowley informed novelist and essayist Aldous Huxley that his secret society, the Ordo Templi Orientis, had fed peyote to Hitler and under its influence brainwashed him, trained him in oratory, and “gave him his daemon.” Needless to say, Neuburg offers no further evidence of this third-hand claim. Likewise, perhaps the most famous story about Hitler’s involvement in occultism comes to us as hearsay that we are expected to take as truth. In Trevor Ravenscroft’s incredible—as in hard to believe—book, The Spear of Destiny, he lays out a tale about Hitler’s obsession with a magical artifact, manipulation by esoteric secret societies, and possession by dark forces, all of which was supposedly conveyed to him by Dr. Walter Stein, the physician and advisor to Winston Churchill mentioned in Part One, who believed, or at least spread the idea, that Hitler was a Satanist. As Ravenscroft’s pseudohistory unfolds, we meet a young and indigent Hitler who is obsessed with an artifact in the Hofburg Museum in Vienna. This artifact, a lance variously believed to have belonged to Saint Maurice or to Constantine the Great, became conflated with the Holy Lance, or Lance of Longinus, said to have pierced Christ’s side during the crucifixion. This claim is also made of numerous other lance heads displayed around the world. Ravenscroft, however, tacitly asserting that the one in the Hofburg was genuine, describes how it called out to Hitler, possessing him, for he who took ownership of the Holy Lance would rule the world. While it is true that, after annexing Austria, Hitler seized the crown jewels and this artifact along with them, transporting them in an armored train and depositing them in a bunker, there was plenty of precedent for doing so as it made a clear symbolic statement about his sovereignty. Trevor Ravenscroft attributes quotes to Hitler without source; makes claims that biographers of Hitler have proven untrue, such as where he was at certain times and what his financial situation might have been; and relies on a plot containing so many coincidences that it reads like a bad novel, which it probably is. Perhaps the biggest strike against the book is that it later came out Ravenscroft never actually met Dr. Stein but rather claims to have interviewed his ghost through a séance! Regardless, even if he really had learned these things from Dr. Stein, Stein’s own credibility issues and the lack of any concrete evidence make Ravenscroft’s story of Hitler’s initiation into the occult only worth mentioning insofar as it is entertaining.

A depiction of Longinus piercing Christ’s side with the Holy Lance, via Wikimedia Commons

However, even if Hitler’s devotion to esoteric and occult beliefs cannot be clearly proven, it is evident that he surrounded himself with true believers. One example was the astrologer and hypnotist, Erich Jan Hanussen, an old friend of Hitler’s who would sometimes advise him by reading his horoscope or suggesting certain arcane rituals be undertaken for luck or to break supposed curses on Hitler. His relationship to this figure seems to suggest at least an openness or tolerance of the occult. Then there were the members of the Thule Society, such as the playwright Dietrich Eckart, racial theorist and future Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, and pseudo-aristocratic occultist Rudolf von Sebottendorff, all of whom ran the Nazi mouthpiece newspaper, the People’s Observer. These men were all neo-pagans and Ariosophists, believers in the legendary land of Ultima Thule as the long-lost origin of the mythical Aryan race, about which, as already promised, I will have more to say before the series concludes. There is no evidence that Hitler himself was a member of the Thule Society, however, and he may have only relied on them as writers and publishers because of their involvement in the DAP from the beginning, before it had even transformed into the NSDAP, or Nazi Party. One thing, however, is certain; the involvement of the Thule Society members in the Nazis did much to encourage Heinrich Himmler to devote himself to the party, and Himmler would prove to be the biggest occult influence on Nazism.

Raised a middle-class Catholic, like Hitler himself, Himmler was an imaginative youth who lost himself in daydreams about medieval Germanic folklore and Nordic mythology, much like Guido von List. His reveries about the warriors of the Nibelungenlied and of Teutonic Knights left him yearning for martial service. He enlisted in the 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment in World War I, but with poor eyesight and a weak constitution, he never saw any action and failed to complete the officer training into which his father had pulled strings to enroll him. During the days of the Weimar Republic, he lived on a farm and became enamored of völkisch ideas, including the most extreme Blood and Soil notions, and he became obsessed by the myth of the Aryan race and its history in the primeval past as well as the runology of Guido von List. After studying agriculture at the University of Munich and still trying to scratch an itch for the military service he idealized, he join a freikorps militia, and finding similar interests among members of Nazi Party, such as those espoused by the Thule Society, he joined up, and during the attempted coup known as the Beer Hall Putsch, he marched with his freikorps to seize the former war ministry offices. Upon Hitler’s release from prison and the reconstitution of the Nazi Party, Himmler took a position as a rural community organizer, recruiting völkisch idealists for the Nazi cause, but his dark star was on the rise. By 1929, he was the head of another freikorps, the SS (the Schutstaffel, or Protection Squad), conceived as a kind of elite imperial guard. Through ruthless maneuvering, Heinrich Himmler would likewise take control of the German State Police, or Gestapo, and over the course of his career and the Third Reich would become the most feared man in Germany, but his focus always remained on the SS, which he transformed from an imperial guard into a kind of cult devoted to neo-paganism and Aryan purity. More than any other Nazi, Heinrich Himmler stands as proof of occultism’s influence on Nazi policy, and it was at his desk that the most horrifyingly evil Nazi policy, that of the Final Solution, originated.

Some scholars, such as Stephen E. Flowers and Michael Moynihan in their essay, “The Myth of Nazi Occultism,” have suggested that the pagan and anti-Christian culture of Nazism has been exaggerated, pointing to the fact the original NSDAP party platform declared Christianity the official religion of Germany, and further noting that Hitler not only mocks neo-pagans in Mein Kampf but also relies on numerous biblical references (Flowers and Moynihan 30-31). A quote from Hitler’s 1938 speech to the Reich Party Congress stands as a clear example that Hitler, who himself never resigned from the Catholic Church as did many others in his party, may have thought of himself as remaining a Christian. He warned that “woe if the movement or the state, through the insinuation of obscure mystical element, should be given unclear orders.… There is already a danger if orders are given for the setting up of so-called cult-places, because this alone will give birth to the necessity subsequently to devise so-called cult games and cult rituals. Our cult is exclusively the cultivation of that which is natural and hence willed by God.” But of course, he may have simply been appealing in this speech to those who had retained their traditional Christian loyalties, and it is telling that in it he still calls Nazism a cult, even if only rhetorically. But to suggest that Nazism was not anti-Christian in the extreme would be to ignore the fact that, along with Jews, they would eventually persecute a great many Catholics and Jehovah’s Witnesses for their beliefs. And the simple fact that the neo-pagan Heinrich Himmler organized and ran the SS like a pagan cult clinches the argument, for the SS were considered the elite, the perfect example of Nazi ideals. Himmler required that any who would join his modern day Teutonic knighthood first renounce their faith in Catholic or Protestant Christianity. SS soldiers were forbidden to celebrate Christmas, replacing the observance with solstice celebrations. While it is true that many in the SS only paid lip service to this policy and continued to worship privately as they always had, the policy itself stands as the strongest evidence of Nazism’s anti-Christian, neo-pagan principles.

Photograph of Himmler by Friedrich Franz Bauer, licensed under (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE) via Wikimedia Commons

The runology of Guido von List, with which Himmler was so fascinated, provides another piece of evidence proving the occult influence on Nazism and the SS in particular. Even the prominence of the swastika itself, which had early been flown as a banner by Lanz von Liebenfels at the solstice rituals of his New Templars, appears to have been encouraged by the fascination of neo-pagans and new age mystics with ancient runes. The old mystic Guido von List had connected the hakenkreuz, or hooked cross, as it was called in German, to ancient Aryans, suggesting it represented some force by which the universe had been created, an assertion for which, typically, he offered no evidence beyond his own certainty. Certainly the symbol, called swastik in Sanskrit, has been found to be prevalent in numerous cultures connected through Indo-European languages, from Northern Europe all the way to India. It has been used in some form in Hinduism and Buddhism and Jewish Kabbalism, and in ancient Greece, where it was called the gammadion. But as noted in the previous installment, language groups and even cultural groups, are not the same as racial groups, and this was the root error that resulted in the myth of an Aryan race. Moreover, this symbol, which Carl Sagan has noted is readily apparent in nature and so could have arisen spontaneously in completely unrelated cultures, has been found in artifacts of pre-Columbian North American native tribes, such as the Navajo. Its widespread use in multiple cultures is likely what encouraged Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society to take it up as one of their principal symbols, and its association with Nordic mythology and the Teutonic Knights, a Catholic military order around whom swirled almost as many fantastical theories as those concerning the Knights Templar, led to the hakenkreuz being adopted as an important symbol of the Thule Society as well, who recommended its use in the Nazi flag. Members of the Thule Society likely saw in it more than the traditional Sanskrit meaning, which denoted good luck or well-being, for they were preoccupied with the symbols of Guido von List’s so-called Armanen Futharkh runes, a runic alphabet he appears to have invented and claimed were supernaturally conveyed to him. Therefore, to them, the hakenkreuz, or swastika, was likely viewed as two Sig or Sigel runes superimposed on each other. According to List’s runic alphabet, Sig meant victory, just like the German word sieg, which would become the traditional Nazi chant, sieg heil, or “hail victory.” Likewise, when it came time for Heinrich Himmler, the true believer, to choose the symbols of the SS and their regalia, he settled on two Sig runes, like twin lightning bolts, a runic symbol that he made so common in Nazi Germany that typewriters were manufactured with a special key to type the symbol on official documents. Along with this runic insignia, Himmler chose to retain the symbol previously adopted by the SS before he had taken command: that of the Totenkopf, or death’s head, a symbol that had been called the Jolly Roger when used by pirates. The images of the skull-and-crossbones and runic double lightning bolts on the black uniforms of this military order would strike terror into their victims and the world at large, and the very fact that this elite group openly and stringently devoted to neo-paganism and racial theories based on myth adopted its own occult iconography goes a long way toward establishing that this was more of a cult than an army.

Himmler’s devotion to the occult myth of the Aryan race is plain to see in his administration of the SS as well, for it was not only held up as an exemplar of Nazism but also of Aryan racial purity. Many were the armchair theorists and mystical declaimers of Ariosophy in those years, but Heinrich Himmler, a mild-mannered and mousy little man with hooded eyes, was determined to act on his convictions of Aryan purity and actually enact a program of controlled breeding that many early 20th century eugenicists only pondered. He started by instituting exacting standards for membership in the SS, believing that his elite corps must be unimpeachably pure of Aryan blood in order to serve as the vanguard in their struggle to assert the mastery of their race. Applicants to serve in the SS were therefore required to not only appear Nordic but to document their genealogy back more than a hundred years to prove that no Slavic or Jewish blood ran through their veins. This was true not only of new applicants, but of the existing rank and file, from which Himmler purged any whose blood he believed to be tainted. Once enlisted, SS could not marry unless their brides provided their family trees to prove their pure Aryan ancestry. Once approved, their weddings were pagan affairs, a non-Christian consecration ceremony that Himmler himself had crafted. And even their daughters were forbidden to marry any man in whose lineage could be found a drop of Jewish or Slavic blood, for Himmler saw the members of his SS as the seed from which a future, purely Aryan utopia would spring, and he felt it needed to be protected from the corruption of miscegenation. No wonder, then, that, after the SS had proven in its operations in the Soviet Union that it was capable of mass murder, the zealously anti-Semitic Hitler, who had long shouted about the annihilation of European Jews, would turn to Himmler, the ruthless enactor of racial policies, for a “Final Solution.” Thus it was Himmler, the mastermind of the concentration camp, and his death’s head cult, who would carry out the greatest atrocities of the Third Reich.

When one hears about how carefully Himmler and the SS scrutinized the women in their officers’ lives, one might be tempted to give credence to the tales that Himmler formed a secret unit of women, the SS Hexen-Sonderkommando, who were witches practicing their dark arts to further the ends of the Führer. But this appears, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be a legend. Certainly Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer, was interested in witchcraft. He created a team of researchers to gather evidence that the Catholic Church had persecuted Germans in their witch-trials, and this group, which indexed its findings in the Hexenkartothek, may actually be the inspiration for the SS Hexen group of legend, but there is no indication that this group was even comprised of women, let alone witches. Documents have turned up indicating that Himmler may have believed one of his ancestors had been persecuted as a witch, and that he was interested in claims that unusual numbers of crows were said to haunt the sites of witch executions, but I decline to hazard a guess as to the authenticity of these, and regardless, they would only prove his academic interest in the occult, which is already well-established. In truth, there were female units in the SS, such as the Helferinnenkorps, or Helpers Corp, who served as nurses and administrative assistants. Later, there were the more notorious Aufseherinnen, or Overseers, women tasked with overseeing some aspects of concentration camp operations. Technically, none of these were considered real members of the SS, and of course, there are no indications of them practicing magic, but there is the story of Die Hexe von Buchenwald,  the Witch of Buchenwald, that might have transformed into a legend of actual witches in SS uniforms. Ilse Köhler Koch, wife of Karl Otto Koch, commandant of the Buchenwald, was in her position as Oberaufseherin, known to engage in as much casual cruelty and disgusting sadism as any male counterpart. She took a voyeuristic pleasure in staging rapes, and she was disturbingly obsessed with tattoos, such that she had them cut off the corpses of prisoners, tanning the skin and making accessories out of them, like gloves and handbags.

Ilse Koch testifying in her own defense, via Wikimedia Commons

While Himmler and the SS may not have had witches in their ranks, they certainly had at least one warlock. In the same year that Hitler rose to the position of chancellor, a nearly 70-year-old man, formerly a colonel who had served in the Austrian army during the previous world war, got an audience with Himmler and explained how he was able to commune with the spirits of old Nordic heroes from the time of Germanic mythology. The two men shared many interests, in theories about the ancient roots of the Germans, their old runic language, their relation to the gods. Himmler made him head of a department focused on researching prehistory, but within a year, this old mystic guru had risen to the rank of SS Oberführer, a position something like that of a general. Karl Maria Wiligut was just another crank coming out of the Austro-German New Age, like a Guido von List or a Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, except he had never managed to find himself a following. Like List, he was interested in runes and had written a book about them, and just as List crafted a mythology around a group of ancient priests called Armanen, an extrapolation of a tidbit in Tacitus that mentioned Germanic tribes called Irminones who resisted the Romans, Wiligut crafted his own alternate mythology around a similar group he called the Irminen, although he insisted they were a wholly different ancient Germanic priesthood that worshipped a different pagan deity and actually went to war with List’s Wotan-worshippers. Just as Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels had his publication Ostara, Wiligut published his own periodical, The Iron Broom, in which he also vocally dissented from Christianity and bemoaned the fact that the supposedly superior Aryan race had been and was being deteriorated by lesser races, including the Jewish race. As Guido von List had claimed supernatural inspiration for the futharkh runes, and as Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels had claimed to receive a vision revealing the threat of the sub-human races, Wiligut claimed that he knew so much about the ancient world because he channeled ancient spirits, from whom he learned that the Aryan race was born 230,000 years earlier, in a fantastical world with three suns, peopled by dwarves, giants, and mythical creatures. His own bloodline, according to him, could be traced back to Irminen royalty, born of gods and men, just the kind of divine sodomy that Lanz von Liebenfels wrote about. In every way, he was a contemporary of those pseudo-mystics, but he never had his own secret society or cult. In fact, he could not even make a believer of his own wife, whom he abused and who ended up having him committed. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, he spent around three years institutionalized before being released into the welcoming arms of Ariosophists who appreciated his writings. And eventually, he found an acolyte in Heinrich Himmler who was finally able to give him, in the SS, the cult following that had always eluded him.

Heinrich Himmler had grown up in Landshut, in the shadow of Castle Trusnitz, which called up images of the ancient kings and hero knights with which he had been infatuated. And Himmler’s high priest, Karl Maria Wiligut, had never had an ancient temple of his own, as had his contemporaries. Guido von List and his Armanenorden had some ancient Roman ruins at Carnuntum in which they practiced their pagan rituals, and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels’s Ordo Novi Templi or Order of the New Templars used Castle Werfenstein, an impressive old pile of rocks on a hilltop, for their orgiastic rituals. So, late in 1933, Himmler and Wiligut, the two leaders of the Nazis’ Death’s Head Cult, went looking for just such a place and found it in the Castle of Wewelsburg. Believed to be near the site of an ancient battle in which Germanic tribes defied Roman rule, it was perfectly suited for their neo-pagan beliefs, and the fact that it was said to be the site of thousands of witch burnings also, perversely, seems to have been a draw for them. The strangely triangular shaped castle would officially be the temple of the Death’s Head Cult, renovated to reflect their occult mythology with countless runic symbols carved into the ornate walls and ceilings. The castle was to be the hub from which he would build outward a massive complex called the Center of the New World whose numerous towers, walls and boulevards would, from above form the shape of a spear pointing north, toward the mythical homeland of the Aryan race. This spear one may be templated to think was meant to represent the Holy Lance, but that very Christian symbol had no place in the mythology of the Death’s Head Cult, which more likely would think of it as Gungnir, Wotan’s spear, or as a simple metaphor for this new world order, if you will, that they intended to spearhead.

Plans for the Center of the New World at Wewelsburg, via Wikimedia Commons

It was here at Castle Wewelsburg that they would perform their pagan weddings and baptisms, and other rituals, which Himmler, always one for meticulous record keeping, kept curiously secret. Thus legends have sprung up around the goings on there. In Dusty Sklar’s 1977 book, The Nazis and the Occult, she reported an unsupported claim that Himmler, Wiligut, and the SS engaged in human sacrifice rituals at Castle Wewelsburg. As the story goes, they would take a good specimen of an Aryan man, behead him, and use this severed head to channel otherworldly spirits they called the “Secret Masters of the Caucasus.” When you look more closely into the provenance of this story, however, much like the claims of Trevor Ravenscroft, it begins to lose any semblance of credibility. Sklar’s source was an Occidental College anthropology professor named C. Scott Littleton, which sounds reliable enough, but it turns out Littleton had the details from a college friend whose identity he refused to reveal, and that friend had them from a professor at a German university who likewise would remain anonymous. Supposedly, this German professor’s father had been an SS general and had left behind a box of files in which were reports about these grisly séances, but the actual files have never turned up. Instead, we just have what amounts to an urban legend, in which Sklar was told that Littleton heard that so-and-so spoke to a guy whose father had proof of these occult rituals. Nevertheless, what we do know of the Castle at Wewelsburg shows us the fascination that Himmler and Wiligut maintained in the occult and in their mythologized ancient past, an interest they encouraged all the members of their Death’s Head Cult to take. Throughout the castle, they built a series of oak-paneled reading rooms, each named after a specific subject, among which were a room on runes, a room on all things Aryan, rooms on old Germanic kings, a room on the Order of Teutonic Knights, and rooms on King Arthur and the Holy Grail. And as we shall see, in the final installment of this series, under the auspices of Heinrich Himmler’s authority, the Nazis would engage in much strange research and occult archaeology straight out of an Indiana Jones film.

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Further Reading

Badger, William, and Diane Purkiss. “English Witches and SS Academics: Evaluating Sources for the English Witch Trials in Himmler's Hexenkartothek.” Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural, vol. 6, no. 1, 2017, pp. 125–153. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/preternature.6.1.0125.

Roland, Paul. The Nazis and the Occult: The Dark Forces Unleashed by the Third Reich. Chartwell Books, 2008.

Sklar, Dusty. The Nazis and the Occult. Dorset Press, 1989.

Yenne, Bill. Hitler’s Master of the Dark Arts: Himmler’s Black Knights and the Occult Origins of the SS. Zenith Press, 2010.

Nazi Occultism, Part One: The Myth of the Aryans

In this installment, I’ll be returning to a topic that I have not revisited since my exploration of the Reichstag fire a couple years ago.  The rise of Nazism and the nature and underpinnings of their racist and tyrannical ideology fits particularly well into the thematic focus Historical Blindness, for a few reasons. One, it involved numerous misleading narratives and dubious conspiracy theories spread as propaganda, some of which have passed into history as though they were fact, as we explored in the previous installments on the Reichstag fire and the Oberfohren memorandum and the Ernst confession. Two, their conception of themselves and their place in history derived from numerous myths and false alternate histories, as we shall see in this series. And three, because not only are the lies and myths of Nazis still promulgated today by some on the far right, but the far right has also seen a resurgence in numerous countries around the world, making it more relevant than ever and essential that we not turn a blind eye to the lessons of the Nazis’ rise to power. Therefore, it is important that we look at the darkest influences in German society at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries to discover what made Nazism possible, what terrible conditions and malevolent forces led to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis.

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At the outset, it must be clearly established that Nazi ideology and mythology are undeniably evil. As I move from one concept’s origin to the next, from one movement or idea to another, I may not always return to this baseline truth or explain overtly why each is dangerous, misleading, or wicked—and in fact, some may appear harmless or may actually have been harmless at first, making their eventual enfolding into Nazism that much more insidious—so at the beginning, I must clarify that every element contributing to the rise of Nazism must be looked back on with distaste and mistrust and that I am in no way exploring them as valid notions or admirable schools or thought. Any who might read this and think, “Hey, they were on to something,” close your browser. You’re missing my point and you should reexamine your biases, your thought processes, and really, your life. Nazis were and are deluded and despicable. Any doctrines of racial supremacy are pure evil, in part and overall. The question I intend to examine here, however, is the nature of Nazism’s evil. Was it a distinctly human evil, the evil of men and their avarice and greed for power and domination? Certainly it was this, but was there some other, spiritual or supernatural aspect to its evil? Nazis are remembered as devilish ghouls, and many are the religious people who will tell you they think Hitler and his lieutenants were possessed by demons. In everything from Indiana Jones to Captain America, Hollywood portrays the Nazis as seekers after ancient and supernatural power. But how accurate is this conception of Nazi occultism? It is a question that first requires a definition of its central term. The “occult” denotes the obscured or the hidden, and in this sense, Nazis were not “occult” at all. While they may have kept some of their most monstrous programs quiet, they made no attempts to hide the tenets or doctrines of their movement. But the term “occult” connotes more than hidden knowledge; it hints at intercourse with the supernatural and with pagan or satanic influences that the Western, predominately Christian world hold to be nefarious, forces in contravention to all that is good and righteous. By this definition, especially that of the pagan and anti-Christian, it is hard to argue that the Nazis were not an occult movement.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that in large part, the popular notion of Nazi occultism was a narrative spread as propaganda. And much of this propaganda focused on Hitler and the Nazis being in league with the literal devil. Even the greatest and most prominent opponent of the Nazis, Winston Churchill, who helped to convince the world of the dark and evil threat that Nazi Germany posed, may have been significantly influenced by his personal physician, an expatriate German named Walter Stein who vocally asserted that Hitler was a diabolist and that his power derived from demons, a claim for which there is no evidence, insofar as such a claim can ever be proven. But for a more concrete and influential propagandist, one must look to Lewis Spence, whose 1940 The Occult Causes of the Present War made sweeping accusations of outright Satanic worship among not only Nazis but across Germany generally, and stretching back far into its past. For a taste of Spence’s logic, consider the following: he claimed that the fact so many witches had been burned in Germany was proof that the German people engaged in witchcraft to a greater degree than other peoples. For a further example, consider the 1939 book Hitler Speaks, or Voice of Destruction, supposedly written by a former high-ranking Nazi official, Hermann Rauschning. In it are shared numerous conversations the author claimed to have had with Hitler, depicting a Fuhrer carried away by dark forces and evil spirits (132). This book was revealed by journalists in the 1980s to have been a hoax comprised of choice material cribbed from nihilist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and French horror writer Guy de Maupassant. Further works that presented Hitler and his Nazis and being steeped in the supernatural came from figures who were sympathetic to their cause and bemoaned their defeat in the war, such as Savitri Devi, whose pseudohistorical and mystical biography of Hitler, Genghis Khan, and the Pharaoh Akhnaton, called The Lightning and the Sun, represents the leaders of the Third Reich as demigods and Hitler specifically as having been deified after his suicide, or Chilean author Miguel Serrano, contemporary and acquaintance of Carl Gustav Jung and Hermann Hesse, who advocated an “Esoteric Hitlerism” that blended Nazi ideals with Hindu religious traditions and a variety of conspiracy theories and science fiction. From there, popular culture takes up the torch, depicting the Nazis as demon-possessed, devil-worshipping magic relic hoarders, UFO builders, hollow earth explorers, and moon colonizers. It’s enough to make a level-headed researcher doubt any bizarre stories about them, but such stories abound, and many cannot be denied.

Another element of Nazism that some have suggested arises from the occult influence on the movement is their notion of racial superiority, but it is clear that such notions did not originate from occult sources, and in fact did not even originate in Germany. Rather, they originated in the fledgling science of anthropology, which engaged in a lot of what we recognize today as pseudoscience. Long before this, though, some Westerners turned to the Bible for explanations of race and skin tone variation. They relied on the passage in Genesis indicating that since Noah’s son Ham refused to avert his eyes when his father was naked and drunk, Ham’s son Canaan would be cursed to serve his brethren. This biblical story was misinterpreted and twisted in the mid-sixteenth century to provide a justification for racism and slavery, the curse on Canaan becoming a curse on all Ham’s descendants and coming to include a darkness of skin as well as a fate of servitude, none of which was really supported in the original scripture. Later, in the 17th century, Western natural philosophers still tended to think about race in biblical terms. believing that all races must have originated with Adam and Eve, a foundational assumption that led Robert Boyle to view albino children as proof that humans could give birth to progeny of a different race than their own. Much of what has been called “scientific racism” or “race biology” can be traced back to Enlightenment thinkers, such as Carl Linnaeus, father of taxonomy and a devout Christian, whose taxonomic classification of human beings included judgments of their character based on the ideas of physiognomy, a pseudoscience that asserted a person’s temperament and personality could be discerned from their outward appearance. Thus Linnaeus’s Europeanus was “fair,” as in white, and also “gentle, acute, inventive,” while Asiaticus was “sooty” and “severe, haughty, covetous” and Africanus was “black” and “crafty, indolent, negligent.” A racist hierarchy is abundantly evident here, even without mentioning his further classifications of sub-humans, the Homo Monstrosus.

A diagram showing the racism inherent in craniometry, via Wikimedia Commons

The particular brand of pseudoscientific racism that would eventually be folded into the Nazi worldview may have originated among Germans, as it began to take definite form when the German philosopher Christoph Meiners, who coined the early race classifications of Caucasian and Mongolian, believed in the racial superiority of Germans based on their “whitest, most blooming and most delicate skin.” But his race classifications were taken and run with by others, like Georges Cuvier, French zoologist and naturalist, whose work in paleontology caused him to be revered by the Sea-Serpent Killer Richard Owen whom I spoke so much about in my recent installments. Cuvier would add to Meiners’s classification a third, Ethiopian, sometimes called Negroid, to encompass those of darker skins, whom Cuvier believed “always remained in the most complete state of barbarism.” In order to bolster the claims of racial character and superiority already held by early anthropologists, data collected through the pseudoscientific practice of craniometry, or skull measurement, was used to supposedly prove that races originating from the Caucasus region were better formed and more intelligent. Likewise, among the subclassifications of the Caucasoid, the Aryan, the Semitic, and the Hamitic, craniometrists declared the Aryan, or Indo-European, to be of a superior stock. But Aryan did not always mean white northern European, or Nordic as the Germans came to think of it. Originally, it applied to the speakers of most major European languages and those in northern India, Iran and Central Asia. But German linguists and philologists like Max Müller conflated linguistic relationships with racial relationships, and thus was born the myth of a people calling themselves Aryan who came from some mysterious and mythical northern homeland and migrated into India, Iran, and Europe. This myth found perhaps its most influential supporter in French count Arthur de Gobineau, whose Essay on the Inequality of the Races suggested that the most superior of races are those whose blood has been least degraded from its Aryan purity, for this was a “master race,” a term that originally meant the race from which others derived, as in the term “master key,” but which came to be taken as a term indicating the race’s natural right to dominate those inferior to it. Despite the fact that de Gobineau actually thought the English, with their insular country, to be the closest to pure Aryan blood, his ideas became very popular in Germany. This can be attributed to his friendship with the composer Richard Wagner, who publicized Gobineau’s ideas through a newsletter published specifically for visitors to the world-famous Bayreuth Festival, which celebrates Wagner’s operas.

With the entrance of Wagner into the story, we can begin to examine the ever more distinctly German contribution to the notions of racial superiority that would eventually become foundational to Nazism, and we will see that we cannot claim there were no occult or pagan influences on this most evil aspect of Nazism, for to do so, one would have to ignore the influence of the Austro-Germanic “New Age” movement on this burgeoning ideology. Compared to the New Age movement of the 1980s by Bill Yenne in one of my principal sources, this Germany and Austria in the 1920s saw a great increase in interest in alternative theologies and mysticism, including Buddhist and Rosicrucian philosophies, Egyptian mythologies, and Kabbalistic practices. Among these, perhaps the greatest interest was shown to Germanic folklore and Nordic paganism, both of which had been popularized by the operatic works of Richard Wagner, which drew from mythologies contained in the medieval Icelandic Eddas as well as the ancient Germanic epic poem, the Nibelungenlied. In Wagner’s masterpiece. The Ring of the Nibelung, German audiences became entranced by the age of the Nordic gods of Valhalla, as Wotan, whom we may today more popularly call Odin, seeks to regain a ring inscribed with magical runes that grants its bearer the power to rule the world. A fantasy world filled with giants and dwarfs, it may strike modern audiences as quite similar to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and with good reason, for certainly Wagner was a major influence on Tolkien. And just as Tolkien’s works have fired the imaginations of entire generations, so Wagner’s kindled a renewed interest in all things Nordic and pagan among many in Germany during the last half of the 19th century, such that some renounced their former Christian and Catholic beliefs to practice a new form of pagan worship they would call Wotanism, which they felt was more true to their ancient Germanic heritage.

Depiction by artist Arthur Rackham of a scene from Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung, via Wikimedia Commons

Meanwhile, another popular counterculture movement around the same time, also concerned with Germanic heritage, proves to be a complementary piece to the puzzle as we put together a picture of the roots of Nazism. Rather than an ancient fantasy world, this one had at its heart the practical beauty and charm of rustic farm life in rural Germany. Among many city dwellers there arose a back-to-the-land movement that romanticized peasant life as being closer to the pure German national identity, which was at its heart agrarian. It was a nostalgic movement, called the völkisch, or “folksy” movement, reacting to post-industrial alienation with a yearning for quaint villages and a simpler life. The movement appealed equally across the political spectrum, for all in urban areas felt the misery of wage slavery, drawing everyday workingmen and intellectuals alike. Essential to the völkisch movement was a notion of achieving a closer connection to Germanic identity, and thus, at its heart, it was a nationalist movement. But this became intrinsically tied to notions of not just nationality but race and ethnicity as well, as the ideology of Blut und Boden, or Blood and Soil, emerged. The völkisch notion of Blood and Soil argued that one’s blood, or race and lineage, is inextricable from one’s homeland, or soil, and that those who achieve a closer relationship with the land through a rural way of life forge a closer bond to their racial and ethnic identity. One can already see the separate threads begin to come together, for among the völkisch movement there emerged the most famous of German archaeologists, Gustaf Kossinna, who reached the dubious conclusion that finding materially consistent artifacts in a region, such as the pottery containing cord-like impressions that he discovered between the Rhine and Volga Rivers, meant that an ethnically homogeneous race dwelt there. Eventually, in an effort to bolster the völkisch movement and German nationalism, Kossinna made claims that the Corded Ware culture he had discovered was evidence that ancient Germans were one and the same with the mythical idea of an Aryan people as a distinct superior race.

Thus as two concurrent strains in society, the Austro-Germanic New Age was driven on one side by nationalist Blood and Soil-ers who believed their ancestral racial identity tied to the supreme and mysterious race of Aryans and on the other by those who rejected Christianity to worship at the pagan altars of the old Nordic pantheon. And it would not take much of a stretch, then, to link the two, for the ever-evolving myth of the Aryan race indicated they had migrated from some mysterious northern homeland, which some identified with the mythical Hyperborea or Ultima Thule, about which I’ll have more to say later. From there, it’s a mere skip to suggest that the Aryans were the gods of the Nordic pantheon, their homeland of Valhalla one and the same with the mysterious Aryan homeland, and therefore Germans were descended from the gods themselves. Into this roiling cauldron of mystical ideas about race and ancient wisdom came Madame Helena Blavatsky, a Russian woman who had travelled the world and gained fame with her claims to ancient knowledge and psychic abilities. For a fantastic exploration of Blavatsky and her claims, check out Sebastian Major’s series on her in his podcast Our Fake History. For our purposes here, suffice to say that she emerged from popular spiritualism, which saw mediums holding parlor room séances the world over, and rose to become the founder of her own philosophy, or religion, or many would say cult, which she called Theosophy, and which she established through her best-selling book, Isis Unveiled: A Master Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, a volume widely considered to be plagiarized and patchwritten from numerous mystical texts. In 1884, as many pseudo-religious groups and schools of philosophical thought vied for attention in the burgeoning Austro-German New Age, she established a branch of her Theosophical Society in Germany. Among the tenets of Theosophy was one idea that would prove to be particularly appealing to the völkisch movement and its Blood and Soil philosophizers: that among the primeval races of humankind, there existed a hierarchy, at the very top of which was the “root race,” which she identified as Aryan, with all others being subraces. 

Photographic portrait of Madame Blavatsky, via Wikimedia Commons

As an example of the melting pot of pagan and occult ideas that was the Austro-German New Age movement and how disparate beliefs might coalesce into the particularly virulent strain that was Nazism, we find Guido Karl Anton List, who in an effort to claim some appearance of aristocracy for himself would later in life go by Guido von List. He was not, however, from a wealthy family. Rather, he grew up middle class and preoccupied with the fantasy world of Nordic mythology. During a tour of the catacombs beneath Vienna at 14 years old, after seeing an old altar that he assumed had once been dedicated to Wotan, his obsession grew. As a young man and an outdoorsman who wrote for an alpine newspaper, he readily embraced the völkisch back-to-the-land movement, and his writing about the natural world began more and more to take on the tinge of mysticism, as he imagined a variety of spirits inhabiting the German countryside. His writings became more and more nationalistic as well and focused on German racial identity after reading a translation of The Origin and Situation of the Germans by Roman historian Gaius Cornelius Tacitus, which made mention of Germanic tribes called Irminones living outside the Roman Empire. In List’s mind, this group took on mythical significance. He called them the Armanen, and he claimed they were a pagan priesthood that held great power flowing directly from the Nordic god Wotan. With the success of his first novel, List found himself rubbing elbows with many prominent figures in the Austro-German New Age, and his further published works focused on Wotanism. After taking an interest in Blavatsky and Theosophy, he developed his own doctrine, bringing together metaphysics, Nordic paganism, völkisch nationalism, and theories of Aryan and Germanic racial supremacy. He called his movement Armanism, after the almost entirely fictional Armanen priesthood he had imagined, and the elite society he founded, the Armanenorden, worshipped Wotan and conducted pagan ceremonies every solstice. Among the many interests of Guido von List that he wrote about and lectured on to his Armanenorden were runes, those ancient alphabets that preceded the adoption of Latin in northern Europe, which List and others believed held some form of magic, a belief likely encouraged in List’s case by his love of Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung, with its rune-magic talismans. Indeed, he claimed to have had a new runic alphabet revealed to him mystically while temporarily blind. This preoccupation with ancient runes among many in Germany would eventually contribute to some of the most recognizable symbols of Nazism.

Photographic portrait of the young mystic Guido von List in 1878, via Wikipedia

As with any successful movement, Guido von List’s Armanenorden saw its imitators and offshoots. One imitation was the Germanenorden, which greatly admired Von List and his writings, so this may almost be considered a satellite group. Then there was the offshoot led by one of Von List’s closest followers, Adolf Josef Lanz, who at 19 took the name Jörg and became a monk, a career that didn’t last long because of his engagement in illicit sexual activity. Much like Guido von List claiming a runic alphabet was revealed to him supernaturally, Lanz had what he considered to be a religious revelation. He saw a 13th-century carving of a nobleman standing over a creature with a man’s head and a tail, and he believed that he had been shown some truth about the eternal struggle between humanity, which represented all that was good, and the subhuman, which represented all evil. After his ouster from the monastery, he fell in with the Armanenorden and Von List, gave himself the more noble-sounding name Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, wholeheartedly accepted the völkisch notions of Aryan superiority and the purity of Germans, and went even further by asserting that other races represented the subhuman evil of which his vision had warned. He wrote a bizarre book called Theozoology or the Account of the Sodomite Apelings and the Divine Electron, which asserted that Aryans and their descendants were theozoa, or god-men, while all others were anthropozoa, descended from sodomy between the gods and apelings. From his work, he founded his own secret society, the Order of the New Templars, which took solstice celebrations to the next level by practicing orgies at which they raised a flag with a particular runic symbol on it that Lanz von Liebenfels had chosen himself: the swastika. And he established his own school of thought, Ariosophy, which took his particularly awful racism to new extremes, suggesting that the doctrine of Social Darwinism must apply in the case of the races as well, and advocating for the selective breeding and sterilization programs that others were calling eugenics. Lanz von Liebenfels also published a magazine called Ostara, after the goddess of rebirth we know from the holiday Easter, a publication in which he spread many of these vile ideas. One subscriber to Ostara, then a corporal in the German army and an art student in Vienna, was Adolph Hitler.

Photographic portrait of Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, via Wikimedia Commons

Join me next time as I look at the rise of the Nazi party and how these pagan and occult influences helped to shape it and lead it to its darkest places.

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 Further Reading

Dunlap, Knight. “The Great Aryan Myth.” The Scientific Monthly, vol. 59, no. 4, 1944, pp. 296–300. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/18253.

Flowers, Stephen E., and Michael Moynihan. The Secret King: The Myth and Reality of Nazi Occultism. Feral House/Dominion, 2007.

Reid, Gordon McGregor. “Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778): His Life, Philosophy and Science and Its Relationship to Modern Biology and Medicine.” Taxon, vol. 58, no. 1, 2009, pp. 18–31. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27756820.

Yenne, Bill. Hitler’s Master of the Dark Arts: Himmler’s Black Knights and the Occult Origins of the SS. Zenith Press, 2010.

The Monster of Loch Ness: Delusion or Denizen of the Deep?

As I mentioned in the last installment, sightings of sea monsters fell off rather dramatically after the Daedalus encounter and those that followed. Some have looked to this as proof that there had never been true sea serpents encountered, but rather a series of hoaxes and mistakes, while others have suggested this just reflects the fact that more and more ships at sea may have driven them into hiding, especially once those ships became motorized. The we-scared-it-off theory, after all, had seemed reasonable enough to explain the gradual falling off of sea serpent sightings in Gloucester Bay, New England, which had been crowded with tourist-laden ferries and fishing vessels all hunting for the creature. But the mid 19th century would not be last time that people believed they saw a massive, long-necked, water-dwelling creature that would be termed a monster. While the seas remained mostly calm and untroubled by serpents, in the 1930s and ever since, sightings surged in a rather unexpected place, inland, on a lake, as though the Great Sea Serpent had abandoned its saltwater habitat for the fresh waters of a lake in the Scottish Highlands, southwest of Inverness. Like the Great Sea Serpent, this creature is usually described as serpentine, owing to the fact that when it breaks the surface of the lake in which it supposedly dwells, it is seen as a series of humps. Sometimes, though, witnesses of this creature are graced with a view of its long neck and small head, and perhaps a glimpse of its bulky body, which has led to a popular conception of it as being akin to the plesiosaur, although the fact that this one supposedly lives in a fresh water lake would mean that it would more likely be of the family Leptocleididae, genus leptocleidus, or perhaps a genus and species of polycotylid that recent researchers have proposed, dubbing them “occultonectians,” or “hidden swimmers,” and suggesting they survived the extinction of similar plesiosaurs, at least for a while, by taking refuge in and adapting to bodies of fresh water, adaptation that resulted in the development of longer necks. But rather than speculating exactly what kind of surviving dinosaur this creature is, it is far more logical to first consider the reliability of evidence that there is anything at all so large or unusual dwelling in this particular lake: Loch Ness.

Popular belief in the monster affectionately known as Nessie began in 1933, in March, when a couple, the MacKays, who had been staying at a nearby hotel, were motoring along an old narrow road by the lake. Mrs. MacKay saw a huge black form rolling in the lake and told her husband John to pull over. Once he had stopped the car, John could only see the ripples, about a mile and a half away, but even from these he discerned that something very large had caused them. To Mrs. MacKay, the ripples appeared to be a wake made by something just below the surface, and she watched its progress across the otherwise placid lake. Then she saw it again: black humps, two of them, the one in front smaller than that behind it, rising and sinking as though the entire form were undulating. It turned and circled halfway around before sinking finally and disappearing. A few months later, in June, a crew of workmen spotted a large body and head emerge from the water in the wake of a passing boat, a sighting easily waved away as an optical illusion created by the waves themselves. But then in July, another motoring couple, the Spicers of London, saw a creature emerge from the bushes on the side of the roadway, or at least part of one. It looked like a thick appendage, trunklike, perhaps a long neck held horizontally, wavering over the surface of the road. Then it crossed the road in a jerking fashion, its body filling the entire roadway and then suddenly gone in the direction of the lake. Mr. Spicer estimated it was at least 25 feet long, with dark gray skin like that of an elephant. After this sighting, the lake monster had become a news item, with press reports at first suggesting in a measured way that the Spicers had just seen an enormous otter carrying its young on its back. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, with the press attention, sightings increased to about one a month. In August, more witnesses saw a disturbance trailing behind a steamboat on the lake, insisting that because there were calm waters between the boat and the disturbance, it couldn’t have been the boat’s wake. Then one Mrs. MacLennan saw a large animal sunning itself on a ledge, and when she called to her family, it lurched clumsily and rolled into the water. In October, a crew member on a boat towing a barge saw what looked like a mound of water moving toward them like a wave from the side of the lake. In November, Hugh Gray took the first known photo of the supposed creature during his walk home from church. He claimed to have seen it raising its head above the water and lashing its tail. His photo, which saw extensive reprinting in newspapers in December, shows a vaguely serpentine S-shape on the surface of the waters, obscured by a kind of hazy mist. This photo has been variously said by different photographic experts to show signs of having been retouched or damaged and to show no signs of having been tampered with, leaving us, almost a hundred years later, to merely wonder at it.

Hugh Gray’s photo, used under Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0)

In December, as papers reported on Gray’s photographic evidence, the excitement, or hysteria, heated to a fever pitch. One Mrs. Reid, while motoring by, saw an animal lying in a glade very near where Mrs. MacLennan had earlier seen a creature sunning itself, and she described it in much the same terms, huge, fleshy, and clumsy like a hippopotamus. The same month, the first movie film evidence appeared, taken with a 16mm camera by Malcolm Irvine and a film production crew that was in the area specifically hoping to film the creature that had been in the news. His film, which was said by those who viewed it, including reporters from the Times, to have shown a humped creature swimming on the surface and moving both tail and fins, has unfortunately—some might say conveniently—been lost. But it did its job, nonetheless. On the 21st of December, the London Daily Mail, a newspaper with a long and dubious history, declared “MONSTER OF LOCH NESS IS NOT LEGEND BUT A FACT” and in a publicity stunt reported that it had hired Marmaduke Wetherell, a filmmaker with a reputation as a big game hunter, to search for further proof of Nessie’s existence. Think of Wetherell as an early 20th-century precursor to the many reality-T.V. cryptid hunters that populate the backwaters of cable television today, and remember him, for we will return to him shortly. While Wetherell performed his search for Nessie tracks along the shores of the loch, sightings continued into 1934. Just after the New Year, a student named W. Arthur Grant who might have been thought a reliable and scientific witness because he was training to be a veterinarian, nearly ran into something on a benighted road while riding his motorcycle. His headlight illuminated a massive creature with a flat head like that of an eel. It bounded from the bushes and across the road on flippers, its strong round-tipped tail extended behind it, and it disappeared into the darkness, leaving behind only the sound of its splash as it entered the loch. The next month, by the light of a full moon, two girls likewise saw something huge that tapered down to a long tail cross the road in front of them on short appendages that they called legs rather than flippers and head toward the water. And finally, in April of 1934, I’ll end my recounting of the first and most prolific flap of Nessie sightings with the appearance of the most famous, or infamous, photo of the creature. It would come to be known as the “Surgeon’s photo,” having been taken by a gynecologist named Robert Kenneth Wilson while on vacation with a friend. He admitted he had brought the camera hoping to snap a pic of the monster, although later he claimed he’d brought it to photograph birds. When the creature presented itself, he ran back to his car and returned just in time to take two photos, both of which show the shadow of a slender, curved object extending from the water’s surface, the water rippling around it. For all the world, it looked like the body and arched neck and head of the Loch Ness Monster.

The Surgeon’s Photo, credited to Robert Kenneth Wilson, used under Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0)

When one considers the believability of these encounters, one might be tempted to dismiss the eyewitness testimony altogether, leaving only the harder evidence to evaluate. In fact, the simple fact that the story became a newspaper sensation within the first year tends to discredit most of the sightings as either hoaxes by attention seekers or mistakes by the overeager who had been caught up in the hysteria. But historical precedent for sightings of a creature in or around Loch Ness before 1933 might weaken this argument. In looking for pre-’33 indications of Nessie’s existence, one is invariably drawn into the realm of folklore. For example, the Scottish people originated largely in Ireland, and there is an ancient Irish tradition that sees in the reflection of bodies of water an inverted aquatic world, where it was supposed there dwelled mirror opposite creatures, like water-cows and water-horses. Tales told of these animals crossing over at times, such that farmers had been known to harness their ploughs to a water-horse. In Scottish lore, the water-horse evolved to become the kelpie, a shape-changing creature similar to the siren in its alluring behavior. And this certainly might apply to Nessie, when one considers the siren call it has had on many a monster and cryptid hunter. Further, more geographically specific folkloric evidence of the creature can be found in the 7th century writings of the Abbot of Iona, who biographized the 6th century life of Saint Columba. In his work, St. Columba has numerous encounters with animals that show God had given him mastery over the creatures of the earth, such as snakes and boars. In one particular passage, the saint commands a monk to swim across the River Ness and bring back a boat. When a “water beast” appears and makes toward the monk, St. Columba cried out from the shore, “Thou shalt go no further, nor touch the man! Go back with all speed!” and the fearsome beast retreated. To most, in context with the rest of the stories told about St. Columba, this would seem a simple tall tale, but looking back at a story of a “water beast” in Ness—even if it was the river and not the loch—a modern reader cannot help but consider that this could be evidence of an aquatic monster in the area.

And there are many accounts in far more modern times of giant eels, or horse-eels, in the same area if one widens the scope of one’s search beyond Loch Ness. Friend of the show Mike Dash has written of 19th century reports of giant eels which have at least one thing going for them as explanations of Nessie in that they are bottom-dwellers that only surface occasionally, explaining why whatever is in Loch Ness is only glimpsed infrequently. He cites the memoir of a Scottish Catholic priest, who writing about events in the middle of the 19th century described lakes on Hebridean islands teeming with gigantic eels that travel overland from lake to lake. Dash also describes secondhand recollections of a huge maned eel being caught in a canal-lock in 1899 at Corpach, only about 26 miles southwest of the shores of Loch Ness, and how everyone believed it must have come down from Loch Ness, which supposedly had a reputation for monstrous serpents even then. As for Loch Ness itself, there were reports of sightings previous to the 1933 flap, such as in 1871 or ’72 when D. Mackenzie saw what he thought was a log suddenly come to life and churn up the water as it swam with great speed, or in 1889, when Alexander Macdonald saw an unusual creature on the lake that he called “the salamander” and which Roderick Matheson, who frequently plied the waters of the loch on his schooner, called “the biggest eel I ever saw in my life…[with] a neck like a horse and a mane somewhat similar.” Then into the 20th century, when sometime during the first decade a fisherman recalled having scared off a large beast with an eel’s head and a tapering tail that lay still upon the surface of the loch when he cast his line near it. 1919, a 12-year-old boy named Jack Forbes, drives a pony cart home through a stormy night with his father when a beast emerges from the trees, crosses the road and splashes into the water. 1923, a chauffeur’s headlamps catch a huge humped creature as his car rounds a bend, and actually hears the thing grunting as it waddles away. 1926, Simon Cameron is watching some gulls on the water when suddenly they fly off screeching because something that looked like an overturned boat bursts to the surface, water washing down its sides. While some of these recollections may have been colored by or even invented to corroborate the later legend of Nessie, it does seem that Loch Ness had long been a place where people saw animals they believed were unusual.

Further supporting the idea that Loch Ness monster sightings have proven to be far more than a yearlong flap easily written off as mass hysteria fueled by sensational journalism is the fact that the sightings never really stopped. Roy Mackal, a biologist working for University of Chicago who took particular interest in Nessie, claimed there were more than 10,000 such reports and that he had personally reviewed nearly 3,000 published accounts of them. Certainly there are many hundreds of verifiable witness claims, with a more recent accounting estimating they number around 1,800, but more than these, there is a wealth of harder evidence as well. Including the aforementioned Gray photo and the Surgeon’s Photo, one tally has around 30 photos taken of Nessie or what the photographers purport to be Nessie. Most of the time, they picture little more than shadowy humps on the water’s surface that one might imagine could be breaching portions of the creature’s neck or back, such as the Lachlan Stuart photo of 1951 and the Peter McNab photo of 1955. Others like the 1977 Anthony Shiels photo and the 1982 Jennifer Bruce photo seem to show the creature’s head and long neck held elegantly straight up out of the water, like the Surgeon’s photo. Not all of these are easily available to the modern researcher, as some are in private collections and seem to have no extant copies. Such is also the case with movie films supposedly capturing the creature, which also may number as high as 30, ranging from older cine film reels to more modern video recordings. One of these, taken by a Dr. MacRae around 1935 and said to show a slant-eyed, horned creature splashing the surface with its great reptilian tail, supposedly remains locked away in a vault in London, awaiting its release at some uncertain future time when “the public takes such matters seriously!” This seems to be a common explanation for why some alleged films cannot be examined, such as the 1938 film made by London bank manager James Currie, which supposedly resides in the same vault as the MacRae film. Then there are those films that have simply been lost, which includes the very first film made by the aforementioned Malcolm Irvine. Likewise with a film made by one James Fraser the next year, which seems to have rather suddenly vanished after being screened for the Linnaean Society of London, whose members thought it pictured a seal or otter rather than a monster. In 1936, when Malcolm Irvine managed to capture Nessie on film yet again, he once more promptly lost the footage. These instances of poor custodianship of evidence do little to inspire confidence in the credibility of the evidence itself.

Photo by Anthony Shiels, used under Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0)

Beyond the suspicious disappearance of evidence to cause one to look askance, there is also a history of hoaxes about as long as the history of Nessie herself. Remember the actor, film director and “big game hunter” Marmaduke Wetherell that I said to keep in your memory? Within days of his arrival at the lake after being hired by the Daily Mail to “track” the Loch Ness Monster, Wetherell made it known that he had discovered Nessie’s huge tracks and sent plaster casts of them to the London Natural History Museum. The museum eventually revealed that they appeared to be hippopotamus prints. But Wetherell hadn’t discovered a rogue hippo living around the loch; rather, he had taken a stuffed hippo’s hoof that had been part of an umbrella stand, attached a stick to it and used it like a stamp. Years later, in 1960, a young firefighter named Peter O’Connor was caught making hoax photographs by inflating a plastic sack and weighting it down with stones. In 1972, Frank Searle, frustrated at not being able to catch a glimpse of the genuine article, faked some later discredited photos using logs and other objects and by pasting images of brontosaurs onto pictures of water. Then there were the remarkably clear photos taken by Anthony Shiels in 1977, whose reputation as a kook already put his pictures in doubt. Shiels was a self-styled psychic and wizard who claimed to have actually conjured Nessie to the surface through the use of ancient magic. Close examination of his photo showed that ripples on the water’s surface could be seen through the creature’s neck, a sure sign of double exposure. By the time the 1980s and ’90s came around, older, long respected photographic evidence also began to be discredited. The first was Lachlan Stuart’s photograph of humps on the water from 1951, which Stuart had actually admitted to a local was accomplished by wrapping haybales in tarps and floating them in a row. Finally, in 1994, a confession revealed that the most famous photo of all, the Surgeon’s Photo, had been a crude fake perpetrated in collaboration with that original hoaxer, Marmaduke Wetherell. Wetherell’s own step-son, two years before he died, had admitted that Wetherell had conspired with his sons to concoct the photo by affixing a plastic head and neck to a toy submarine and photographing it in a calm inlet of the lake. The gynecologist Robert Kenneth Wilson had been a co-conspirator in agreeing to say he had taken the photo, since Wetherell had already been discredited. Some have cast doubt on this confession as being itself a hoax, suspicious about the perceived size of the object, whether the photo could have been taken in a sheltered cove, and whether a toy submarine could have supported the weight of such a false neck, but even most Nessie believers have come to accept that the Surgeon’s photo, long the single greatest piece of evidence in favor of Nessie’s existence, was nothing but a fraud.

Photo by Lachlan Stuart, used under Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0)

Even if one took the Surgeon’s Photo as authentic, it still does not stand as unimpeachable evidence of Nessie’s existence, for ever since the beginning of the 1933 Loch Ness Monster flap, there have been plenty of convincing answers for what people really see and what is actually pictured in photographs. Most sightings of humps in the water are explainable as waves. Think about the sightings of humps in the wake of a passing boat I mentioned. And we now know that water sometimes behaves strangely, with odd, standing waves or solitons, that appear to be immobile humps with water washing over them. When sightings cannot be accounted for by the water itself, some other, more recognizable animal usually does the trick, like a bathing deer, or most commonly, an otter. Even birds, like cormorants, flying close to the water with their wings disturbing the surface, might appear at a distance to be a series of moving humps leaving a wake. As for more exotic animals, a bathing elephant extending its trunk from the surface, would certainly seem to fit the bill, especially considering some early reports that described its flesh as elephant-like,  and it just so happens that a circus was in the area in 1933. The showman who owned the circus, Bertram Mills, was known to let his performing animals bathe in the loch, and he seemed to encourage the excitement, offering a 20,000 pounds sterling reward to any who could capture the monster. This was a monstrous sum indeed, equivalent to almost 2 million dollars today, and some have suggested he only advertised such an exorbitant reward because he knew the monster didn’t exist, perhaps because he knew his elephants had been mistaken for the beast. But one does not need to look so far for so complicated an answer either. In addition to the extensive photographs and films taken above water, there have been numerous underwater photos taken, as well as many sonar contacts, and all can be very convincingly explained by fish activity and debris. In the same way, some humps on the surface can be attributed to huge bottom-feeding sturgeon visiting the surface, or to simple logs and other vegetable matter. This seems to be a clear instance in which Occam’s Razor cuts to the heart of the matter. These prosaic explanations of sightings are far simpler than the notion that a heretofore undiscovered species of lake monster exists and may represent proof of surviving dinosaurs. And more than this, there are further problems of feasibility making the lake monster hypothesis fundamentally untenable. First, there is the fact that, for such a species to have survived, there must needs be substantial breeding population, not just a solitary monster or a couple of mates, which conflicts with how infrequently they are seen, especially considering how intently people search for them. Then there is the fact that the loch is simply not big enough to contain such a population, nor does it contain enough food to sustain them. Some have suggested that there must be a hidden underwater channel from this freshwater lake to the ocean, but if this were the case, the loch being so far above sea level would mean that the lake waters would have long ago emptied into the sea. When Occam’s Razor cuts so easily and unequivocally through a popular belief like this, it must be assumed to be false, and this means that the same must hold true for all the other supposed denizens of lakes that have surfaced since Nessie. Ogopogo in Okanagan Lake, Tessie in Lake Tahoe, Champ in Lake Champlain, and Bessie in Lake Erie: all must be considered with the utmost skepticism, their very existence held in doubt.

Further Reading

Binns, Ronald. The Loch Ness Mystery Solved. Prometheus Books, 1984.

Campbell, Steuart. The Loch Ness Monster: The Evidence. Prometheus Books, 1997.

Leviathan, The Great Sea Serpent, Part 2: Into the Chaos Waters

In the last edition, I considered the idea that the myths and legends of sea serpents might represent evidence that some dinosaurian creatures actually survived extinction. Thus we traced notions of giant reptilian sea monsters to their roots and explored what has been identified by German comparative mythologists as the Chaoskampf, the motif of a god hero defeating a sea serpent that represents chaos, as seen in the battles of Yahweh vs. Leviathan, Marduk vs. Tiamat, Baal vs. Yam, and Thor vs. Jörmungandr. But there are far more than those that I discussed, such as the Greek myth of Zeus vs. Typhon, the Hittite myth of Tarhunt vs. Illuyanka, the Indian myths of Indra vs. Vritra and Krishna vs. Kāliyā, the Egyptian Ra vs. Apep, the Chinese Yu the Great vs. Xiangliu, and the Japanese Susanoo vs. the 8-headed dragon Orochi [please excuse my pronunciation]. I further looked at similar legends of heroes in antiquity that faced sea serpents, like Heracles and Perseus facing the ketos or cetus, but of course there are more of these as well, such as Apollo defeating Python, the serpent at the center of the earth; Cadmus slaying a dragon at Athena’s direction and cultivating an army from its teeth; and Jason of the Argonauts defeating the dragon that guarded the Golden Fleece. Then there are the dragon-slaying Saint George, Saint Michael the Archangel, and Saint Theodore of Amasea, and the dragon-slayers of medieval legend, such as Beowulf, Siegfried, Gawain, Lancelot, Tristan, and John Lambton, to name just a few. These examples, even when viewed as pure myth with no basis in real encounters between mankind and huge reptilian creatures, still tend to indicate some knowledge of such massive dinosaurian animals having once existed, knowledge unlikely to have been derived from the fossil record back then, as there is no evidence of dinosaur bones having been discovered before the 17th century, nor any reason to believe discoverers of such a fossil in antiquity would be able to discern the anatomy or nature of the creature to whom the bones belonged. And we have reports from antiquity and beyond of ancient peoples finding carcasses of reptilian sea monsters that had washed ashore, unidentified remains, sometimes called globsters, which because they can often be indefinable blobs, are frequently dismissed by skeptics. Take for example, the Stronsay beast, a 55ft corpse that washed ashore on the island of Orkney in 1808. Thinking it a sea serpent, some gave it a scientific name, Halsydrus pontoppidani. Skeptics looked at reports about its remains and claimed it was merely an oversize basking shark. Similarly, even the many reports of encounters with living sea monsters that come to us from antiquity are waved away by the scholarly and the scientific-minded, who claim they are run-of-the-mill sea creatures like whales, despite evidence that ancients were very familiar with whales. The apotheosis of this pattern, of witnesses being mistrusted after the fact, reports being cast in a skeptical light by those supposed to be better qualified at identifying something they didn’t actually see, came in the 19th century, when sightings of sea serpents became more and more frequent despite scientific insistence that such creatures simply did not exist.

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In August of 1817, poor weather drove a coasting vessel in to the bustling harbor town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, on Cape Ann, where its skipper made his way to a local auction house and shared a story that everyone found hard to credit. He and his crew, he said, had spied something strange in the waters at the bay’s entrance. Bobbing there was a creature that appeared to be some kind of sea serpent! It was at least 60 feet long! The patrons of the auction house scoffed and guffawed at the skipper’s ridiculous prank, but before much longer, more and more people were claiming to have seen this creature in the bay. Its body could be seen on the surface of the water, they said, with keg-sized humps all down the trunk of its body, which writhed and moved like a caterpillar. Its skin was black and leathery, and its head was that of a snake, without ears or horns or any sign of gills, and with eyes the size of plates. As sighting after sighting was reported, some continued to disbelieve, while others gave credence to the reports, for after all, this was not the first time that a sea serpent had been seen in Gloucester Bay. It was the oldest seaport in the country, and in fact was one of the first settlements in the Massachusetts Bay Colony chartered in 1623 by James I. The first such report came not long after that when in 1639 John Josselyn, known for writing about New England and its flora and fauna, put down in his diary a story told to him thirdhand about a sea serpent encounter. A boat full of Englishmen spied the serpent “coiled up like a Cable upon a Rock at Cape-Ann,” as the story went, and were discouraged from shooting at it by two Native Americans on board who indicated that if the serpent weren’t killed by their shots, it would attack them in their boat. And again, in a 1641 diary entry, one Obadiah Turner described some residents gathering clams after a storm when just offshore they spotted a serpent that was 15 fathoms, or 90 feet long, a sight that Turner suggests was no great surprise to the inhabitants of Cape Ann, who had seen such creatures before. Now Josselyn’s report, coming from a local who heard it himself from a neighbor, seems about as suspect as any urban legend, and the entry in Turner’s journal actually appears only in a 19th century book of biographical sketches that, while historically accurate in some regards, may be entirely fictional in others, but the historical precedent of serpent sightings in Gloucester Bay, while weak, is there. And as August wore on 1817, historical precedent soon became moot, as hundreds of sightings accumulated.

A depiction of the Gloucester sea serpent, via Wikimedia Commons

Today, these witness sightings survive in the form of eighteen signed depositions given under oath before a local magistrate. A shipmaster named Ellery swore to seeing the serpent’s flat, snake-like head and about 40 feet of its body, which seemed jointed with humps the size of 2-gallon kegs. He saw the beast turn around quickly, its head passing by its own tail. Then we have a merchant named James Mansfield who on the 15th likewise saw an enormous serpent swimming around the surface, holding its head about a foot above the water, and he too described humps on its body, calling them “bunches.” Then another mariner named William Somerby described a snake-headed sea serpent that swam past his schooner more swiftly than any whale. Describing its swimming motion, he said its body rose and fell, and its head moved from side to side as it went. On and on the reports go, agreeing in most particulars. Sightings were made mostly in Gloucester Bay, but up the coast into Maine as well, and south all the way to Long Island Sound. All of them described a snake-like creature with a flat oblong head—compared to a snake’s in shape but to a horse’s in size—that it raised sometimes several feet above the water on a long neck. And crucially, it was said to be indented or uneven on its back and body, with humps or joints. A former staff member of George Washington’s, General David Humphries, came to the area to collect reports, and according to him, the serpent was actually seen by a crowd of more than 200 people over the course of an entire afternoon, frolicking in the waters off Windmill Point in Massachusetts Bay. Obviously a phenomenon like this would not go unnoticed even by a fledgling press, and indeed, the Boston Weekly Messenger spread news of the creature with the headline “Monstrous Serpent.” Surely this exacerbated the rash of sightings and encouraged some who had seen nothing to make false claims, for soon tourists flooded the area, hoping for a glimpse of the monster. Add to this the fact that a $5,000 bounty was put on the creature, and you have not only ferries full of looky-loos choking up Gloucester Bay but also ships full of whalers readying their harpoons and cod fishermen setting out nets and attaching baited shark hooks to buoys in hopes of catching and skinning the serpent. It is said some ships who encountered the serpent simply turned around and sailed away in fear, or took on artillery to protect themselves. One man, Martin Gaffeney, supposedly shot the creature, but it only dove out of sight into the waters and surfaced again in the distance, out of range of Gaffeney’s gun. 

Amid this outrageous flap, the Linnaean Society of New England, a group devoted to taxonomy, or the naming and classification of organisms, took an interest. With no specimen, they looked to personal testimony as a reliable alternative. Forming a committee, the Linnaean society wrote a questionnaire to hand out while interviewing witnesses and engaged the Gloucester judge who took the aforementioned depositions and published the witness statements with the lengthy title of Report of a Committee of the Linnaean Society of New England Relative to a Large Marine Animal Supposed to be a Serpent, Seen near Cape Ann, Massachusetts, in August 1817, a primary source for witness statements about the serpent. According to the Linnaean Society, there was simply too much evidence for there to be nothing to the reports. The fact that it was all testimonial evidence did not dissuade them, as testimonial evidence was at the time given great weight, when the witnesses could be confirmed to be of good reputation. So the Committee concluded that they had identified a new species, a genuine sea serpent! And they bolstered this conclusion with further notes on a physical specimen they believed had been discovered. Shortly after the sightings had begun, some farmers had pitchforked what appeared to be a three-foot snake on the beach, but this snake was unusual. After the farmers had given their statements and turned the dead snake over to the Linnaean Society committee, they saw it for themselves and dissected it. There were unusual protuberances along on the snake’s back, and as this appeared to correspond with the reports of the sea serpent’s humps, they decided that this must be a young specimen of the same species, which they named Scoliophis atlanticus. To their chagrin, however, a French naturalist named Alexandre Lesueur, who had also examined the snake, declared that it was nothing more than a common black snake suffering from a disease that left its spine deformed. While sightings continued, in 1819 in Nahant, and then up in Nova Scotia in 1825 and 1833, after a while they died away. At the time, one Boston newspaper declared it would no longer report on the serpent because it was not news, for “the existence of this fabulous animal is now proven beyond all chance of doubt.” Yet at the same time, it was already becoming a dubious story, with one playwright in Charleston publishing a drama in 1819 called The Sea Serpent; or, Gloucester Hoax: a Dramatic jeu d’esprit in Three Acts, which suggested that the people of Gloucester had lied about seeing the serpent just to increase tourism.

A Linnaean Society illustration of the Scoliophis atlanticus via Wikimedia Commons

Regardless of the vagaries of public opinion or the credulity of the press, what the example of the Gloucester Serpent demonstrates is that the scientific community, in the beginning of the 19th century, was actually very open to the notion of a previously unconfirmed species of large marine creature. The alacrity with which the Linnaean Society of New England announced the discovery of a new species, to say nothing of the gameness of Edinburgh’s Wernerian Natural History Society to endorse the authenticity of the Stronsay Beast, as discussed in my recent patron exclusive, shows that the very idea of a real sea serpent was not yet scientific anathema. How, then, did that change? One might look to the 1840s and a major character I introduced in Part One, Richard Owen, who might be thought of as a sort of villain in this story, especially if you believe his biographers that he was a callous and dastardly egoist who relished controversy, and if you consider that during his career he claimed credit for fossil discoveries that others had actually made. He even visually fits the bill of our story’s villain, as in his old age, he very much resembles how we imagine Ebenezer Scrooge to appear. But in our last installment, I only pointed out the irony of this “father of the dinosaurs” comparing pterodactyls to dragons in his Crystal Palace statuary exhibition while he vehemently attacked any who would suggest that dinosaurs survived in the time of man as the dragons or sea serpents of yore. But let us look more specifically at what Owen did to earn himself the nickname “the Sea-Serpent Killer.” Perhaps his first foray against sea serpents was not against any living example of one, but against a fossil, for remember that the first half of the 19th century was the heyday of dinosaur discovery and classification. The fact that evidence of massive reptilian creatures existing in the far past emerged at the same time as reports of them appearing in modern day seas cannot be discounted as a major impetus of belief in the Great Sea Serpent. But in the 1840s, Richard Owen dealt a blow to notions of ancient sea serpents when one Dr. Richard Harlan sent Owen a number of massive vertebrae and other bones that had been discovered in the American South. Harlan had deduced from these bones the existence of a huge reptilian sea creature that he called Basilosaurus, or “king lizard.” However, after examining them, Owen concluded and made known to the world that this was a cetacean creature, a prehistoric whale, not a reptile, suggesting it be renamed the Zeuglodon. Thus Richard Owen killed his first sea serpent, and out of this scholarly kerfuffle would arise an affair that would forever shake the scientific community’s faith in sea serpent tales.

Present at one meeting of the Association of American Geologists at which Dr. Harlan presented his Basilosaurus bones was one Dr. Benjamin Silliman. Silliman was a believer in sea serpents, having come out years earlier in favor of the idea that the Gloucester Serpent was a real creature. A few years after Dr. Harlan spoke at that meeting, Silliman received a visit in Connecticut from one Albert Koch, a purveyor of antiquities and fossils who operated a kind of travelling museum of oddities. Silliman had previously published some of Koch’s writings, and knowing Koch’s interest in massive prehistoric creatures, he told Koch about a woman in Alabama who might know where another Basilosaurus skeleton could be found. Forthwith, Koch made his way to Alabama, and by hook or by crook, he came into possession of some very interesting bones indeed. Before long, like the very P.T. Barnum he fancied himself, he opened a tourist attraction to show off the assembled skeleton of a fantastical sea serpent that he called Hydrarchos sillimani, hydrarchos meaning “great sea-serpent” and sillimani after his friend who’d given him the tip. Koch traveled with his skeleton to New York City and displayed it along with a letter of endorsement from Benjamin Silliman, and he made much of welcoming the opinion of Richard Owen, who he believed would find the Hydrarchos sillimani far more similar to a Plesiosaurus than to an extinct whale. However, Koch never received the benefit or the detriment of Owen’s opinion, for before it could be offered, one of Benjamin Silliman’s very own former students, Jeffries Wyman, declared to the world that Koch’s skeleton was a crude counterfeit. It was a hoax, he asserted, a simple assortment of bones from five different skeletons that he had cobbled together to approximate the image of a sea serpent. With this claim, Benjamin Silliman demanded that Koch remove his name from the display, which Koch promptly did although he maintained the skeleton was genuine. Today, consensus remains that the Hydrarchos of Albert Koch was a fraud, just as Wyman claimed, for indeed, Koch was caught perpetrating exactly such a fraud when he sold the Missourium, a supposed skeleton of a mastodon, to the British Museum, which promptly recognized that that it was composed of several skeletons and took it apart to reassemble them correctly.

An illustration of Albert Koch’s Hydrarchos, via Wikimedia Commons

It was only a few years after this that the most famous and detailed report of an encounter with a sea serpent appeared in newspapers to astonish the lay public and stir the already kindled ire of scientific skeptics like Richard Owen, who by this point believed all sea serpent witnesses to be either liars or fools. The problem was that the witnesses of this sea serpent were considered reliable, and some might have argued, unimpeachable. It occurred on August 6th, 1848, when H.M.S. Daedalus, a Royal Navy corvette, a kind of small frigate, sailed the seas between St. Helena and the Cape of Good Hope, on its return journey from the East Indies. A midshipman saw it first, and alerted the officers who stood on the quarterdeck. The ship’s captain, Peter M’Quhae, and his first lieutenant, Edgar Drummond, along with some others, saw a large serpentine creature swimming on the surface of the sea not far from the ship. The details of this encounter come to us from the captain’s own report to his superior, which was eventually published in the Illustrated London News along with some illustrations that M’Quhae supervised to ensure their accuracy. He said that sixty feet of the creature’s body was visible, and that it seemed to move as if propelled, without any undulation of its form. And it passed so close by the ship that “had it been a man of my acquaintance I should have easily recognized the features with the naked eye.” What he saw of its features was a snakelike head, exposing big jagged teeth when it opened its jaws, with a mane like seaweed, and it raised its head as high as four feet above the water as it went, as close as M’Quhae could estimate by comparing it to the length of the ship’s main-topsail yard. In all, he and his crew watched this sea serpent for twenty minutes!

As I suggested before, at the time, witness testimony was accorded great weight as evidence, as in a court of law, provided the witness could be proven trustworthy, and in this regard, Captain M’Quhae seemed unassailable. First, officers of the Royal Navy were a scientific sort of mariner, with training in navigation and meteorology and experience in observing the seas around them. They were not the kinds of superstitious sailors one might expect to dream up a monster that wasn’t there. They, like most 19th-century British gentlemen, believed in empiricism and knew that spreading a false tale like this could not only damage their reputations but also harm their careers. Furthermore, to suggest that they may have been mistaken in what they saw discounts their years of experience at sea; M’Quhae, for example, had become an officer more than thirty years earlier, during the Napoleonic Wars. Nevertheless, our villain, Richard Owen, incensed at the idea that the public would take the word of some mere navy men over the skepticism of the scientific community, weighed in. His rejoinder, published in the Times, essentially insisted that they must have just seen an elephant seal, and that they had mistaken the eddy that frequently trails behind swimming elephant seals as the body or tail of a serpent. Never mind that these experienced seamen had most likely seen elephant seals before. But the Sea-Serpent Killer had spoken, and M’Quhae’s angry rejection of the assertion did little to slow the groundswell of skepticism. In the wake of Owen’s challenge to the veracity of the sighting, more attention was paid to the account of the incident recorded by M’Quhae’s First Lieutenant, Drummond, whose version of the event differed in some key regards. It indicates that, while the captain insisted he had seen a tail, Drummond could only see a fin, and rather than passing as close as the captain says, Drummond estimates it was about a hundred yards away and could only be seen with the naked eye for five minutes, after which they had to watch it with a spyglass. Add to this Drummond’s report that the weather was “dark and squally” and you have plenty of good reason to doubt the testimony of the captain of the Daedalus, who, it should be noted, first estimated the creature’s length to be 120 feet before conferring with others on his crew and emending his estimation to half that. And at least one researcher, friend of the show Mike Dash, has actually cast some doubts upon the supposedly unimpeachable character of the chief witness, Captain Peter M’Quhae, pointing out that M’Quhae had only been offered two commands in the several decades since he became a commander, suggesting he was not necessarily the best example of a Royal Navy Captain, with all the assumptions about intellect and keen perception that go with it. 

Another depiction of the Daedalus serpent encounter, via Wikimedia Commons

All of this chipping away at the façade of reliability of the Daedalus encounter may lead one to disregard it entirely and wonder why anyone ever took it seriously, but then one must understand that the story appeared in newspapers with astonishing illustrations created in collaboration with the witnesses themselves. Then, for every expert expressing his doubt in the papers, there followed another convincing report of further sea serpent encounters. A couple months later a report appeared relating the story of an American brig, the Daphne, having encountered a similar serpent in September, only a little more than a month after the Daedalus had had its encounter, and in the same waters off the African coast. With the dragon-like only 40 feet away, the Daphne aimed cannons charged with nails and sundry pieces of iron at it and fired, causing the monster to rear its head and thrash in the waters before diving and fleeing. Then on New Year’s Eve of the same year, witnesses aboard H.M.S. Plumper, near Oporto off the Portuguese Coast, saw another serpent, and like the creature reported by the crew of the Daedalus, this one too appeared to have a mane. However, as the skepticism of the learned became well-known and began to spread, sea serpent sightings fell off and almost ceased, a fact that many have suggested proves there never were any serpents to begin with. One more did occur a decade later that is worth mentioning, though, due to it finally sinking the Daedalus tale once and for all. Sailing near the Cape of Good Hope, just as the Daedalus had been, one Captain Smith spotted a sea serpent from the deck of his ship, the Pekin. Fearlessly, he commanded his crew to draw nearer to this primordial beast of the deep, and as they approached, he caught a better look at it. It was nothing but a large mass of seaweed, out of it sprouting a root that resembled a neck and head. This, of course, made the Daedalus encounter something of a joke, prompting an anonymous member of her crew to write a furious letter to the Times insisting that what they had seen was a living creature swimming rapidly, with a surge of water under its chest, but the damage had been done, first by Owen, then by others. Theories about what M”Quhae and his crew saw are many and various. It was either a seal, or an oarfish, or some kind of shark or whale, or it was some floating seaweed or a log, or perhaps even a whaler’s abandoned canoe being pulled by something he had harpooned, but it was not, could not be, a sea serpent.

In the modern age of the Internet and fascination with the paranormal and cryptozoological, interest in the Great Sea Serpent has seen a resurgence, but we have also seen the development of yet further simple and skeptical explanations of what these supposed sea monsters really might have been. In the 1990s, friend of the show Mike Dash uncovered an alternate illustration of the Daedalus serpent drawn according to First Lieutenant Drummond’s directions, and this alternative picture, which does not show a serpentine head raised far above the water, had led some to suggest that the crew saw a sei whale, a kind of rorqual whale, skimming the surface. A comparison of pictures makes a convincing case, but there remain some elements that preserve doubt, such as there being no mention of the creature blowing like a whale and the fact that the sei whale’s fin should have been more prominent. Then there is the New England Serpent. Judging from the strange descriptions of the Gloucester Serpent as having humps or segments like barrels and the description that it moved rather more like a caterpillar than a serpent—surging forward and then gathering its segments before surging again—a compelling theory has been suggested that it was a whale dragging a great deal of netting and barrels from an attempt by whalers to kill it. So rather than its body contracting and expanding, what mariners saw was its burden being pulled behind it and gathering when its momentum ceased. Again, a compelling explanation, but one that fails to account for descriptions of the creature’s large eyes and flicking, snakelike tongue. In the end, it is easy for a doubter to cherry pick certain details to fit a debunking explanation and ignore others. And we see skeptics bend over backwards sometimes to get their theories to work, saying perhaps the whale seen by the Daedalus was injured or deformed so that its fin was not so prominent, or perhaps among the barrels being dragged by the whale mistaken for a serpent in Gloucester Bay there was one pile of kegs that resembled a raised neck and snakelike head. These contortions can sometimes seem just as ridiculous as the alternative belief, that primordial, perhaps dinosaurian creatures, survivors of the massive extinction event that wiped out most other animals like them, still roam about in the seas, hidden beneath the surface for the most part, until they rear their controversial heads and cast our notions of natural history into chaos and confusion.

The much less sensational sketch of Lieutenant Drummond’s recollection of the creature, via the Skeptical Inquirer

Further Reading

Colavito, Jason. “A Yale Professor’s ‘Lecture’ on Giants in the Time of the Great Sea Serpent Fraud.” JasonColavito.com, 20 May 2015, www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/a-yale-professors-lecture-on-giants-in-the-time-of-the-great-sea-serpent-fraud.

Erickson, Evarts. “When New England Saw the Serpent.” American Heritage, vol. 7, no. 3, April 1956, www.americanheritage.com/when-new-england-saw-serpent.

Fama, Elizabeth. “Debunking a Great New England Sea Serpent.” Tor.com, Macmillan, 16 Aug. 2012, www.tor.com/2012/08/16/debunking-a-great-new-england-sea-serpent/.

Galbreath, Gary J. “The 1848 ‘Enormous Serpent’ of the Daedalus Identified.” Skeptical Inquirer, vol. 39, no. 5, September/October 2015, skepticalinquirer.org/2015/09/the_1848_enormous_serpent_of_the_daedalus_identified/.

Harris, Gordon. “The Cape Ann Serpent.” Historic Ipswich, historicipswich.org/2019/03/26/cape-ann-sea-serpent/.

“How to Unmake a Sea Serpent: The Case of the Scoliophis Atlanticus.” Esoterx, 29 March 2014, esoterx.com/2014/03/29/how-to-unmake-a-sea-serpent-the-case-of-the-scoliophis-atlanticus/.

McGowan-Hartmann, John. “Shadow of the Dragon: The Convergence of Myth and Science in Nineteenth Century Paleontological Imagery.” Journal of Social History, vol. 47, no. 1, 2013, pp. 47–70. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43306045.

Willis, Matthew. “Where Be Monsters? The Daedalus Sea Serpent and the War for Credibility.” The Appendix, 5 June 2014, theappendix.net/issues/2014/4/where-be-monsters-daedalus-sea-serpent-and-war-for-credibility.

Leviathan, The Great Sea Serpent, Part One: Here Be Dragons

On the last episode, I discussed our knowledge of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, which destroyed something like 75% of all life on the planet. Whether this was the result of widespread volcanic eruption or asteroid impacts or both, there is consensus, based on the fossil record, that most of Earth’s life forms died off at the time. Everyone knows about the extinction of the dinosaurs, but there were many other species destroyed in the same extinction event, from mammals to invertebrates and even single-celled creatures and plant life. But of course, we also know that some life survived that extinction event. If this were not the case, then we humans and other animals would not be around to proliferate and dominate the planet. So then, how do we know that some dinosaurs did not themselves survive extinction? Considering the myths and legends of antiquity and the Middle Ages, one might be tempted to see in tales of dragons proof that some great saurian monsters survived, not just into further prehistoric eras, but even into historical eras, their encounters with men recorded for posterity.  For where did the notion of dragons originate, if not derived from those gargantuan reptiles? Some historians have suggested that ancient peoples must have discovered dinosaur fossils and thus extrapolated legends of dragons (Stothers 221). Certainly the concept of dragons colored our imagery of dinosaurs in the 19th century. Indeed, much of the early writing about the ichthyosaur and plesiosaur named them “sea-dragons,” and even the staunchest opponent of mythologizing the dinosaurs, the originator of scientific dinosaur taxonomy, Richard Owen, conceded to calling the pterodactyl a “dragon” (McGowan-Hartmann 54-55). This comparison may have even influenced our conception of dinosaur physiology, as only recently have we begun to question the portrait of giant, scaled beasts, believing them instead to have often been feathered creatures. There is, however, no convincing evidence for the reverse notion, that such fossils created our myths of dragons and other monstrous reptilian beasts. Another view holds that the notion of such monsters entered human culture simple because of encounters with known creatures, like large crocodiles and pythons, but this also doubtful, for considering the great size attributed to them, not to mention their other preternatural attributes, these would have to be inordinately exaggerated tales to establish such myths and legends. Is it not easier to believe, then, that some dinosaurian species could have survived the extinction event that destroyed others, and that perhaps they lived and procreated long enough to have encounters with mankind before going extinct in some later era? Certainly not, you’d say, or the fossil record would surely demonstrate their continued existence in later periods. A nearly unimpeachable argument, to be sure. But what if the evidentiary remains of these few surviving creatures have simply not been discovered yet, and could this be because they dwelt in the most remote places on earth, the deepest and darkest of habitats, the ocean depths? If so, could it possibly be that some have survived even to this day? (Please join me next time for) Thank you for listening to Leviathan; or the Great Sea Serpent, Part One: Here Be Dragons.

Despite the speculation that dinosaur fossils may have been stumbled upon in antiquity and recognized as the remains of enormous reptiles, the knowledge of such creatures appears to have originated in the late 17th century, when in 1677 English naturalist Robert Plot discovered a massive petrified femur. Plot’s assumption that it was the bone of a gargantuan man might serve as an example of what discoverers of fossil remains in antiquity may have assumed upon finding large bones. Likewise, when the Lewis & Clark expedition found a large bone in a Cliffside in 1806, Meriwether Lewis believed it to have belonged to a great fish.  It was not until the 1820s and ‘30s and the discovery of further fossilized bones in England that the classification of the dinosaur began with the description of the Megalosaurus in 1824. The vocabulary we know today would come into use in 1841, when the aforementioned Richard Owen coined the term dinosaur, a Greek portmanteau of “terrible” and “lizard.” Still, however, the notion of dinosaurs did not take hold of the public imagination. It had much to overcome, not the least of which was the resistance of a religious establishment that had decided in the 17th century that the Earth had been created in 4004 B.C., on October 23rd at 9 a.m. to be as precise as the Archbishop on whose calculations they relied. Therefore, the entire notion of vast primordial ages, proven by the fossil record of extinct creatures, challenged their entire worldview (McGowan-Hartmann 52). Another hurdle that early paleontologists faced was the very conception of dinosaurs; it was one thing to read about the bones and to hear the descriptions of the creatures, but another entirely to see them and conceive of them as they might have been in life. Richard Owen overcame this obstacle in 1854, when he opened a display of life-size dinosaur statues at Crystal Palace, in Sydenham, London. He called it the “first public ‘revivifying’ of the dinosaur,” and the display may be responsible with Western culture’s obsession with dinosaurs ever since (qtd. in McGowan-Hartmann 53). But of course, as previously indicated, even the scientifically-minded Owen resorted to evoking the image of ancient dragons at Crystal Palace in order to help the viewing public to conceive of the creatures as he conceived of them.

Owen’s dinosaur statues under construction, via Wikimedia Commons

It is perhaps, however, a strange supposition to think that people would have had a hard time imagining such beasts without statues and directions to think of them as dragonlike. It would seem mid-nineteenth century Englishmen and women would have been easily able to conceive of giant reptilian monsters, for there had been unsettling news in the press for decades, complete with illustrations, of colossal sea serpents spotted all over the world. Visitors to Owen’s exhibition surely had heard of the so-called Great Sea Serpent, a fantastical hypothesized marine creature that had come to worldwide attention over the course of a spate of sightings in New England in 1817 and had been witnessed in various parts of the world’s oceans ever since, from the coasts of Norway to the waters of Nova Scotia and all the way down to the south Atlantic Ocean, where in 1848 the crew of the H.M.S. Daedalus experienced one of the most publicized and compelling encounters with an unidentified sea creature that has ever been recorded. The irony is that the father of the dinosaurs, Richard Owen, had taken umbrage at the attention these sightings had drawn, especially that of the Daedalus, for he saw the public’s fascination with them and the credulous acceptance of them as unscientific (McGowan-Hartmann 51). He had dedicated his life to the painstaking study of the fossil record and anatomical science, and here were some squinting sailors and hucksters come around to tell the world that one of the principal tenets of paleontology, that the monstrous primordial creatures he studied had all gone extinct, was false. To Owen, this represented a backsliding into pre-Enlightenment superstition, when rather than simply marking unknown areas of maps as terra incognita, cartographers would write hic sunt dracones, or “here be dragons,” and would populate the blank spaces of their maps with fanciful illustrations of monsters, and scholars would compile lists of preposterous phenomena, as in Konrad Lykosthenes’s 1557 Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon, or Chronicle of Prodigies and Portents, which featured more than a thousand woodcuts of strange spectacles, including numerous sea monsters. Indeed, Richard Owen’s vocal criticism of the validity of sea serpent sightings and the credibility of their witnesses had earned him the nickname “the sea-serpent killer.” Thus it is exceedingly ironic that even he would have recourse to comparing dinosaurs to dragons in his strictly scientific exhibition. The underlying truth this fact may suggest is that, even disregarding the rampant sea serpent sightings of the 19th century—all of which, rest assured, we will examine or review, with varying detail, in this series before we conclude—and notwithstanding the rich lore of dragons and sea monsters originating before the Age of Enlightenment, in the Age of Discovery and the Middle Ages, notions of huge reptilian and serpentine beasts have been embedded in human consciousness across cultures, far back into antiquity and beyond, to the very foundations of myth.

Even in the furthest reaches of human civilization, we have traditions of gods or great heroes who did battle with serpentine monsters associated with the ocean. Consider, for example, the Mesopotamian myth of Marduk and Tiamat, the mother of monsters and dragons. The hero-god Marduk faced her on the battlefield, loosing an arrow into her open jaws and splitting her heart in two. Although some scholars dispute her general appearance, as portrayed by Babylonians, it is generally accepted she took a snake-like form, and she is clearly associated with the salt waters and was of so immense a size that Marduk was able to form all of heaven and earth out of her corpse, so one might justly consider her the first Great Sea Serpent. The idea of all creation being made possible by the heroic defeat of a sea monster or god appears across cultures. Canaanites held that Baal defeated Yam to create the world, and likewise, Yahweh, god of the Israelites, struggled against a sea monster, or monsters, at the time of creation. In various places in the Bible, we find reference to Rahab, the “boisterous” sea serpent, Tannim, variously translated as sea monster or dragon, and of course, Leviathan, the “twisting serpent” of Isaiah, the Psalms, and Job ( qtd. in Papadopoulos and Ruscillo 214). While it is unclear whether these were single or separate serpents, their role is the same. By defeating them, Yahweh establishes order out of the chaos of the waters. The creature is also presented as proof of the power of Yahweh, for in Job, the question is posed whether a mere man could hope to catch Leviathan with a fishhook. And funny enough, that is exactly what is done in Norse mythology, though not by a mere man, when the god Thor undertakes an ambitious fishing trip, hoping to land the World Serpent, Jormungandr. Baiting his hook with a giant ox’s head and hooking the beast, Thor thrusts his feet through the bottom of his boat and into the floor of the sea, hauling the serpent up to look it in the eye. The serpent got away that day, but it was foretold that Thor would face it again during the final struggle of Ragnarok. Thor sought out the World Serpent for vengeance, but often we find in these sea serpent myths the hero, perhaps not a god but at least a demigod, facing the beast in an effort to save a damsel. Greek mythology provides more than one example of this, with Heracles saving Hesione from a sea monster, and likewise Perseus rescuing Andromeda, both women having been chained to rocks as sacrifices to appease the god Poseidon, who had sent the monsters to devastate their kingdoms. Now, I am no Alexander Hislop; I do not suggest that these similarities mean these are but different names for the same figure, or that these myths represent retellings of one real encounter between an ancient hero and a primordial monster, but is it not possible that this sea-monster motif in ancient mythology suggests some inherited human knowledge of gigantic, sea-dwelling reptiles? Or did these remarkably dinosaurian creatures spring fully formed from human imagination? 

Thor facing Jormungandr, via Wikimedia Commons

It is interesting that the customary explanations relied on to dismiss later sea serpent encounters—usually that they were actually encounters with creatures that we can easily identify today—are also used to explain away old myths such as these. For example, the Leviathan of Job is simply a crocodile, some claim, even though descriptions have it breathing fire or rearing seven heads, or it was just a whale (Papadopoulos and Ruscillo 214). This one, of course, is a perennial favorite, as the sheer size of whales, and the fact that only part of them could be glimpsed in the water surely could have meant they were the source of some supposed sea monster sightings. Leviathan is also sometimes conflated with the creature that swallowed Jonah in the Bible, and this creature has clearly been assumed to have been a whale, although the Hebrew calls it rather vaguely a “big sea creature.” Then there is the sea monster of Greek mythology, the so-called “cetus” that Poseidon sent against man. It is often pointed out that this is the same word from which the word “cetacean” is derived,  which is our scientific classification for marine mammals like whales. Indeed, the word “cetus,” or more accurately “ketos” (κῆτος) before its Latinization, appears to have been used in ancient Greece to mean both a whale and a sea monster or sea serpent. But to suggest that ancient Greeks held some misconception of the nature of the whales that populated the Mediterranean would be inaccurate. Among other sea creatures, whales in particular presented themselves for easy anatomical study, for they beached themselves and died, or expanded with methane when dying at sea and floated to shore to continue decomposing (Papadopoulos and Ruscillo 198). The bones of whales have been recovered as ancient Greek artifacts, used to make objects like tables (Papadopoulos and Ruscillo 197). And Greek and Roman philosophers and naturalists such Aristotle and Pliny make their knowledge of whales clear. Aristotle, for example, notes they “have no gills but a blowhole instead” and lacking teeth, they “have instead hairs similar to pigs’ bristles,” a clear description of baleen plates (qtd. in Papadopoulos and Ruscillo 210, 212).

Rather than convince us that the “cetus” of legend was not a whale, perhaps their knowledge of whales might cement the notion that the word was always only used to refer to whales. And it should be pointed out that in the Bible, Jonah boarded his ship in Jaffa, and that was the same place where it was said Andromeda had been chained in offering to the monstrous Cetus. (Papadopoulos and Ruscillo 213). So perhaps both of these encounters were, after all, with a whale, although chaining up a human sacrifice for a whale seems rather ridiculous, given what we know of whales. And other descriptions of the monstrous Cetus make its differences from a whale starkly clear. When Virgil uses the term to refer to the sea serpents that attack Laocoön and his sons, he describes them as “rearing in coils…their bodies thrashing, backs rolling in coil on mammoth coil… flickering tongues licking their hissing maws.” Now of course, this creature was a poetic invention, as was the Marcus Manilius description of the Cetus that attacked Andromeda at Jaffa. But in much the same way, Manilius describes it as coiled, with scales and jaws (Papadopoulos and Ruscillo 212). At least one scholar, Kathleen Coleman, has attempted to see a description of a whale in Manilius’s portrait, but one would be hard-pressed to see in these descriptions anything but the monstrous sea serpent of legend. And although not witness accounts, they certainly go to show that ancient Greeks were not only thinking of whales when using the word “cetus” or “ketos.” A couple final examples to illustrate this come to us from Pliny, who recorded the discovery of more than one huge sea monster whose remains had washed ashore. On the coasts of an island near Lyon, he describes the tide leaving hundreds of monsters of incredible size stranded. Another, on the coast of Spain, was said to have more than a hundred teeth as long as nine inches, and yet another, on the eastern side of Mediterranean, again near Jaffa, was more than forty feet long, with a spine one and a half feet thick and ribs taller than any elephant. One might argue that these could very well have been the remains of whales, but considering the Greeks’ known familiarity with whales, it is then unusual that the bones of the latter creature were thereafter taken to Rome and placed on display as the very sea monster that had attacked Andromeda at Jaffa so many years before (Papadopolous and Ruscillo 213). 

Andromeda and the sea monster, via Wikimedia Commons

With the discovery of physical remains, one sees that antiquity offers more than just poetic renderings of mythical sea creatures. And beyond reports of remains, which one could argue might be misidentified, there are records of eyewitness encounters with monsters that dwell in the deep.  One incident, recorded by Orosius but likely derived from a lost history by Livy, occurred in the Bagradas, a river near Carthage in northern Africa that spills directly into the Mediterranean Sea. A Roman commander had his troops encamp beside the river, and when they went to fetch water, a huge reptile, some 120 feet long, poisoned and devoured numerous men, and the soldiers’ javelins glanced harmlessly off of its thick scales (Stothers 223). The report goes into singular detail, indicating that the creature had no feet and describing its motion as that of a serpent or snake, “by a sinuous movement, extending its sides first right and then left.” Eventually, the Roman soldiers defeated the serpent by flinging a boulder on it with a ballista, and its viscera were said to poison the water (Stothers 224). They carried this creature’s skin and jaws back with them to Rome for all to wonder at. Aristotle indirectly corroborates this incident on the Bagradas River when he describes massive serpents overturning fleets of boats in the sea off the North African coast (Stothers 226). Meanwhile, Pliny the Elder mentions large snakes swimming in the Red Sea and Livy describes massive snakes leaping out of the water in the seas south of Rome (Stothers 228, 232). Now all of these encounters might be explained by suggesting they were exaggerated accounts of encounters with prosaic beasts. The leaping snakes seen from Rome may have actually been the backs of dolphins, and others may have been genuine sea snakes of large size. The Bagradas beast, often supposed to be a crocodile, does not seem as easily explained away, though, for its sinuous, serpentine movements would not suggest those of a crocodile, and even if its reported length of 120 feet were inaccurate, it must have been miraculously large to warrant the display of its remains as an “object of wonder” for more than a hundred years (Stothers 224). Nor was the Bagradas beast alone in its mythic proportions. Around 75 BCE, Posidonius described the corpse of a sea monster a hundred feet long and its jaws 7 feet wide. Describing the same creature, Strabo noted that its jaws were large enough when gaping for a man on horseback to enter it, that each of its scales was 4 feet long, the size of a shield, and men mounted on horseback on either side of it could not see each other (Stothers 232). These descriptions were not of bones but of fresh creatures with the scales of their flesh intact, and so, considering the knowledge of whales that we know ancient mariners and coastal dwellers had, it seems unlikely they would have mistaken a beached whale for a scaled monster. And we have reports of similarly massive sea creatures when they were still alive, as when Aelian shares the reports of mariners who have seen the so-called Scolopendra, a creature that was supposed to be able to lift its head above the water as it swam, the entirety of its body visible on the surface, with what appeared to be thousands of tiny feet or flippers propelling it like oars protruding from a galley. We have reports of the remains of these Scolopendra from Theodoridas and Antipater (Stothers 233). To explain them, scholars have suggested, again, they were merely whales, and the feet must have simply been an illusion caused by ripples, or perhaps suckerfish attached all in a row to the whale’s side, and I suppose attached in this way also to every whale mistaken for a Scolopendra by experienced sailors who had likely seen whales before. Another theory goes that the Scolopendra may have not been a whale at all, but rather a giant squid, a creature whose own existences was for so long doubted, and its sightings explained away. 

As the sea serpent enters medieval lore, it is difficult to separate myth inspired by Greek and Roman poets from genuine sightings. One example of the fanciful legends coming out of medieval Europe would be that of King Olaf II of Norway who was said to have slain an “orm” or sea serpent and thrown it onto a cliff side, where its shape could still be discerned. And as we leave the Middle Ages with their tales of dragons and dragon slayers behind and enter the Age of Exploration, we continue to find Norway, with its storied Sea Orm, to be a hotbed for sea serpent sightings. In the mid-16th century, historian and cartographer Olaus Magnus did much to make this Great Norway Serpent famous. A Catholic priest exiled from Sweden after its conversion to Lutheranism, Magnus started drawing up his Carta Marina, or Sea Map, in 1527. By 1539, it was the biggest and most detailed and accurate map of any European region, and scattered across it were illustrations of a variety of sea monsters. These were no decorative dragons set down merely to fill empty space, though, as had been the practice among mapmakers previously, but rather depictions of sea monsters that sailors had actually reported seeing, whose eyewitness accounts were collected in Magnus’s History of the Northern People to accompany the map. The most fantastic of those shown on the map is coiled about a ship’s mast and striking with bared fangs at a sailor on the ship’s deck. This sea serpent had been reported by numerous fishermen and trade navigators that plied the waters around Norway’s coasts. It was between 200 and 300 feet long, and 20 feet thick, living in caves and feeding on livestock that strayed too close to the shore. The beast was black, they said, with shining eyes that seemed to gleam like fire. Covered with scales, it swam about with its head held high out of the water, a mane of hair glistening on the back of its neck, and sailors knew not to watch it from the decks of their ships, lest it draw near and snap them up. Magnus’s sea serpent stories spread from there into early zoological texts, like Sebastian Münster’s 1544 chart of marine and terrestrial monsters, Conrad Gesner’s 1558 Historiae Animalium, Edward Topsell’s 1608 History of Serpents, and on they went, from the 17th to the 18th century, when more modern sightings began to shape the notion of the Great Sea Serpent with which Richard Owens would do intellectual battle.

Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina, via Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps the first of these modern sightings, again in Norway, was that of missionary Hans Egede in 1734, who saw a monster emerge from the water, raising its head “as high as the Mast-Head.” Its body he said was as big as the ship that carried him, and it “spouted like a Whale-Fish” before falling backward and raising its tail. Now to the modern reader, it is easy to dismiss this as a breaching whale, despite the fact that Egede’s own words indicate some familiarity with whales. But Egede also described its skin as “rugged and uneven” and “covered in Shell work” (McGowan-Hartmann 50). This scale-like quality to the skin might be explained away with the presence of excessive barnacles on the whale, one may suppose, but this was not the only sighting in Norwegian waters in those years, for a Captain Lawrence de Ferry would report seeing another serpent, or “Sea-snake,” as he called it, near Bergen in 1746, and he and his fellow sailors would describe it under oath in a deposition. The creature passed them, and they brought the ship about to draw nearer to it, firing a gun at it until it disappeared into the bloody water. This serpent, they said, held its very horse-like head with its long white mane two feet above the water, and behind its neck, they spied as many as eight coils of its thick body, with about a fathom, or six feet, between each, making it at least 50 feet long. If this is the creature Egede saw—for he also described its head as “oblong,” like a horse’s—then it sounds less and less like a whale. As sightings like these were spread in those years, in works like Bishop Erich Pontoppidan’s 1753 Natural History of Norway, or John Jonston’s 1767 Natural History of Fishes, they were sometimes treated as genuine and sometimes relayed with skepticism, and the scholarly practice of suggesting that the sailors had just seen some other readily identifiable animal began. Despite the fact that often sailors were far more likely to have seen firsthand and be able to discern such creatures than the writers who doubted their faculties, their sea serpent sightings were blamed in the nineteenth century on not only whales and squids, but on sharks, seals, sea lions, porpoises, eels, oarfish, and simple logs and seaweed. But while this scientific skepticism became almost zealous, an atmosphere that Richard Owens, father of the dinosaur, would do much to establish and perpetuate, the seemingly credible sightings of sea serpents seemed to multiply, almost as if to spite their doubts.   

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Join me next time for Part Two of Leviathan, the Great Sea Serpent, as we enter the chaos waters of sea monster sightings in the modern era and try to come to some conclusion as to the believability of all these big fish stories. 

A depiction of the sea serpent reported by Hans Egede, via Wikimedia Commons

Further Reading

McGowan-Hartmann, John. “Shadow of the Dragon: The Convergence of Myth and Science in Nineteenth Century Paleontological Imagery.” Journal of Social History, vol. 47, no. 1, 2013, pp. 47–70. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43306045.

Nigg, Joseph. Olaus Magnus’s Sea Serpent.” The Public Domain Review, publicdomainreview.org/2014/02/05/olaus-magnuss-sea-serpent/

Papadopoulos, John K., and Deborah Ruscillo. “A Ketos in Early Athens: An Archaeology of Whales and Sea Monsters in the Greek World.” American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 106, no. 2, 2002, pp. 187–227. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4126243.

Stothers, Richard B. “Ancient Scientific Basis of the ‘Great Serpent’ from Historical Evidence.” Isis, vol. 95, no. 2, 2004, pp. 220–238. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/426195.

Blind Spot: The Great Dying and the Chicxulub Crater

For a very long time, there has been consensus among paleontologists that a mass extinction event, sometimes called The Great Dying, occurred around the boundary between the Cretaceous and the Paleogene or Tertiary periods, a boundary also marking the end of the Mesozoic era and the beginning of the Cenozoic, about 65.5 million years ago. The fossil record stands as clear evidence of a mass extinction around that time, with the fossil remains of dinosaurs being the best known and most illustrative examples of species extinction during that period. However, scientists have not always been in consensus regarding just what caused this mass extinction. Some have theorized that gradual climate change may have made the planet uninhabitable for them, or volcanic activity, or falling sea levels. The idea that an asteroid impacted the earth was something of an outlier, considered dubious by many, for it seemed so very unlikely that in the vast, howling void of space a meteor or a comet would be on just the right trajectory to collide with our pulsing globe of life, let alone that its impact could have such a massive destructive effect on species the world over. But two physicists out of Berkeley, Luis and Walter Alvarez, would change this notion forever, and through the scientific detective work of various disparate specialists and investigators, evidence supporting the Alvarez Hypothesis would eventually convince the world that some massive impact resulted in the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction. But is this known with any certainty, and what doubts or alternative theories persist, making the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs a prehistoric blind spot?

In 1977, a young geologist named Walter Alvarez was collecting limestone samples in a little Italian village called Gubbio. What he discovered was that between two layers of limestone marking the Cretaceous-Peleogene boundary, a thin layer of red clay was present. In the Cretaceous layer below, there were a great variety of different species of tiny, fossilized marine creatures called “foram,” while in the red clay there were none. Then in the Paleogene layer above, there remained only one species of foram. Returning to Berkeley with his samples, Walter consulted his father, Nobel Prize winning physicist Luis Alvarez, an impressive man with a storied career that included designing the detonator of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, inventing a radar system commonly used by air traffic controllers, discovering an isotope, and pioneering the use of bubble chambers in particle physics and cosmic ray detection for the purposes of searching for hidden chambers in Egyptian pyramids. Luis Alvarez suggested using neutron activation analysis on the Gubbio samples to determine the length of time it took for the red clay layer to form, but to their surprise, the most interesting thing this analysis turned up was the immense quantity of iridium in the clay. Of course, as we know from the scientific study of the Tunguska Event, iridium is an element common in asteroids and other extraterrestrial objects, but not typically present in the crust of the Earth. With further discoveries of this anomaly at other sites, such as New Zealand and Denmark, evidence mounted that some extraterrestrial material had been dispersed across the world at the end of the Mesozoic Era, just when the mass extinction was known to have occurred. And what’s more, beyond iridium and some other elements, the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary layer contained a great deal of soot, indicating some kind of mass conflagration.

Luis Alvarez winning the Nobel Prize, via Wikimedia Commons

As the Alvarez Hypothesis took shape and gained momentum, a terrifying vision of apocalyptic doom began to form. The idea of an asteroid striking the Earth and causing a tsunami was comprehensible, but that would not account for global devastation of species far inland. But Luis Alvarez’s experience with nuclear explosions gave him some insight, for he know that a blast of great magnitude would throw an immense amount of dust into the stratosphere, theorizing that it could possibly blot out the sun for years, which would result in plummeting temperatures and the death of plant life and thereafter of most animal life. And based on the iridium levels they had observed, Alvarez inferred that the asteroid must have been massive indeed, at 300 billion tons, and thus its impact would have resulted in an explosion equivalent to 100 billion megatons of TNT. In one second, this world killer would have torn a hole in our atmosphere, superheating to hotter than the surface of the sun, and when it struck, it would have thrown matter half way to the moon, much of which would have come falling back down as separate meteor strikes. The blast wave would have utterly destroyed all life for a few hundred miles, and creatures beyond that radius faced fires, earthquakes, landslides, and acid rain as the skies filled with dark clouds far worse than any of the so-called Dark Days I discussed in the latest patron-exclusive Blindside episode. These were dark months, perhaps even benighted for as long as a year as dust clouds filled the atmosphere. 70-75 percent of all life would have died as photosynthesis failed, starving herbivores and thereby reducing the food supply of carnivores. The Alvarez Hypothesis was not only horrifying, it had geological evidence to support it, but it remained largely contested by those who subscribed to the theory that the extinction was precipitated by massive volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps region of India. They and others challenged the Alvarez Hypothesis, refusing to believe in an impact with no crater as proof.

One of the first craters studied as possible proof of the asteroid impact theory was located in Manson, Iowa. This was one of the largest craters ever discovered on the planet at 22 miles in diameter. But Luis Alvarez had estimated the crater of their world killer would have to be more than a hundred miles across. Moreover, new evidence had appeared in Haiti, where Florentin Maurrasse of Florida International University discovered an even thicker layer of iridium. When Glen Izett of the U.S. Geological Survey examined samples from the Haitian layer, he found tektites, little pieces of glass naturally created by meteorite impacts. Drill samples from the Manson, Iowa, crater were then compared with the Haitian tektites, settling once and for all through chemical analysis that the Manson impact could not have been the culprit. And this further narrowed the search field, for those who had examined the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary sediments at Haiti and the tektite glass therein, including a graduate student named Alan Hildebrand, agreed that the impact site must have been close by, somewhere in the Caribbean. Little did Hildebrand and others searching for the crater realize that their crater had already been found. Leave it to a newspaperman to make that connection. In 1981, Carlos Byars, writing for the Houston Chronicle, suggested that a ring formation recently surveyed on the Yucatan Peninsula was not a volcano as previously believed, but may in fact have been an impact crater. When Byars contacted Alan Hildebrand and shared the idea, Hildebrand followed up, reaching out to the geophysicists who had been studying the formation, not realizing he was about to enter the final chapter of a story that had been unfolding for decades.

Example of tektite glass, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, Attribution: I, Brocken Inaglory

In 1947, PEMEX, the national Mexican oil company, performed a gravity survey of the Yucatan peninsula in search of fossil fuel deposits, and they picked up a semicircular formation that looked promising. However, when they drilled the area in the 1950s, they came up empty handed. Drilling near the pueblo of Chicxulub, a village whose name meant “the devil’s tail” in Mayan, they turned up no oil, but rather some odd samples of volcanic rock. Being that there were no known volcanoes in the region, it was theorized that the circular formations their survey had perceived were from a long extinct and buried volcano. More than a decade later, after capping their failed wellheads, PEMEX contracted Robert Baltosser to reconsider their gravity survey data, and Baltosser was the first to recognize the presence of an ancient crater, as he had previously surveyed a crater site in Tennessee. So the discovery was made, but Baltosser had signed a confidentiality agreement, and PEMEX was not in the business of publicizing data that might prove to be valuable. Thus the existence of the massive crater remained a secret.

In 1978, Glen Penfield, another contractor, was mapping magnetic fields for PEMEX using survey flights over the sea off the Yucatan coast. He discovered a magnetic anomaly and mapped out a huge semicircular ridge beneath the water, and when he compared it with the company’s old gravity map, he found to his astonishment that they matched, forming a perfect circle. He realized he had made a momentous discovery, but like Baltosser before him, he was bound by his agreement with PEMEX not to publish his findings. However, he knew that a journalist learning of the discovery would certainly be able to publish. So Penfield arranged for a reporter acquaintance, Carlos Byars of the Houston Chronicle, to be present at a meeting of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists when he and his colleague would be presenting a report of their findings. The plan worked; Byars published the story and thereafter put Penfield in touch with Hildebrand, the grad student who was becoming a major player in the search for the impact site that would prove the Alvarez Hypothesis.

In 1990, Hildebrand and Penfield began their joint search for evidence that could prove not only the existence of the Chicxulub crater but also its responsibility for the Great Dying. Evidence, however, would not be easy to come by. The data Penfield had turned over to PEMEX had gone through a normalization process that erased some of the magnetic anomalies that had been telltale signs of an extraterrestrial impact. Those anomalies remained on the original data records, but those tapes had been lost somehow. The only evidence of what Penfield had observed beneath the sea off of the Yucatan Peninsula now lay filed away somewhere at PEMEX headquarters, under lock and key, and PEMEX, already resentful that Penfield had spoken about his findings at a meeting of geophysicists, was not inclined to share them. So they went in search of the drill samples that had been taken in the ‘50s, which they discovered had been stored in a warehouse in Veracruz. Unfortunately, that warehouse had burned down, and when he arrived to sift through the ashes, he found that it had been bulldozed. Penfield’s only hope then was to search the towns were PEMEX’s failed wellheads had been capped, and eventually, he found that several of the core samples had been taken and distributed for study. Upon examining the melted sedimentary rock that many had previously believed to be the result of volcanism, they discovered the presence of “shocked quartz,” which is only ever formed at impact sites. Thus the Chicxulub formations were proven to be an impact crater, and further study has only further proven the crater’s existence. At 110 miles in diameter, it was the likeliest suspect to prove the Alvarez Hypothesis, which today is supported by the majority of the scientific community.

Gravity map of the Chicxulub Crater, via Wikimedia Commons

Scientific consensus does not make for scientific certainty, however, nor for objective truth. There had been many ridiculous hypotheses before the Alvarez Hypothesis—namely that dinosaurs had died off because of how very stupid they were, because they had eaten too much or eaten the wrong things and poisoned themselves, or because they had failed to procreate or just wasted away from some kind of primeval ennui—but like the dinosaurs, most of these theories died off with the coming of the asteroid theory. However, one old hypothesis has persisted. Some scientists still point to the Deccan Trap volcanic eruptions as the culprit. All four of the major extinction events before the Great Dying had been as a result of volcanic activity releasing carbon dioxide and sulphur into the atmosphere. This is generally agreed upon. And much evidence indicates that the fifth extinction event, at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, coincided with the voluminous eruption of one of the largest volcanos on Earth in the Deccan Traps. It seems absurd to suggest that this volcanism had nothing to do with it, for certainly, if both were occurring, then both probably contributed to the poisoning of the world’s air. The two theories, after all, are not so very different. Both take a catastrophist view of prehistory, imagining very sudden and calamitous changes rather than a gradual transformation. Recently, though, some of the gradual views of dinosaur extinction have started to regain traction. In 2016, a phylogenetic study of dinosaur speciation published statistical evidence that dinosaur speciation, the ability to spawn new species as others went extinct, had been declining for tens of millions of years (Sakamoto et al. 5036). This, however, doesn’t diminish the significance of the effects that volcanism or a massive extraterrestrial impact would have. Rather, it only shows that dinosaurs would have been especially susceptible to extinction at the time.

One scientist, a Princeton micropaleontologist named Gerta Keller, has actually challenged the idea that an impact at Chicxulub could have caused the Great Dying. According to her research, the object that struck the Yucatan peninsula arrived 300,000 years before the Great Dying actually occurred and so could not be responsible for it. Moreover, she argues that since the layers at Chicxulub containing microtektites were lower than the layers containing iridium, then the iridium layer discovered around the world could not have been from the Chicxulub impact. While her claims have been contested, Keller remains steadfast, insisting that a sudden extinction likely required the coincidental combination of massive volcanism in the Deccan Traps and a massive extraterrestrial impact, but insisting that Chicxulub is not the one that did it. And now we have a new candidate, a hypothesized 310-mile-wide crater that just happens to be located offshore of India and the Deccan Traps volcanic plateau. This crater has been named Shiva after the Hindu god of destruction. Other, smaller impact sites dating to the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary have started to turn up as well, like Manson, Iowa, and the 15-mile-wide crater in the Ukraine, at Boltysh. A picture begins to form of monstrous lifeforms already in decline and vulnerable to disaster, and a world reeling from colossal volcanic activity suddenly pummeled by a series of enormous asteroids, perhaps a swarm or perhaps castoff from one initial impact. But like all theories about the Great Dying, this is just conjecture—it is an informed opinion, supported by fact, but still only an opinion—and this, perhaps the most significant event in Earth’s past, which was directly responsible for the emergence of humanity as the dominant life form on the planet, may forever remain enigmatic.

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A depiction of dinosaur extinction precipitated by Deccan Traps volcanism, via Wikimedia Commons

Further Reading

Betz, Eric. “How We Found the Dinosaur Doomsday Site.” Discover, 23 March 2016, blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2016/03/23/chicxulub-crater-dinosaurs-drilling/#.XL5BOzCpHRY

DiGregorio, Barry. “Doubts on Dinosaurs.” Scientific American, vol. 292, no. 5, 2005, pp. 28–29. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26060982.

Hildebrand, Alan R., et al. “Chicxulub Crater: A Possible Cretacious/Tertiary Boundary Impact Crater on the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico.” Geology, vol. 19, no. 9, Sep. 1991, pp. 867-871. ResearchGate, www.researchgate.net/publication/257984366_Chicxulub_Crater_A_possible_CretaceousTertiary_boundary_impact_crater_on_the_Yucatn_Peninsula_Mexico

Jablow, Valerie. “A Tale of Two Rocks.” Smithsonian Magazine, Apr. 1998, www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-tale-of-two-rocks-151643588/

Gerta Keller, et al. “Chicxulub Impact Predates the K-T Boundary Mass Extinction.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 101, no. 11, 2004, pp. 3753–3758. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3371432.

R. Monastersky. “Cretaceous Die-Offs: A Tale of Two Comets?” Science News, vol. 143, no. 14, 1993, pp. 212–213. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3977229.

Ponsford, Matthew. “The Buried Secrets of the Deadliest Location on Earth.” BBC, 12 Nov. 2018, www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181111-the-buried-secrets-of-the-deadliest-location-on-earth

Sakamoto, Manabu, et al. “Dinosaurs in Decline Tens of Millions of Years before Their Final Extinction.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 113, no. 18, 2016, pp. 5036–5040. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26469494.  

Schulte, Peter, et al. “The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary.” Science, vol. 327, no. 5970, 2010, pp. 1214–1218. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40544375.

Terror over Tunguska: The Siberian Blast of 1908

Come with me on a breathtaking expedition to a primeval swampland, where we will encounter a visitor from the stars. This is a story of cosmic horror on a level of which H. P. Lovecraft only lurked at the threshold. The notion of an earth-shattering cataclysm hurtling out of the black void of the universe to end the era of man is a chilling one. In modern cinema, we might temper our feelings of powerlessness by imagining that our technology is up to the task of defending against a world-ending asteroid strike, as in the popcorn flick Armageddon, but at the same time, our sense of impotence in the face of such imminent death from beyond persists, as that same year saw a less optimistic version of the scenario in 1998’s Deep Impact. This deep-seated dread comes not from knowledge or experience, as humankind has never experienced such a calamity before; we know a great deal about surviving earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, and tsunamis, but not about the devastation of a massive celestial object impacting the earth. And yet it has happened here before. Scientists believe that around 4.4 billion years ago, a planetoid the size of Mars collided with our world, casting off so much of our mass as to create our moon.  And 65 million years ago, it is believed that just such an impact might have been the cause of the extinction event that eradicated the world’s population of dinosaurs. So perhaps this foundational dread is inborn, part of our connection with the earth and its longer memory. Or perhaps it is simply that our own exploration and scientific discovery has revealed things with which we struggle to be at peace, for we have uncovered the evidence: the bones of extinct creatures, the massive Chicxulub Crater beneath the Yucatan peninsula. And then there is the one more recent reminder of such devastating collisions, although this one lacks a discernible crater and remains mysterious in many ways.

*

Just after 7 a.m. on June 30th, 1908, Semen B. Semenov sat on his porch enjoying a morning that must have seemed like many others. As a farmer in the Siberian village of Vanavara, he was no stranger to hard work and likely had already been at it for some hours before taking a seat on his porch and admiring the day. Then, before his eyes, the sky split open, and a ball of fire burst into his field of vision, a mass of flame roiling as it moved over the forest. Semenov felt the heat of that fire hit his face as if he’d just opened the door of a kindled woodstove. He scrutinized the fireball, trying to judge the size and nature of the thing, but just as quickly as it appeared, it vanished, for the sky suddenly darkened, as though the rift he thought he’d seen had clapped shut. A thud sounded from the forest, deeply felt through the earth, and then the forest, the fields, the very porch beneath his feet seemed to jolt as if struck by an impossibly sudden gust of wind, and Semenov’s feet lost hold of the planks beneath them and he fell unconscious. When he regained his senses, a great and furious roar, as of an entire fleet of ships discharging cannon fire, rattled his entire house, cracking its sturdy wooden frames and shattering the windows. Turning again to the skies from whence this destroyer had come, Semenov witnessed the birth of a massive black cloud, rising from the forest where burning trees could be seen to have fallen in great numbers and climbing ever higher into the once pleasant morning sky.

Semenov was not alone a witness of this event north of the Stony Tunguska River, about forty miles or 65 kilometers from his village of Vanavara. Most of those who lived in that largely uninhabited region saw the fire, heard the terrible blast, and of course they saw the haze the poisoned all the air and the towering smoky cloud, which filled the sky afterward, dropping a foul black rain as it sluggishly drifted over the land. In the aftermath of this fiery visitation, those who drew near that stretch of the Stony Tunguska found countless burned tree trunks, denuded of all branches, lying flat on the ground in parallel ranks, like fallen soldiers laid out after battle. Hunters found game scarce, and for a while, most went without venison, for more than a thousand reindeer had been destroyed by the blast. Indeed, there were some known tribes of nomadic people who also disappeared, entire roaming communities, whole families that were wiped from the face of the earth by that all-consuming fire from the heavens. Nor were the effects of this event experienced only by locals, such was the magnitude of the blast. After Semenov and his house were battered by the shockwave, 400 miles away the Trans-Siberian Express was similarly rattled, its engineer bringing the train to an abrupt halt when he saw the very tracks ahead vibrating like the tines of a tuning fork. Within five hours, London’s barometers detected the shock wave racing through the atmosphere, and later, they would detect it again, after the ripple of the blast had gone all the way around the world and returned. And the towering dark cloud rising from the Siberian wastelands would continue, rising higher than any ordinary cloud, treating Central Asia and northern Europe to glorious sunsets and strange, illuminated nights so bright that Londoners reported being able to read their newspapers and take clear photographs at midnight and sailors claimed to be able to see clearly for miles across benighted seas. The cause of this night sky illumination, it seems, was that the dark Siberian cloud had grown to such a towering height that it caught and reflected sunlight from beyond the horizon.

Location of the Tunguska Event, via Wikimedia Commons

It was clear to the world that some great atmospheric disturbance had occurred, but it was not clear what had caused it. The London Times, days later, suggested it was the result of some distant volcanic eruption, since it seemed so similar to the aftermath of Krakatoa’s eruption 25 years earlier. But with no definite reports of volcanic activity, news of the disturbance seemed to fade and dissipate along with the massive cloud. While one might think that news from Russia, the developed nation closest to the blast might have enlightened the world, Russia and all her peoples, scientists included, were preoccupied at the time. Only three years earlier, unarmed petitioners were massacred by Imperial Guardsmen at Tsar Nicholas II’s Winter Palace, sparking the first Russian revolution, as mutinies among the military, strikes among workers, and general social unrest threatened the empire. This was followed by Russia’s entry into the Great War and thereafter by the revolutions of 1917, kicking off the Russian Civil War in 1918, which saw the Red and White armies clashing across Siberia, displacing tens of thousands of peasant farmers like Semen Semenov. And while the violent warfare persisted, amid this refugee crisis, an outbreak of typhus spread, turning much of Siberia, already a harsh and desolate place, into a nightmarish hellscape, with swollen and mutilated corpses littering the streets and choking the icy rivers.

Thus it was not until 1921 that someone ventured out into the wilds of Siberia to investigate what had happened there more than a dozen years earlier. His name was Leonid Kulik, a former revolutionary who had survived three wars and imprisonment for his radicalism. By 1921, he was studying meteorites at St. Petersburg’s Mineralogical Museum and planning an expedition into Siberia to search for impact sites. During his preparations, he found an old Siberian newspaper that mentioned the event of 1908, and he began a new line of investigation, piecing together several obscure news articles to assemble a narrative of that day in June when Siberian peasants witnessed a strange fiery object traversing the morning sky on a horizontal and southerly trajectory, terminating in an enormous blast. Based on these vague and contradictory newspaper reports, Kulik set out that year, on the Trans-Siberian Express to the town of Kansk, where he found no shortage of villagers willing to share their memories of that strange day, but he soon realized he was searching the wrong place and returned to St. Petersburg to further research the blast. So Kulik immersed himself in all the reports he could find from that year and any further research that had been done, consulting the work of geophysicists whose observatories had recorded the seismic and atmospheric disturbances that day. Based on their calculations, Kulik eventually recognized that the epicenter of the blast lay north of Vanavara and the Stony Tunguska River, in the midst of a remote and swampy coniferous forest, or taiga.

Leonid Kulik, via Wikimedia Commons

Kulik would not be able to mount another expedition until 1927, when he and an assistant made their way into the vast Siberian interior of the continent. It was a dangerous journey in a dangerous land. The winters were legendarily severe there. The swamps of the taiga were more easily traversable then, as they stayed frozen solid for eight or nine months, but one ran the risk of freezing to death themselves in that time of year. It is said that in those months, birds are known to fall out of the skies, frozen solid. But with the summer thaw came vast bogs swarming with clouds of mosquitos and flies, their brackish waters crowded with decaying tree trunks to the point that they became impassable. Thus Kulik and his companion timed their departure such that they would be entering the taiga in the spring, hoping to avoid the pitfalls of both seasons. It proved to be months of travel, the most arduous being the final leg, as they penetrated the taiga itself on pack horses. After several days, fighting scurvy and other illnesses, they finally arrived at the site of the 1908 blast. It stretched on, impossibly vast, all the way to the horizon, an entire ancient forest smashed flat to the ground, thick old-growth tree trunks blackened by fire, snapped like toothpicks at their bases, and thrown to the ground. To give some sense of the immensity of this blast, it has been measured at 2,150 square kilometers or 1,335 square miles, with some 80 million trees destroyed. As Kulik surveyed the massive blast zone, he saw every tree parallel to the next, and as he further explored, he found the trees, which had been pointing south, were eventually pointing north, indicating a radial pattern. Finding the center of this pattern, he expected to discover a massive crater, but instead, to his surprise, he found a grove of trees that still stood upright, although they were dead, blackened and bereft of branches. He likened them to a stand of telegraph poles at the epicenter of the blast zone. Leonid Kulik would return to this site more than once in his life, always searching for a crater, for evidence of the meteorite that must have struck the earth to cause this destruction. But he never solved this, the enduring mystery of the Tunguska Event, an extraordinary blast with no apparent impact.

The mystery of what came out of the sky on June 30th, 1908, persists even today. Expeditions by scientists to the blast site have been continuous. Kulik himself, as previously stated, made several more, but in 1941, at 58, he became involved in his fourth war, and this one he didn’t survive, dying in a prison camp in 1942. Scientific advancement in the fifties and sixties and afterward saw further interest renewed in the site. Of course the prevailing theories focused on a comet or meteorite strike, but the lack of impact crater confounded these and gave rise to various intriguing alternative theories. In 1946, Russian war veteran and science-fiction author Alexander Kazantsev hypothesized that an alien spacecraft, from Mars obviously, had visited Siberia in order to retrieve water from Lake Baikal and ended up exploding in the air over the taiga. His theory was born of the atomic age and was inspired by a visit to Hiroshima, so Kazantsev speculated that the craft detonated in a nuclear explosion, irradiating the area below. No evidence of high radiation levels have ever been found to support the theory of a nuclear explosion, however, so this notion, with its concomitant belief in extraterrestrial visitation, has only been embraced by UFOlogists and writers of science fiction, among whom the Tunguska Event has become a mainstay. This marks the beginning of a pattern in thought on the Tunguska Event, though. Just as the Atomic Age and the era of UFO sightings led to this unique new theory about the Siberian blast, so whenever a new notion in science emerged, it was applied to this mysterious incident.

Alexander Kazantsev, via arves.org

In the mid-sixties, a new theory emerged positing that a chunk of antimatter had struck the Earth in 1908. In like fashion, this theory seems to have arisen from the popularity of the concept of antimatter at the time. The idea of negative matter can actually be traced back to the late 19th century, to outmoded scientific theories, such as the vortex theory of gravity, which in the 1880s led William Hicks to propose the existence of matter with negative gravity. The existence of luminiferous ether, a long-standing theory of the substance filling what seems to be empty space, remained scientific consensus in those years, and despite proofs of its non-existence like the results of the Michelson-Morley Experiment, it would not be done away with until Einstein’s contributions. When applied to the understanding of the atom, Ether theory led Karl Pearson in the 1890s to suggest the existence of Ether Squirts, which notion itself “would involve the existence of negative as well as positive matter in the universe.” But it wasn’t until the 1920s and the work of Paul Dirac that we draw near the modern notion of antimatter as negative particles. Then in 1932 Carl Anderson scientifically confirmed their existence, discovering and naming the positron. A couple decades later, in 1955, Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain discovered the antiproton and won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Thus in the 1960s, the interest in antimatter was high, and another Nobel Prize winning scientist, Edward Libby, developer of the science of Carbon-14 dating, put his weight behind the idea that the Tunguska Event may have been an example of antimatter and matter colliding. As proof, they cited radiocarbon evidence from tree rings formed in 1909 (“Blast Due” 382). However, they collected their data from two trees, an oak in L.A. and a Douglas fir in Tucson. A few years later, the Condon Report on UFOs which reinvestigated Project Blue Book data for the Air Force revealed the findings of several scientists that there was not enough radiocarbon evidence to support this theory, and that the impact of an object containing antimatter may actually be impossible to confirm as we have no evidence that the antimatter itself would leave any trace.

Just as scientific preoccupation with antimatter led to ideas of an antimatter collision, so in 1973, when the scientific community was fascinated by black holes, a new theory regarding the nature of the Tunguska Event was spawned. This one, however, would have seemed quite far-fetched before very recent scholarship, for black holes were known to be enormous deformations of space-time where gravity is so strong that no matter would escape. Surely a black hole would condense, pulverize, and destroy the Earth as we know it, for it was thought that only a mass the size of a star could form a black hole. Then along came Stephen Hawking at Cambridge to show the world that the Big Bang may have created black holes of varying sizes, some perhaps even very small. And as study of the phenomena progressed, it was speculated that large black holes could fragment into smaller ones if they collided with each other. So arose the notion that the object that Semenov saw roaring out of the sky in 1908 was not a comet or asteroid but a black hole. As this theory goes, the mass at the center of the black hole would only have been the size of a few atoms, and the collision of its gravitational field with our atmosphere could have caused the great disturbance that witnesses saw. Despite all this sound and fury, however, proponents of this theory insisted the black hole would have passed right through the ground, through the entire Earth itself, and would have emerged on the other side of the globe, through the Atlantic Ocean, raising a great column of water and leaving behind a massive shockwave (“Did a Black Hole” 181). The problem here was that no such disturbance was recorded in the Atlantic that year.

Simulated view of a black hole, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

 While these colorful theories have come and gone, the abiding theory is that a comet or an asteroid struck the Siberian taiga that day. The lack of an impact crater has always confounded this simple theory, though, for if an object of the size scientists believe this object must have been actually struck the ground, there would have been a massive displacement of the earth, and there certainly wouldn’t have still been trees standing upright at the epicenter of the blast radius. So, taking a page from Kazantsev’s science fiction, they rely on the idea of an airburst, and this appears to resolve the problem. Under great pressure from penetrating the atmosphere, the object exploded above the ground, the force of the blast directed downward because of its trajectory, charring the trees directly below it but leaving them standing as the shockwave then hit the ground and spread outward, burning and knocking over the trees in its path as it moved away from that stand of blackened telegraph poles. But what was it? There is a big difference between a comet and an asteroid. A comet is composed primarily of ice and dust, so the idea that it would detonate and disperse completely under the heat and pressure of entering the atmosphere is understandable. And it’s true that a comet might strike the Earth at far higher velocity than an asteroid because they circle far from the sun on longer orbits, so even a small comet might make for a far more destructive collision. But because of their longer orbits, comets are far less likely to strike the Earth than asteroids (Gasperini et al. 81). In fact, we have no direct evidence that a comet has ever hit Earth, although recently we did confirm that such a collision can happen, when in 1994 observatories witnessed a comet crash with great violence into Jupiter.

Due to the rarity of comet impacts, and evidence from computer simulations that suggest a comet would explode too high in the atmosphere to be the cause of the blast, science tends to favor the notion that the Tunguska Event was caused by an asteroid. What kind of asteroid, however, proves to be yet another mystery. An iron asteroid, once part of some planet’s core, would be so dense as to explode too low, or not explode at all, resulting in a crater and a meteorite remaining behind for study. As this doesn’t appear to be the case, many scientists believe it to have been a common stony asteroid, once part of some planet’s crust (Peterson 23). The fact that such a stony asteroid might have been vaporized in its explosion does not necessarily mean, however, that no trace of its extra-terrestrial material remained. In fact, some Soviet investigators in the late 1960s believed they discovered such remains. In soil samples taken from the blast site, they uncovered a number of shiny black metallic spheres with magnetic properties (Glass 547). Analysis of their distribution appeared to indicate they were associated with and perhaps formed by the blast. These microscopic spheres were studied for more than a decade, and by the 1980s, nigh-sensitivity neutron activation analysis indicated they were extra-terrestrial in nature, specifically due to their richness in iridium (Ganapathy 1159). Moreover, testing of Antarctic ice layers dated to 1908 also show higher levels of iridium, indicating that this meteoritic debris travelled the world over after the towering cloud over Tunguska carried it into the stratosphere (Ganapathy 1160).

Lake Cheko, via Geotimes

But still, as always, experts disagree, staking their professional reputations and careers on a variety of alternative theories. A group of Italian scientists, for example, have traveled to Siberia to take samples from the bottom of Lake Cheko, a small lake very near the epicenter of the blast, which because of its shape has been speculated to be an impact crater, perhaps for a piece of the asteroid thrown aside by the airburst. The Italian investigators discovered the lake to have funnel-like dimensions, unlike most Siberian lakes, which have flat bottoms, and this shape further encouraged the idea it had been created by an impact (Gasperini et al. 84). The amount of sediment on the bed of the lake seemed to indicate it was older than 1908, but their study of the sediment indicated a difference between its topmost layers and those beneath, and underwater video showed what appeared to be trees buried in the sediment. Moreover, old 19th century military maps showed no sign of the lake and testimony from natives corroborated the idea that the blast had created it. And most tantalizing, their seismic and magnetic analysis returned indication of an anomalous magnetic rocky object beneath the lake that they believe may be the culprit, a fragment of the Tunguska object (Gasperini at al. 86). Further studies by Russian scientists have continued to dispute this theory though, showing through radiometric dating and analysis of sedimentation rate that the lake is significantly older than the Tunguska Event (Rogozin et al. 1226).

So, as with all enduring mysteries, disputes persist. Indeed, I have not even taken the time to discuss the opposing school of thought, that the Tunguska blast was a completely terrestrial phenomenon, the result of a natural release of methane gas from the swampy taiga, perhaps due to the underground formation of a kimberlite deposit. If a massive plume of methane were ignited, it would certainly create an enormous fireball, although witness statements clearly indicate the fireball they saw descending, not ascending. Nevertheless, this view of the event is so popular that in Moscow, on the anniversary of the Siberian blast, scientists who subscribe to competing views of its cause attend separate conferences on the same day (Perkins 6). Yet regardless of this schism in the scientific community, in the popular imagination, when one thinks of the Tunguska Event, one thinks of some cold cosmic body hurtling out of darkness to smite our living Earth. The thought is enough to cause an existential dread, especially when one considers that such impacts may not be as rare as we would like to believe. In 2013, a meteor the size of a six-story building screamed across the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia, and detonated with the strength of a nuclear explosion, shattering countless windows and injuring 1,200 people. Then just last year, in December 2018, another meteor exploded, this time over the Bering Sea. No one noticed at the time, but satellites observed it, and we’re only now coming to realize the strength of the blast, which rings in at 173 kilotons, ten times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It is unsettling, to say the least, to think that if either of these objects had exploded closer to the Earth’s surface, or God forbid, impacted, then we might have had an event of such devastation that only the Tunguska blast could stand as its precedent. And of course, in the case of Chelyabinsk, with its population of over 1 million, it could have been far, far worse.

Fallen trees at Tunguska, 1927, via Wikimedia Commons

Further Reading

“Blast Due to Antimatter?” The Science News-Letter, vol. 87, no. 24, 1965, pp. 382–382. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3948365.

“Did a Black Hole Collide with the Earth in 1908?” Science News, vol. 104, no. 12, 1973, pp. 180–181. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3958509.

Fernie, J. Donald. “Marginalia: The Tunguska Event.” American Scientist, vol. 81, no. 5, 1993, pp. 412–415. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/29775005.

Ganapathy, Ramachandran. “The Tunguska Explosion of 1908: Discovery of Meteoritic Debris near the Explosion Site and at the South Pole.” Science, vol. 220, no. 4602, 1983, pp. 1158–1161. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1689889.

Gasperini, Luca, et al. “THE Tunguska MYSTERY.” Scientific American, vol. 298, no. 6, 2008, pp. 80–86. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26000644.

Glass, Billy P. “Silicate Spherules from Tunguska Impact Area: Electron Microprobe Analysis.” Science, vol. 164, no. 3879, 1969, pp. 547–549. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1727021.

Peterson, I. “Tunguska: The Explosion of a Stony Asteroid.” Science News, vol. 143, no. 2, 1993, pp. 23–23. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3976924.

Perkins, Sid. “A Century Later, Scientists Still Study Tunguska: Asteroid or Comet Blamed for Siberian Blast of 1908.” Science News, vol. 173, no. 19, 2008, pp. 5–6. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20465508.

Rogozin, D., et al. “Sedimentation Rate in Cheko Lake (Evenkia, Siberia): New Evidence on the Problem of the 1908 Tunguska Event.” Doklady Earth Sciences, vol. 476, no. 2, Oct. 2017, pp. 1226–1228. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1134/S1028334X17100269.

Blind Spot: A Tale of Two Babylons

In this edition, I will discuss another very influential anti-Catholic work. However, as opposed to the lurid Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, this work’s criticism focused more on Catholic beliefs and practices, yet it still managed to be just as sensational, incendiary, and outrageous as that Protestant hoax. The work first appeared as a pamphlet in 1853 and was expanded into a book over the next five years, while secret societies in America turned anti-Catholicism into the ascendant Know Nothing political party before promptly fading into obscurity, as covered in my recent Patreon exclusive Blindside podcast episode. But this book, The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop, would not fade away so quickly and would see multiple editions before evolving into a tract in more modern times to continue spreading its complicated yet somehow convincing claims that the Roman Catholic Church was really just pagan idolatry repackaged from its Babylonian origins. Perhaps it is not surprising that these claims found purchase among Protestants who were already disposed to identify the Roman Catholic Church with the “whore” of the apocalyptic prophecy in Revelation 17, which depicts a beast, and riding atop it, a woman, the so-called “mother of harlots,” whose name appears on her forehead as “Mystery, Babylon the Great.” To claim that the Catholic Church was actually just Babylonian paganism in disguise certainly seemed to clarify that unsettling imagery. And beyond Protestants, the claims of this book have historically appealed to condescending atheists and know-it-all agnostics as well, and have since passed into the realm of memery. As I discussed in my Christmas special, glib social media reposts claiming that certain religious practices are based on heathen traditions have proven quite popular, and those having to do with Easter seem to have their origin in Hislop’s pseudohistorical work. So what can be discerned from his dense treatise? What conclusions has it disseminated, and how did the author arrive at them?

*

I have been unable to find much in the way of well-sourced biographical information about the author of The Two Babylons, Alexander Hislop. More is written about his brother, Stephen, a missionary to India of some renown who drowned while crossing a swollen river. In his biography, we have a brief mention of Alexander, the eldest of three brothers, who “was educated for the ministry of the Church of Scotland…was a ripe classical scholar, was deeply read in Biblical archaeology and prophetic exposition, and…became a minister of the Free Church of Scotland in the town of Arbroath.”  The fact that he sided with the Free Church in the Presbyterian schism sometimes called the Disruption of 1843, which resisted the power of government to appoint ministers in the church, already suggests he was something of an iconoclast and a church purist. And a simple perusal of his several published works before The Two Babylons further indicates the power of his convictions regarding Christian doctrine, and one in particular, 1846’s The Light of Prophecy Let In on the Dark Places of the Papacy, demonstrates the drift of his thoughts toward the thesis he would eventually express in the most well-known of his works. And the thesis of The Two Babylons is not secreted away, buried in some dense paragraph at the back of the volume, but rather appears in clear typeface upon its cover in the form of a subtitle: The Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife.

As Hislop asserts, many of the doctrinal and ritual practices of the Catholic Church—tellingly, the ones that Protestant critics of Roman Catholicism tend to take issue with, like its treatment of Mary as a co-redeemer and its reliance on images and rituals—have been derived from ancient pagan beliefs. He starts back at the very beginning, with the migration of peoples to the river valley that would come to be known as Babylonia and later as Mesopotamia, and the rise of the great hunter Nimrod who defeated the beasts that preyed upon them and protected his subjects within the secure walls of cities, such as Babel, where according to the biblical legend, a grand tower was built and languages became confused, and from which, so the story goes, all the peoples of the world dispersed, carrying with them, by Hislop’s reckoning, the pagan traditions that in Roman times would eventually be integrated with the Christian faith to create Catholic traditions. Hislop claims that after Nimrod’s death, his wife, Semiramis, lifted him up in memory as a sun god, and by extension, deified their son Tammuz as the son of god or as god reincarnate, and eventually, she came to be worshiped herself as a mother goddess. Hislop sees a direct line of descent between Semiramis and the veneration of Mary by Catholics, tracing this mother goddess tradition through numerous iterations, as Isis with her Horus in Egypt, as Shingmoo in China, Nana among Sumerians, Ceres in ancient Greece, Fortuna in Rome, and in India as Indrani or as Isi with the child Iswara or as Devaki with the child Crishna. He finds analogues in nearly every culture of antiquity, and he believes that at some point, after the Etruscans had integrated into Roman society, an Etruscan pontiff who was dedicated to the old idolatrous ways managed to get himself elected sovereign pontiff and began the corrupting the church by incorporating more and more pagan Babylonian symbols and traditions.

Isis suckling Horus, via Wikimedia Commons

Among these symbols are the keys of heaven given over to Peter and symbolically entrusted to the Pope as representative of papal authority. To Hislop, it can be no coincidence that two pagan gods, Janus and Cybele, are also pictured with keys. Then there is the gaudy throne on which the Pope sits, the Chair of Saint Peter, which Hislop says must have previously been the throne of the pagan Pontifex Maximus because of some panels on it that depict the labors of Hercules. And the Pope’s mitre he says corresponds with the fish head of another pagan god, Dagon. Then there’s the Eucharist. The church’s insistence that sacramental wafers be round is telling, per Hislop, since disks of bread were also consumed at altars in Egypt, in symbolism of the sun! Even something as simple as a ritual burning of candles can be painted a shade of sinister, for as Hislop notes, candles were also burned by worshippers of the sun god Zoroaster, who was yet another iteration of Nimrod according to Hislop’s view of history. And his revelation of paganism’s deep embedding within the church would not be complete without taking the central symbol of the faith down a peg or two. The cross, Hislop declares, is a pagan symbol used throughout the many traditions descended from Babylonian idolatry, and it represents the mystic letter Tau, which stands for Tammuz, son of Nimrod and Semiramis. Thus even the innocent treat of hot-cross buns eaten on Good Friday is tainted, but further still Hislop takes it, for he claims this treat and the very word that we have for it, “bun,” derives from an ancient sacred bread consumed in worship of another goddess, whom the holiday Easter celebrates.

So we come to perhaps the most well-known and widely spread of Hislop’s contentions, that the church holiday of Easter is really a pagan celebration. He makes similar arguments about Christmas, most of which I have wrestled with already in my recent holiday special. And like those claims, you’ve likely read or heard these as well: the traditions of Easter are derived from the worship of Astarte or Ishtar, a fertility goddess, and the eggs and bunnies of the holiday are mere symbols of sex and apt for the bursting forth of life at springtime. Hislop sees a pure precursor to Easter in the Jewish Passover, which occurred around the same time of year, and he grants that its intended purpose was to commemorate Christ’s death and resurrection, said to have happened around that time of year as well. But the fasting period of Lent he says was borrowed from the pagan tradition of a forty days’ abstinence in the spring that can be observed in many cultures. Of bunnies, Hislop is entirely silent, but as for the eggs, he looks far and wide for their precedence, marking the ancient Greek consecration of eggs to Baachus, the Hindustani tales that attach importance to eggs and their color, the Japanese sacralization of a brazen egg, and the practices among the Egyptians of hanging eggs in temples and among the Chinese of painting and dying eggs for festivals. His final coup de grace, however, is the myth of the Phoenician goddess Astarte falling to earth in an egg. Case closed, or at least that’s how Hislop presents it—eggs appear in different cultural traditions, so they must all be tied to a single earlier tradition, and the goddess Astarte is said to have emerged from an egg, so surely all instances of sacred egg traditions must really be instances of Astarte worship. And if Astarte is not close enough sounding to Easter for you, there is Ishtar, Mesopotamian counterpart. So there you are. Easter must be Ishtar.

But let’s look more closely at these assertions. While it is very true that Astarte is identified across cultural lines with Ishtar, as she is also one and the same with the Semitic mother goddess Ashtoreth, the connection Hislop makes to Easter appears to be based on nothing more than how the names strike his ear. Astarte/Ashtoreth/Ishtar was a goddess of sex and fertility but also of war and vengeance; she appears greatly simplified here in order to cement her association with Easter. The problem is, most of the world doesn’t celebrate a holiday called Easter, but rather one called Pasqua in Italy, Pâques in France, Paaske in Denmark, Paskha in Bulgaria, and Pasen in the Netherlands, all derived from the latinate Pascha, itself from the Hebrew Pesach or Passover. So who’s using the name Easter? English speakers and Germans, who celebrate Ostern. Hislop’s myopia really shows here, as does his ignorance of folklore that had origins far closer to home, for most scholars accept that the name Easter is derived from the name of the Germanic goddess Ēostre or Ostara, a goddess of the dawn, with whom rabbits were symbolically associated (Billson 447). As for the eggs, there is no shortage of pagan traditions involving this most common of foodstuffs, several of which seem to accord well with the Easter themes of rebirth, such as the egg from which the phoenix is reborn, but the simplest and therefore most likely explanation for the inclusion of eggs in Easter traditions is the prominence of roasted eggs in the Passover Seder meal (Newall 16).

The goddess Ēostre or Ostara, by Johannes Gehrts, 1901, via Wikimedia Commons

Now some might object that this still shows Christian traditions having their origins in pagan goddess traditions or in other non-Christian ceremonies, and this is absolutely true. One would be hard-pressed to make a tenable argument that there exist no such influences in Christian traditions. But what Hislop argues is far different. He argues that nearly every goddess tradition can be traced back to Semiramis, that the worship of her and her husband and son were purposely integrated, through some far-reaching conspiracy, into the pure and true form of Christianity as a means of poisoning it into apostasy.  Now it’s quite true that pagan deities were often conflated across cultures; for example, Ishtar/Astarte/Ashtoreth have also been identified with the goddess Aphrodite. Much of this conflation can be blamed on the ancient Greeks, who believed their pantheon of gods to be universal, meaning that they assumed all cultures worshipped the same deities but merely had different names for them (Budin 98). Today, scholars of antiquity take a different view, but Hislop, relying on his scripture-based understanding of the dispersion and migration of peoples and cultures, takes a decidedly Grecian syncretistic approach to world history, skipping from civilization to civilization, presuming that each must have their Nimrod, Semiramis, and Tammuz figures because his theory depends on it. In his estimation, Semiramis is Astarte, is Aphrodite, is Diana, is Artemis, is Ceres, is Juno, is Minerva, is Athena, is Venus, etc. etc. And likewise Nimrod is Osiris, is Zoroaster, is Mithra, is Odin, is Saturn, is Bacchus, is Cupid, is Apollo, is Mars, is Adonis, is Hercules, is Beelzebub, is Lucifer and on and on and on and on and on and on…..

He does, however, sometimes claim there is evidence for his profligate syncretism, often referencing the contemporary work of Austen Henry Layard. In fact, at the time of The Two Babylon’s publication, citing the archaeological finds of Layard at the site he believed was Nineveh lent seeming authenticity and academic rigor to Hislop’s treatise. But Layard’s findings have since been challenged and in some cases discredited. For example, his book was titled Nineveh and Its Remains, but the site he was excavating would eventually be identified as Nimrud, called Calah in Genesis, while Nineveh, it was discovered, was actually elsewhere. And much of what Layard claimed in his hastily written book cannot be given much weight, as he may have been embellishing his findings to secure better funding. One of his advisors even suggested he “[w]rite a whopper” and “[f]ish up old legends and anecdotes,” saying “if you can by any means humbug people into the belief that you have established any points in the Bible, you are a made man.” Then, beyond citing Layard and other scholars whose work could not be called reliable today, Hislop relies a lot on what might be described as armchair etymology as proof of his claims. In fact his identification of several goddesses with Semiramis relies on such questionable evidence, for he sees in Astarte and Ashtoreth’s names Greek and Hebrew cognates for the word “tower,” and behold Diana had a second name that meant “tower-maker” and everyone knows Semiramis, or at least her husband Nimrod, was renowned as a builder of cities. Therefore, by his logic, these far-flung deities were the same mythical being. Even contemporary critics excoriated him for his fast and loose play with pseudo-etymology, such as the Saturday Review of September 17, 1859, which pointed out that “[h]e always acts upon the principle, common to all dabblers in etymology, of ignoring the obvious derivation, and going a-mare’s-nesting among the roots of some wholly alien dialect.”

The final line of the Saturday Review’s evaluation of Hislop’s work perfectly encapsulates the academic community’s critical response to his research: “we never before quite knew the folly of which ignorant or half-learrned bigotry is capable.” Yet despite this decidedly forceful challenge to the quality of his scholarship, the book was embraced, perhaps not surprisingly in that era of anti-Catholicism, by Protestants of every stripe, regardless of the fact that many of Hislop’s claims about Catholicism would logically recast all of Christianity as a pagan apostasy. Historians have never really taken his work seriously, and for good reason, but an academic consensus has never proven to be a deterrent to the spreading of baloney. It gets repackaged for wider consumption and becomes harder and harder to quash. In this case, one Ralph Edward Woodrow transformed Hislop’s dense work into a simplified and easy to digest illustrated little book called Babylon Mystery Religion: Ancient and Modern, and evangelical Christian ministry groups bought and circulated it by the thousands. Never mind that years later Woodrow realized the errors of Hislop’s methodology, noting first and most outrageously that Nimrod and Semiramis don’t even appear to have lived during the same time period, let alone have been married. As a mea culpa for his part in disseminating the nonsense, he wrote a follow-up essentially pointing out what historians had known for decades: that Hislop’s argument was built on superficial similarities, by misquoting authorities and making up fictions out of whole cloth. But by then, Hislop’s academic-sounding drivel had been even further repackaged into a cartoon tract by famously anti-Catholic pamphleteer Jack Chick, and there was just no stopping its propagation. And to this day, if you Google the origin of Easter or questions about Mary worship, you’ll find memes and webpages of varying quality that earnestly recycle Hislop’s claims as though they are gospel.

Further Reading

Budin, Stephanie L. “A Reconsideration of the Aphrodite-Ashtart Syncretism.” Numen, vol. 51, no. 2, 2004, pp. 95–145. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3270523.

Billson, Charles J. “The Easter Hare.” Folklore, vol. 3, no. 4, 1892, pp. 441–466. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1253567.

Newall, Venetia. “Easter Eggs.” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 80, no. 315, 1967, pp. 3–32. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/538415.

Maria Monk and Her Awful Disclosures

In this edition, I revisit a topic that I briefly explored as background in my very first foray into blogging and podcasting, which looked at the demagogue Lewis Charles Levin and his influence on the 1844 nativist riots in Philadelphia. I’ve decided to delve more deeply into nativism in American history not only because I feel that this story deserves a better telling than I gave it in 2016, but also because, over the last couple of years, we’ve seen the embers of nativist sentiment that candidate Donald Trump fanned during his campaign erupt into flames during his presidency. And Donald Trump, during his first term, has done much to further encourage the nativist feelings that helped carry him into office. Say what you want about him as a chief executive, but he is not one to forget about the constituency that elected him and has consistently and tirelessly appealed to his base, which of course may help him in his bid for reelection. Soon after taking office, within days of being sworn in, in fact, he signed a series of executive orders that would certainly appeal to xenophobes and Americans that are fearful of foreigners. These orders stripped federal funds from cities that provided sanctuary to undocumented immigrants, drastically increased the numbers of immigration enforcement and border patrol officers, and built detainment facilities at the border. During the ensuing years, his administration faced significant criticism for a continuing year-over-year increase in arrests and removals by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE officers as well as for the policy of separating families and interning children at the U.S.–Mexican Border. Meanwhile, he has consistently pushed during budget negotiations to fund the concrete barrier, or wall, that he promised his supporters in 2016, even allowing the government to shut down over this sticking point, the most recent being the longest government shutdown in American history. As I write this, after a State of the Union address in which he threatened to do so, Trump has declared a state of National Emergency over a border crisis that he insists can only be resolved by building his proposed wall, while many insist there is no border crisis, or that the crisis is actually humanitarian and has been mischaracterized, or that the wall will cost too much and be ineffective. Clearly, the fear of immigrants and their perceived pernicious influence on society is a current issue, and so the situation demands an awareness of America’s history of nativist politics, lest we risk true historical blindness. In particular, Trump’s so-called Muslim Ban, the executive order that barred the entry of immigrants from certain countries whose inhabitants happened to share a predominate religion puts one in mind of the original objects of nativist aversion: European Catholics. Anti-Catholicism was the original engine of anti-immigrant sentiments, and to couch our analysis of that part of American history in a narrative, we shall look to the most popular, most influential anti-Catholic work every published in America. In 1836, the first edition of this book sold 40,000 copies, and it was the best-selling book in America for years, until it was finally surpassed by Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is certainly strange, then, that when the woman credited as its author died in 1849, she expired in an almshouse, and rather than remembering her accomplishments in her obituary, newspapers reported her death as though taking pleasure in the passing of a villain.

*

The woman presented as the author of the book in question, Maria Monk, told of her chaste Protestant youth. Her father, an officer of the British garrison in Montreal, died before she could know him, and her mother sent her away to a nunnery for her education, a common practice even among Protestants because of the well-known quality of Catholic schools. As she grew older, Maria Monk became interested in converting to take the veil and join the Black Nuns of the nearby Hotel Dieu Nunnery, a convent highly regarded for its charitable contributions to the community. So she converted and entered as a novice, toiling for years at the arduous tasks of sewing and candlemaking until such time as she received the black veil, took oaths and learned some terrible truths about the nunnery in which she had resided for so long. The Mother Superior explained to her that she must “obey the priests in all things,” and the principal thing they would demand of her was to have sexual intercourse with them. The Mother Superior explained that in this case, it was no crime but rather a virtue to offer this relief to the poor, secluded, ascetic priests without whose service all of mankind must burn in hell for lack of the pardoning of their sins. So after all, the convent was little more than a harem for the priesthood, she discovered, and on that first night, as a baptism of sorts, one priest summoned her to his private chambers, where she was brutally raped by three priests. And as if this violation were not horror enough, she also learned that beneath the nunnery lay a warren of secret tunnels connecting to other convents and churches through which the nuns were forced as a humiliation to walk on their hands and knees, and dungeons and torture chambers in which uncooperative nuns were held and branded like cattle and whipped with rods until they bled. Perhaps the most horrifying discovery she made was the fate of the children produced by the rape of the priests: these newborns were baptized, strangled to death, and discarded into a lime pit. Of course, Maria considered escape, but the example of another nun discouraged her. St. Frances, a beautiful nun, resisted the priests for fear of having a child that would be murdered, and for this crime they sentenced her to death, forcing the other sisters to watch as they laid her on a bed, threw another bed on top of her, and then jumped up and down on it, as many as the bed would hold, not only smothering St. Frances but battering and crushing her body. When she no longer drew breath, they threw her into the pit along with the decomposing infants.

L'ancien Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal sur la rue Saint-Paul, et le charrieur d'eau, via Wikipedia

Maria Monk often found herself imprisoned and tortured in those secret places beneath the convent, usually for an ill-considered comment to her Mother Superior. While there, she met a mentally unstable nun named Jane who shared her knowledge all of the secret places of the Hotel Dieu. Armed with this knowledge as well as the certainty that any child she bore would be promptly put to death, Maria Monk finally resolved to escape the nunnery when she discovered she was pregnant. Upon the pretense of seeking supplies for the physician, she managed to get herself out of the Hotel Dieu and fled Montreal for New York, where she ended up almost dying in childbirth at a charity hospital. It was there that she spoke frankly to a Protestant minister about her terrible experiences at the nunnery, and the minister encouraged her to tell the world. Thus was born her book, The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, as Exhibited in a Narrative of Her Sufferings During a Residence of Five Years as a Novice and Two Years as a Black Nun, in the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal. First news of the book and its shocking revelations was published in October of 1835 in the Protestant Vindicator, teasing only that a nun was being sheltered by a group of Protestant ministers, and that she had recently escaped the Hotel Dieu nunnery pregnant with a priest’s child. Immediate outrage erupted in Montreal newspapers, from Catholic and Protestant alike, insisting the Vindicator retract their libel, for the nuns of the Hotel Dieu were looked upon as saintly women for feeding and clothing the poor and the sick, and ministering to the dying and their orphans. Moreover, the idea that such abominations would be ignored by everyone in their city or that they were all so blind as to be ignorant of them entirely was enough to incense nearly every resident of Montreal. But the publishers of the Protestant Vindicator insisted that more details and proofs would be forthcoming, and soon other Protestant publications joined in the promotion of the book, thus ensuring it would sell well and be widely read upon its publication, and indeed, within weeks, it had sold 20,000 copies.

The advance press and the scandal itself might seem an obvious explanation for the book’s success, but from another view, it may seem anomalous in the otherwise staid and prudish 1830s for so lurid a tale to find so wide an audience. For context, we must consider the rise in anti-Catholicism in those years. Since 1820, a fear of Catholic influence in America, as spread by Catholic immigrants, specifically Germans and the Irish, had welled up like sewage after a storm. Catholic populations had been growing in America since the Revolutionary War, but they had largely been communities of businessmen and artisans, and their religious institutions were admired for the way they gave back to their communities, as with the Catholic private schools in convents, to which even Protestants desired to send their children. In the early 19th century, however, the influx of poor and uneducated Catholic immigrants put many Protestants on guard. They saw diseases spreading in slums, as in New York in 1832, where cholera thrived among new immigrant populations, and they saw social services like poorhouses, asylums, and prisons spread thin because immigrants disproportionately filled them. Looking at these problems, Protestant ministers settled on the Catholic Church as the cause of many societal woes. Whereas before they had focused on doctrinal differences and theological disputes in their anti-Catholic messages, in the 1830s they began to attack them on moral grounds, selling a great number of pamphlets, books, and newspapers like the Protestant Vindicator by publishing sensationalist material that played on the public’s anxieties over gender roles and sexuality. Nuns who devoted themselves to God rather than to a husband, and priests who took vows of celibacy, could be seen as subverting traditional domestic and family roles, and some have seen this as the reason why much of the anti-Catholic literature of the day was focused on female sexuality and on seduction and rape narratives. Thus, when Maria Monk’s disclosures were published, they had a waiting audience ravenous for more and more lurid revelations about the Catholic bogeyman.

Cholera prevention poster from New York City, via Wikimedia Commons

Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures fit comfortably into this genre of anti-Catholic literature that was doing well at the time. Some of the earliest entries in this category, like the 18th century titles Master-Key to Popery and Mysteries of Popery Unveiled, were simple exposes of priestcraft, illuminating the minutiae of sacramental rituals and the practices of inquisitors. Even these prefigure Monk's narrative, however, as they were often preoccupied with the practice of confession, which since the Middle Ages had been frowned upon for its suspected inappropriate contact between priests and the virtuous young women who confessed to them. This was the first sex scandal of the Catholic Church, and priests were sometimes subject to Inquisition themselves, for the crime of "solicitation," which today might be called sexual harassment. Interestingly, the confessional was invented during the Reformation to combat this precise problem, and originally they had been open air dividers to be used in public, meant to separate the confessor from her priest but not afford the priest any privacy. But these were not exposés of convents or heinous crimes committed therein. Some more contemporary anti-Catholic literature took the form of conspiracy theorizing, such as in Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, an 1835 collection of letters that Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, had written to the New York observer cautioning against the political influence of popery--a concern that would soon come to dominate Anti-Catholic thought. For more direct predecessors to Monk’s Disclosures we must look to fiction, particularly the gothic novel, among the many contemporary popular examples of which we find more than one story of nuns being exposed to the corruption and lechery of priests. The Nun, published in 1834, portrayed monks as nefarious sorts who lured women into nunneries, depicting a heroine, Clarice, who is held captive in a convent. That same year, in Lorette, History of Louise, Daughter of a Canadian Nun, readers followed a protagonist that was ill-used by a lecherous priest. And nunnery exposés were not just the stuff of fiction but explored in non-fiction as well, such as in 1834’s Female Convents and Open Convents in 1836, the latter of which claimed nuns were subject “to the savage and brutal lusts of men professing to be ministers of religion” (qtd. In Pagliarani 111). Nor even were Monk’s disclosures the first of their kind. A year earlier, one Rebecca Reed wrote of escaping from the terrors of another convent in Charlestown, outside of Boston, Massachusetts, in her Six Months in a Convent. Reed’s book did not sell as many copies as Monk’s, and in the long run, due to problems of credibility stemming from her unreliable character, neither was her story given as much weight as Monk’s, nevertheless it contributed significantly to a notorious riot in Charlestown.

During the year prior to its publication, Rebecca Reed’s manuscript was circulated locally, its allegations of captivity and abuse at the local Ursuline convent stirring up rumor and anti-Catholic resentment in an area where it already festered. By 1834, the population of indigent Irish Catholic immigrants in the greater Boston area had soared to 20,000, a fact resented by Yankee Protestant laborers who felt their work prospects were being undercut by this cheaper labor supply, a fear that had already led to numerous skirmishes among these workmen. Into this explosive atmosphere Reed injected her claims, further rousing suspicion and anger against a convent school whose students were actually predominately Protestant. Then one day, a nun from the convent showed up at a local man’s door, incoherent and wearing only a nightdress. A carriage soon arrived from the convent, from which the mother superior and a bishop emerged, explaining that the nun was suffering from a brain fever. They took the poor nun back to the convent and let it be known that her condition improved after her return. But that didn’t stop the rumors which Reed’s book had already set in motion. As the story spread, it was said that a nun had escaped her convent only to be recaptured and dragged back to her captivity. Newspapers took up the rumors, suggesting the poor escapee had endured torture prior to her escape and speculating that she had likely been murdered once recaptured. Placards appeared in public with threats, indicating that if the convent were not investigated, it would be demolished in four days’ time. These were not put up by anti-Catholic ministers but by truckmen, lower class workers of Boston who felt great resentment toward the Irish laborers who had become their competitors. In order to prevent this threatened mob action, town selectmen went the next day to inspect the nunnery and were led in their tour of the building by the very nun whose recent brain fever and wanderings had encouraged the furor. She was quite well now, and her thorough tour turned up no torture chambers or secret tunnels. But even as the selectmen prepared a statement for the newspapers, a mob gathered at the nunnery, three days before the time they had appointed.

"Ruins of the Ursuline Convent, at Charlestown Massachusetts," 1834, via Wikimedia Commons

They shouted for the mystery woman who had escaped and been recaptured to be set free, and the mother superior, in high dudgeon, threatened the mob, announcing sarcastically that if they didn’t leave, the bishop would unleash the power of the “twenty thousand of the vilest Irishmen at his command.” Of course, this only made matters worse. Pistol reports filled the night sky, and the mob increased, setting barrels of tar on fire to light the area and illuminate the imminent riot. When they finally broke through the front entry, the nuns were ushering their students out the back to hide by a tomb in the garden. From this vantage, they watched as the rioters, finding no evidence of the evils they imagined within, set about looting, breaking windows and dishes and picture frames, pushing furniture out onto the grounds, and setting fire to the interior of the beautiful school, hollering and laughing all the while. Firemen arrived, and they did nothing. In the aftermath, some few rioters were charged for their crimes, but all were either acquitted or pardoned. Rather than fueling anti-Catholic hysteria, the Ursuline riot of 1834 garnered sympathy for the plight of the Catholic in America and caused many Protestants to temper their anti-Catholic rhetoric. After this egregious incident and the subsequent publication of Reed’s book, which was implicated in the affair, it is perhaps not surprising that the most popular convent exposés and escaped nun narratives tended to expose the goings-on of nunneries in foreign countries, which could safely be accused of improprieties and iniquities without fear of accidentally inciting violence against them. So in 1836, we see Rosamond: or, a Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of an American Female under the Popish Priests, in the Island of Cuba, and we see The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, with its horror stories set in a Canadian convent.

However, Canada was simply not far enough away for the calumnies to go unanswered. While the nuns and the bishop of Hotel Dieu would not lower themselves to respond to such nonsense, the newspapermen of Montreal did. A very public investigation was conducted, with numerous affidavits sworn. A variety of respectable citizens of the city went on record that the Hotel Dieu was a perfectly reputable establishment, and that Maria Monk was known as a vagrant and a woman who made her living by disgraceful means on the streets, a “stroller” (Sullivan). Most damning was the affidavit sworn by Maria Monk’s own mother, which revealed the true life story of the increasingly infamous woman. Maria was born to a Protestant family in Quebec around 1816. She had been an unruly child, made even more disorderly after a brain injury she had suffered as a toddler: a slate pencil had been thrust deeply into her ear. From that time onward, her mother claimed that she had indulged in outrageous fantasies. These troubled her all her life and must have bordered on delusions as eventually, after some time spent in prostitution, she was committed to the care of the Magdalene asylum in Montreal. This had been her only contact with Catholic nuns, and it came to an abrupt end when she became pregnant while an inmate there. The nuns had turned her out into the street, and it was then that she met one William Hoyte, anti-Catholic activist and head of the Canadian Benevolent Society, who took her to New York and encouraged her to spread the story of her captivity in a convent. Maria’s mother even swore that Hoyte had offered to pay her off if she would corroborate her daughter’s claims, but she refused, feeling that he was taking advantage of her brain damaged daughter. All of these statements were published and circulated not only in Montreal but beyond as well, for some Montreal newspapermen collaborated on a book that refuted Maria’s Awful Disclosures called Awful Exposure of the Atrocious Plot Formed by Certain Individuals Against the Clergy and Nuns of Lower Canada, Through the Intervention of Maria Monk. Their book, however, was not widely read, and William Hoyte and the cabal of nativist agitators responsible for promoting Monk’s book, among them certain Protestant ministers such as Reverend J. J. Slocum and Reverend George Bourne, assured the public through their anti-Catholic mouthpiece newspapers, that these affidavits were simply lies promoted by the Catholic Church to dupe the foolish Protestants who lived among them in Montreal.

Cover illustration of Awful Disclosures, via Wikimedia Commons

One American Protestant newspaperman, Colonel William Leete Stone, happened to be travelling through Canada in the autumn of 1836, and harboring some nativist sentiments himself, he could not resist the urge to go see for himself the terrible sins in which the priests and nuns of Montreal might have been engaged. Colonel Stone walked every inch of the Hotel Dieu and the Magdalene asylum and two other convents in the city, never finding any sign of mass graves, torture chambers, or hidden passageways. Upon his return to New York, he interviewed Maria Monk herself, and finding that she could not accurately describe the convent, he declared in his pamphlets and in his newspaper, the Commercial Advertiser, which was one of the most widely read in the city, that Monk was a fraud. This certainly injured her credibility, but still supporters clung to the truth of her book. That same year, however, further revelations emerged from the courts, where a series of lawsuits among the coterie of nativists surrounding Monk hauled the secrets of the whole affair into the open. It turned out that Maria Monk had been the mistress of William Hoyte, but after he brought her to New York and introduced her to the others in his nativist circle, she left him to be the mistress of Reverend J. J. Slocum, and now Slocum was encouraging her to sue for a better share in the profits of the book. As the suits commenced, it became clear that, although Maria Monk’s name appeared on the book, its principal authors were the aforementioned trio of Hoyte, Slocum and Bourne. Nevertheless, when one wants to believe something, all sorts of mental gymnastics can ensure it remains believable, like insisting that these nativists only helped her put down what were her true recollections, that they were ghost writers rather than hoaxers. And so the book kept selling, so much so that a rival nativist newspaperman, Samuel B. Smith, wanted a piece of the action and, unbelievably, produced his own supposed escaped nun, Francis Patrick, whom he claimed had also fled the Hotel Dieu. This Francis Patrick, though, was an outright fiction, played in public by a woman named Frances Partridge, and her story, published by Smith in The Escape of Sainte Francis Patrick, Another Nun of the Hotel Dieu, was more widely disbelieved. Therefore, when Maria Monk met her and wrapped her in a hug and announced through tears that she had known Francis Patrick at the Hotel Dieu, rather than lending credibility to Patrick’s claims, it only further discredited her own. The next year, Maria Monk left Reverend Slocum, then her legal guardian, and ran away to Philadelphia with some unknown man. There she disappeared, eventually turning up on the doorstep of a doctor with a new story, claiming that a band of Catholic priests had kidnapped her and held her in a Catholic asylum in Philadelphia with plans to spirit her back to Montreal. The doctor contacted her guardian, Reverend Slocum in New York, who eventually came to get her, but not before the physician had spoken at great length with Maria about her abduction. Finding her story inconsistent, this doctor further damaged her trustworthiness in the public’s eyes when he published a pamphlet called An Exposure of Maria Monk’s Pretended Abduction and Conveyance to the Catholic Asylum, Philadelphia, by Six Priests on the Night of August 15, 1837: with Numerous Extraordinary Incidents during her Residence of Six Days in This City.

Soon Slocum, trying to rehabilitate her reputation, arranged for the publication of a sequel to Awful Disclosures, titled Further Disclosures by Maria Monk concerning the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, the substantial profits of which, as her guardian, Slocum kept entirely for himself. That same year, Maria became pregnant, and Slocum abandoned her to destitution and public denigration. She disappeared from the public eye after that, only showing up in the historical record again just before her death in a poorhouse, when she was arrested for picking her own boyfriend’s pocket. This woman went from being held up as a paragon of Protestant virtue, inspiring a nation’s sympathy as the ultimate victim of the wicked foreign power that was Catholicism, to being a blurb in an 1849 newspaper, which announced, “There is an end of Maria Monk” (Pelchat).

But there seems to be no end to her awful disclosures. After the conspiracy behind the book was exposed, after she was thoroughly discredited, even after her final ignominious end, her books sold and sold. Throughout the rest of the 19th century and even into the 20th, the worst continued to be believed about what went on behind closed doors in convents. And in the form of tracts circulated by evangelical groups, this known hoax continues to be disseminated, showing up in 1961 when Catholic candidate John F. Kennedy campaigned for president, and again in 1995 when Catholic traditionalist Pat Buchanan sought the Republican nomination for president. Much like the insidious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, this lie just won’t die because if they want to, some people will stubbornly believe even the most thoroughly debunked fraud and will spread it to others who don’t know any better.

One of many cheap reprintings of Awful Disclosures, undated, via The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry

And of course, the fact that the Catholic Church is so mired in current scandals having to do with inappropriate sexual contact certainly doesn't help the public discern what they should believe when exposed to hoaxes like these. Just last month, in fact, Pope Francis declared that his predecessor, Pope Benedict, had dissolved an order of nuns in France because of allegations that priests there kept the nuns in "sexual slavery." A story like this might cause one to wonder if escaped nun narratives like Maria Monk's were actually true... but then the evidence that they were frauds rather causes one to wonder if these modern accusations might not be a similar kind of hoax. But there is every reason to believe recent accusations made by nuns encouraged by the #MeToo movement against abusive priests, as reported on by the Associated Press, not to even mention the massive, ongoing pedophilia scandal. So we are left with some cognitive dissonance, believing accusations against the modern church but disbelieving previous claims. However, the difference of motivation and the presence of ulterior motive must be considered here. The struggle of sexual assault victims to overcome fear and shame in order to bravely expose their abusers must be differentiated from the machinations of those seeking through bald-faced deception to promote the fear and resentment of an entire class of people based on race or religion.

Portrait of Maria Monk, via Catholic Education Resource Center

*

Further Reading

Franchot, Jenny. “Two ‘Escaped Nuns’ Rebecca Reed and Maria Monk.” Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism, University of California Press, 1994, publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft1x0nb0f3&chunk.id=d0e2483&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d0e1634&brand=ucpress.

Frink, Sandra. “Women, the Family, and the Fate of the Nation in American Anti-Catholic Narratives, 1830-1860.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 18, no. 2, 2009, pp. 237–264. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40663352.

Hughes, Ruth. “The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk.” University of Pennsylvania, www.sas.upenn.edu/~traister/hughes.html.

Kennedy, Kathleen. “The Nun, The Priest, and the Pornographer: Scripting Rape in Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures.” Genders, no. 57, 2013, Academic OneFile, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A324981030/AONE?u=sjdc_main&sid=AONE&xid=67fbbac8.

Pagliarini, Marie Anne. “The Pure American Woman and the Wicked Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature in Antebellum America.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, vol. 9, no. 1, 1999, pp. 97–128. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1123928.

Pelchat, André. “Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures” Beaver, vol. 88, no. 6, p.28. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login/aspx?direct=true&db=f6h&AN=36006571&site=ehost-live.

Prioli, Carmine A. “The Ursuline Outrage.” American Heritage, February/March 1982, www.americanheritage.com/ursuline-outrage.

Sullivan, Rebecca. “A Wayward from the Wilderness: Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures and the Feminization of Lower Canada in the Nineteenth Century.” Essays on Canadian Writing, no. 62, Fall 1997, p. 201. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=339667&site=ehost-live.

Blind Spot: The Jowers Affair

Just when it seemed that James Earl Ray’s dubious and discredited claims would fade into the background noise of history, leaving him to rot in his prison cell, disregarded by the press and the culture generally, events conspired to haul his claims of being a patsy out of mothballs. In 1993, on the ABC program Prime Time Live, Sam Donaldson interviewed a beshadowed man on national television, and this man claimed to have accepted money and hired a gunman to murder Dr. King, making it clear that he had far more to say if he were granted immunity from prosecution. This man was one Loyd Jowers. Sixty-seven years old at the time of his television appearance, Jowers was the owner of Jim’s Grill, the restaurant beneath the rooming house that served as a sniper’s perch to the assassin. Jowers’s confession began a new line of investigation leading to a new conspiracy claim for Ray’s then lawyer, a conspiracist named Dr. William Pepper—that’s right, Dr. Pepper—to focus on and promote. In 1997, Dexter King, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s second son, visited James Earl Ray and confronted him about his involvement in the murder. Shockingly, he then announced on behalf of his whole family, that they believed in Ray’s innocence. A few months later, Dexter also met with Loyd Jowers. Likewise, the Kings believed that Jowers’s testimony was the key to proving the murder of Dr. King had been the result of a conspiracy. This marked the beginning of a campaign by those who had survived Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to get Jowers’s story on the record. When they, along with Ray’s legal counsel, failed to get Jowers immunity, Coretta Scott King brought a civil suit against Jowers as well as “other unknown co-conspirators” for the wrongful death of her husband, seeking only $100 in symbolic compensation, as their true goal was not monetary reward but rather to finally get the truth. To some, the result was the final revelation of James Earl Ray’s innocence and proof of a conspiracy to kill Dr. King. But sometimes, the act of muddling or obscuring truth can masquerade as its disclosure when in fact it’s only making the truth harder to discern.

Loyd Jowers claimed that Frank Liberto, a Memphis produce dealer with a reputation for mafia connections who had long been suspected of involvement in the King assassination, had given him a substantial sum of money to arrange for King’s death, out of which he had paid the assassin. Now, patrons on Patreon will recognize the name Liberto from January’s Patreon exclusive Blindside edition of the podcast, in which I explored the conspiracy claim about his and the mafia’s involvement. Suffice to say here that there is every reason to doubt Liberto had anything to do with the murder of Dr. King, but his name had been floated in the immediate aftermath of the assassination and had never really disappeared from the conspiracy theories surrounding the murder, so it’s no great surprise that Jowers would name him in the late 1990s. However, as the Jowers angle was looked into by Ray’s attorney Dr. Pepper and his investigators—who themselves have major credibility issues, as outlined in my most recent Blindside Patreon episode and as I will further discuss shortly—they claimed to have uncovered numerous witnesses who could corroborate Jowers’s involvement in the murder. One was a cab driver, James McCraw, who told an investigator on Dr. Pepper’s team that Jowers had shown him a box with a rifle in it and bragged that it was the very rifle that had killed King. Another was one Bobbie Spates, a waitress at Jim’s Grill, who said Jowers had told her the day after the assassination that he’d found the murder weapon. And finally, there was Bobbie’s sister, Betty, a 16-year-old girl and Loyd Jowers’s erstwhile lover who worked across the street from the grill at a paper company. Betty Spates also put the rifle in Jowers’s possession, for she said she went to the restaurant that afternoon and saw him on his knees disassembling it. Moreover, Betty corroborated the claims that Jowers had an influx of money, for she claimed to have seen a great deal of cash secreted away in a disused stove a week prior to the King slaying. And as Dr. Pepper’s investigation continued, Betty’s revelations became more and more outrageous. She said she had visited the grill several times on the day of the assassination, each time seeing Jowers with a rifle. Before noon, she saw him with the gun; around noon, she saw him in the foliage back of the restaurant, aiming the gun up at the Lorraine Motel as though rehearsing the assassination; at around 4pm, she saw him disassembling the rifle; and then at 6pm, right after the moment of the assassination when she had heard a firecracker sound, she saw Jowers running back into the restaurant by the back door, the knees of his trousers muddy, his hair disheveled, his face pale and agitated. In his hands was a second, different rifle from the one she had earlier seen him carrying. Not only did this testimony seem to corroborate Jowers’s involvement, but it also contradicted his own claim that he had merely paid someone else to shoot King, instead indicating that he himself had been the shooter. And one other claim of Betty’s tends to confirm that she was not conspiring with Jowers in a hoax: she said that a known employee of Jowers’s, Willie Akins, had come into her home in the mid-1980s, fired a gun into the sofa beside her, and told her that Jowers had paid him to kill her.

There are, however, a myriad of reasons to doubt Betty Spates’s claims. Firstly, the story of Akins’s murder attempt was not very believable, and she had never even called the police about it. Secondly, there was the way her story expanded proportional to Dr. Pepper’s interest in it, a telltale sign of someone saying what an investigator wants to hear. Then there was the fact that elements of her statements proved untrue. At one point she said she was working at Jim’s Grill that day, but she had never worked there as her sister Bobbie had. She also claimed that Jowers had bought her a house to keep her quiet, and that government men had approached her with an offer to place her in witness protection, neither of which turned out to be true. And she went on to recant major aspects of her story, such as that Jowers had asked her to dispose of the rifle and that she had been at the restaurant at the time of the assassination, the latter detail having already been disproven since the police locked down Jim’s Grill just after the shooting to interview those inside, among whom she was not listed. But perhaps the biggest red flag on Betty Spates’s testimony comes from statements she had made to investigators at the time of the assassination. Twenty-four years earlier, back when the two had still been romantically involved, Betty Spates was already making claims about Jowers’s involvement in the crime. After the assassination, Betty was spreading the story that, very close to the time of the shooting, she had seen James Earl Ray outside the rooming house, making it impossible for him to be upstairs pulling the trigger. Instead of Ray, she was offering Jowers as a suspect, failing to disclose their relationship, which, if strained, might have been a motive for falsely accusing him. However, when Ray’s prosecutors visited her in 1969, she admitted her claims were a hoax, explaining that she had been promised five grand to make the false statements by friends of Martin Luther King who wanted to force investigators to expand their scope beyond James Earl Ray.

Loyd Jowers, via Wikimedia Commons

The final nail in the coffin of the Spates testimony was hammered in when she revealed that one of Dr. Pepper’s investigators, eager to obtain some smoking gun evidence of Ray’s innocence, in this case both figurative and literal, had actually offered Betty money. She called the $500 the investigator gave her a Christmas present, and the investigator told Gerald Posner, the author of my principal source, Killing the Dream, that he had only been helping Betty out with some overdue utility bills, but Spates eventually made a clear confession that she had taken monetary compensation for the story that she offered. And this was not the only time that Dr. Pepper’s team of investigators would prove themselves dishonest. At about the same time they were encouraging Betty Spates’s stories, they had also found another woman, Glenda Grabow, who was willing to go on the record that she knew who Raoul was. She said she had been involved in an abusive relationship with him when she was fourteen, and he had admitted to her that he had killed Dr. King. On her testimony, Dr. Pepper tracked down an actual suspect, a Portuguese immigrant living in New York named Raul, spelled slightly differently than James Earl Ray had always spelled it. Nevertheless, in 1995, after decades of playing coy and not identifying anyone as his Raoul, Ray pointed at this suspect’s photo and confirmed it was his mystery man. But there were numerous problems. Grabow’s story was so implausible that Dr. Pepper himself left most of it out of his book. Besides his claims to have killed King, Grabow’s Raul was involved with Carlos Marcello, the famous New Orleans crime lord, and met with Jack Ruby, with whom Grabow says she was also romantically involved. Moreover, Grabow happened by chance to have seen her Raul standing on the hood of his car outside the Houston airport upon JFK’s arrival in Texas, training a scoped rifle in the president’s direction, asserting that she had accidentally foiled the first attempt on Kennedy’s life, resulting in Raul moving to Plan B at Dealey Plaza. Of course, none of this helped Ray, so Dr. Pepper omitted it. And to further demonstrate the untrustworthiness of the Pepper team’s investigative practices and therefore the unreliability of all their witnesses, Gerald Posner describes audio tapes of Dr. Pepper’s investigators questioning Grabow, in which they ask leading questions and even put Raoul’s name in her mouth, as she had only referred to him by a racial epithet that they assured her was only his nickname: Dago. But the really unforgivable part of this farce Dr. Pepper’s team created is the fact that the Raul that Grabow and Ray identified was an innocent family man whose life was turned upside down by these accusations, ruining him financially and leaving him no peace in his retirement.

Likewise, then, considering the unprincipled techniques of Dr. Pepper’s investigators, the statement of Betty’s sister Bobbie is also suspect. As for the taxi driver, McCraw, like Betty, we know that he told a far different story when questioned during the months after the assassination. Back then, the only thing he had to say was that, on the day of the assassination, he had picked up Charlie Stephens, the chief witness placing Ray in the rooming house, and that Stephens was drunk. But even this appears to be a fabrication, as taxi company records do not indicate he was even there. It’s possible McCraw said what he did in order to corroborate the claims his friend Loyd Jowers was making. So then we must finally examine Jowers’s own reliability, already troubled by the fact that he had been an alcoholic for decades, as attested to by his own attorney (Posner 289). But disregarding that, we see inconsistencies in the stories he has told about what happened that day as well. Originally, much like Betty Spates, Jowers only told authorities things that might help exonerate James Earl Ray, making one wonder if he too was hoping to claim the money Spates said was being offered by King’s supporters. He said that at around 4pm, he saw the white Mustang out front, and inside his restaurant was a white man he didn’t recognize, eating sausages and eggs. At 6pm, he said, he heard the report of the rifle sounding like a skillet crashing onto the floor and walked toward the rear of the establishment to investigate. At that time, and just after, the white stranger was still present and asked him for a beer. But of course, this stranger could not have been Ray, because Jowers remembered that the Mustang had disappeared while the man remained. And the white stranger came back the next day, and the suspicious Jowers called the police, who identified him as a drifter named Gene Crawford. But this did not stop Jowers from spinning tales about the man, saying sometimes that he was a regular customer named Jim Sanders and other times that he was a CIA operative named Jack Youngblood, neither of which are true.

Further indications of Jowers’s penchant for changing his story around whenever his details are proven false came after his dramatic television appearance, when he named the gunman he had paid to kill King. He claimed to Dr. Pepper and his team that he had hired Frank Holt, a black day laborer. In Jowers’s version, Holt pulled the trigger in the foliage out back, and Jowers disposed of the murder weapon. And before anyone went looking for Holt, he said he had hired Willie Akins to kill the gunman, so there was no point spending any time trying to track him down. Willie Akins, of course, was the same inept assassin who supposedly shot the heck out of Betty’s couch but never actually harmed her despite accepting money to murder her, and here again, he appears to have failed, for Holt was alive and denied involvement and even passed a polygraph. After this, Jowers began to claim that his co-conspirators were members of the Memphis police department, and that the gunman in particular was Lieutenant Earl Clark. This time, he was slippery enough to only implicate men he knew were dead and could not defend themselves.

In Jowers’s favor, one might point out that he had nothing to gain from his confession. He was elderly; perhaps, the guilt had weighed on him and he only wanted to come clean before he died. But just as we know the Pepper team gifted some money to Betty Spates, there are indications that much greater promises of money were being made. In the end, when Betty Spates confessed that her story of seeing Jowers with the gun had come from Dr. Pepper’s team, she also indicated that Jowers’s attorney was involved. According to her, they wanted her to say she had seen Frank Holt hand the rifle to Jowers by the back door before running around to the street, where the police then led him right back in the front door of the restaurant, for the record showed that police officers had pushed Frank Holt into Jim’s Grill from the sidewalk that day. And they told Betty that if she said this thing, she and Jowers could divide $300,000 dollars. So, if this story is true, then it’s clear Jowers believed there was something in it for him to make his confession. After all, if he were only motivated by his guilty conscience, why would he play so coy and refuse to divulge any particulars until he had an immunity deal? Where this money might have come from is a trickier question. Perhaps there would be money in television appearances, like the one Jowers had already made, but not three hundred grand. More likely, Dr. William Pepper anticipated his book, Orders to Kill, would make a killing, so to speak, and he could comfortably apportion a few hundred grand to the little people whose wild stories made it so incendiary. This was similar, in fact, to how James Earl Ray had managed to obtain the services of so many famous lawyers: by offering them a slice of the money his story would make.

Cover of Orders to Kill, via Google Books

But of course, Dr. William Pepper and his team could not have made a media circus of James Earl Ray’s case some 30 years after the assassination without some help. One figure that helped to keep the case in the limelight was Judge Joe Brown, whom you may know as a television personality. Judge Brown actually fought to get Ray’s case assigned to him and afterward refused to recuse himself when it became apparent that he strongly supported the defense and believed there was a conspiracy to murder King. Then of course, the support of Dexter King and other King family members certainly helped to legitimize Dr. Pepper’s efforts. It would be one thing for the family to publicly forgive Ray for his crime, something that many SCLC preachers and friends of King have done as a testament to the power of God’s grace and mercy. It is another thing entirely for Dr. King’s son to shake the hand of the man who murdered his father and tell him he got a raw deal. It is, however, completely understandable for the King family to seek the whole truth about the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. It is therefore especially troubling and distasteful for someone to mislead them and misrepresent the facts in order to make them believe something that isn’t true. This is how blind spots crop up in history. Believable lies are propagated, provable truths are twisted and purposely misinterpreted, and falsehoods are taken to heart and spread by those who are most drawn to believe them. In fact, heap enough untruths on anyone and they’ll find it hard to sift through for the truth. In the civil case of Coretta Scott King vs. Loyd Jowers, for example, after sitting, and even sometimes dozing, through hours and hours of second- and third-hand testimony, the jury found in favor of Coretta Scott King, suggesting that the evidence proved Loyd Jowers and other conspirators, “including government agencies,” were responsible for King’s death, not James Earl Ray. But in response to all the noise made by Dr. Pepper and the Kings, Attorney General Janet Reno launched a Department of Justice investigation and essentially concluded what the House Select Committee on Assassinations had concluded, that Ray was not framed but rather was the shooter. And as for indications that Ray’s brothers may have been co-conspirators, while they did not deny this possibility, they simply could not justify its further investigation because, after 30 years, they just didn’t have any leads on new evidence. There the case of the conspiracy to murder Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stands, and people, it seems, as always, will believe what they want to believe.

The Killing of Dr. King, Part Three: Ray's Reasons

Having examined Ray’s version of events—that he was manipulated by a mystery man named Raoul into bringing the murder weapon to the Memphis rooming house that served as the sniper’s perch, but that he himself did not pull the trigger—and finding it sorely lacking in credibility, we now move on to consider the scenario that Ray was the shooter. Some of the points raised against this version include that he was a bumbling and failed crook and could not have possibly planned such a nearly perfect assassination, a perspective that doesn’t take into account his successful capers, like his bank robberies and his prison escape—and in fact, he would go on to escape from prison again for a short time while serving his sentence for murdering King. Others point to the fact that he was not a murderer and therefore seems an unlikely culprit. However, he had made a career of armed robbery, of threatening people with murder if they didn’t give him what he wanted, and once he is said to have stabbed someone in a Kansas City bar for no reason other than that they had spoken to him. Then there is the point that Ray was no sniper and therefore isn’t likely to have been the shooter, but to suggest that he couldn’t possibly have made the shot that killed King from 200 feet away doesn’t take into account the fact that when he joined the Army in 1946, he qualified as a marksman during basic training. Therefore, the real question needs to be one of possible motivation, of what may have driven Ray to commit the crime. He claims that not only was he not aware that Dr. King would be in Memphis at the same time as he would be there, but also that he didn’t really know who Martin Luther King was and that he certainly never talked about him. Moreover, he and his surprisingly numerous supporters, which include many people of color, insist that he is not a racist. Therefore, it would seem that he had no concrete reason to plan Dr. King’s murder and must have been a patsy. But are his supporters only seeing what he wants them to see? And what evidence is there to belie his true motivation?

Expectedly, after his arrest, Ray was grilled about his feelings toward African Americans in an effort to ascertain whether racism was a driving factor in his assassination of Dr. King. Did he hate black people? Was he connected to white supremacist organizations? Ray has always consistently denied any racist views, though his denials often included odd quibbling and admissions of feeling estranged from people of other races, which one might take as the equivocation of a guilty mind or as an attempt at complete honesty. Certainly many African American believers in a conspiracy have embraced the idea that Ray harbored no hatred toward them. Yet a close investigation into James Earl Ray’s past, as Gerald Posner provides in his book, Killing the Dream, which I’ve relied on extensively in this series, turns up some real evidence that Ray’s ideas about race tended toward bigotry all his life. He grew up in a poor little area of Missouri that some called Little Dixie, as it had been settled by Southerners and had a strong Ku Klux Klan presence (Posner 80). Although Ray himself has never been connected to the Klan, beyond the fact that later in life he accepted the representation of a famously Klan-associated attorney, he did evince some social and political ideas that would line up perfectly with that notorious hate group. While working at a tannery in 1944, he befriended a German named Henry Stumm who spoke admiringly of Hitler and the Nazis. It has been reported by people who knew Ray during this period—including one of his brothers, who shared some damning information about Ray with book authors before later denying he had said them—that it was during this time that James Earl Ray developed an intolerance of and hatred toward Jews and African Americans. From his point of view—again according to statements made by his own brother—Ray believed that the U.S. would be a better place if Nazis took control because they would ensure that it would be a racially homogeneous nation: all white. He thought not that they would exterminate all other races, but that they would exile them, deport them to some other country. In fact, so charmed was he with Nazi race politics that when he joined the Army after the war had ended, he requested to be stationed in occupied Germany, where more than one family member assumed he hoped to learn from or even support the Nazis.

A young James Earl Ray, already in trouble with the law, via the LA Times

After the Nuremberg trials, however, he became disillusioned with the Nazis and with the Army, going AWOL and getting himself discharged from duty and sent back to the states. On the ship back, he was enraged, according one of his brothers, because black soldiers who had married German girls were put in first class while single white soldiers like himself were left in second class. Once home, Ray turned to a life of crime, and some who knew him said he developed an unreasonable hatred for African Americans, making occasional statements about how they should all be kicked out of the country, or even that they ought to be killed (Posner 111). This bigotry apparently continued or even worsened during his time in prison. Beyond the statements of his brothers and others close to him, some of which have since been recanted, some two dozen men who served time with Ray testified to his hostility toward black people. In fact, his animosity kept him from taking advantage of the opportunity to get out of his cell at Leavenworth and enjoy more freedom. In 1957, he had the chance to live on the prison’s honor farm, but he refused because it was integrated and apparently he much preferred the segregated living arrangements of the prison. Then while serving a sentence at Missouri State Penitentiary, he refused to attend any sporting events because the teams were comprised mostly of black players, and he once said of a black guard that worked his cell block, “that’s one nigger that should be dead.” And upon hearing of JFK’s assassination, he remarked, “That is one nigger-loving SOB that got shot. After his escape from the penitentiary, during his time courting Claire Keating in Montreal, Keating remembered their conversations turning to race and to black people specifically, saying that Ray told her, “You got to live near niggers to know ’em,” adding that everyone who knows them hates them (Posner 165). And after that, Ray again showed his true colors to the next woman he spent any significant time with, a prostitute in Mexico. One night, while drinking at a cantina, Ray seemed bothered by the fact that four black men had come in to drink at the same establishment. He began insulting and provoking the men before leaving the bar and coming back in to abuse them more. Returning to his seat, he had his companion feel inside his pocket, where she found that he was now carrying a pistol. One of the black patrons approached him and tried to make peace, but Ray snubbed him. Eventually, Ray drove all four men from the cantina with his disrespect, and he would have gone after them if his companion hadn’t stayed him by convincing him that police would be making their rounds.

Among the racist sentiments that Ray revealed in prison were comments about other countries to which he’d like to immigrate because they were less diverse or had ideas about relations between races that he found more sensible. For example, he told other inmates that he was considering moving to Australia because, as he understood it, there were no black people there. And he spoke a lot about the country of Rhodesia, a southern African nation built on harsh segregationist laws that was frequently in the news at the time because of its social and political turmoil. There, some 200,000 whites had maintained their extravagant lifestyles and their hegemony over the more than three million black native inhabitants by refusing to concede to black rule like the rest of the British colonies in Africa. Under Prime Minister Ian Smith, the colony declared a Unilateral Declaration of Independence and broke away from Britain. According to his brother John, James Earl Ray had not only expressed interest in travelling to Rhodesia but admiration for their stand against black majority rule, telling his brother during a prison visitation that he believed Ian Smith was doing a fine job. Things quickly fell apart, however, as The ensuing economic sanctions did little to bring the Rhodesians to heel, and as the white Rhodesians faced economic sanctions and a guerilla war at home, with multiple black nationalist groups, some armed and trained by Russia and others by China, engaged in a bush war with the relatively small Rhodesian army. This war was framed as a stand against Communism and heathenism, but to be certain, at its heart, it was a struggle to preserve a way of life made possible by white minority rule. And rather than Rhodesia’s troubles discouraging Ray’s interest in immigrating there, he seemed even more drawn to go and contribute in some way to their cause. While in Mexico, he wrote to an address he found in U.S. News and World Report advertising for immigrants to Rhodesia. Later, from Los Angeles, he wrote to the American-Southern African Council, expressing his interest in immigrating to Rhodesia and asking how he might obtain a passport since the U.S. wasn’t issuing them for travel to Rhodesia at the time, and then to the Friends of Rhodesia, Orange County chapter, purchasing a subscription to a pro-Rhodesian publication called the Rhodesian Commentary and asking further questions about immigrating there.  Indeed, his flight to Europe after the assassination seems to have been an effort to make his way to Africa and offer his services as a mercenary. After his London bank robbery, he flew to Lisbon, which was a hotspot at the time for recruiting white mercenaries to fight in Angola’s civil war. In Lisbon, he visited the South African Embassy and asked them about mercenary recruitment, but finding that they were no longer recruiting, he went to the Rhodesian mission and the legation for Biafra, making clear his desire to join a white mercenary group at each location. Thereafter, when he was caught with his pistol back in London Heathrow Airport, he said he was carrying it because he intended to make his way to Rhodesia, where it was quite dangerous. Judging from these actions, it would appear that his plan to go to Africa centered either on some ideological desire to support a country fighting for white supremacy or on some deep yearning to shoot at black Africans.

Rhodesian Army recruitment poster

Another point supporting the notion that, despite whatever weak denials he made or tolerant facades he adopted after his arrest for King’s murder, James Earl Ray did indeed harbor racist ideology is his vociferous support of Alabama governor George Wallace, whose conflict with Dr. King and stringent stand against civil rights I discussed in the most recent installment of this series. By the time Ray escaped from Missouri State Penitentiary, Wallace was concentrating on a bid for the presidency of the United States. His populist campaign has been aptly compared to the campaign of Donald Trump numerous times by many historians, like Wallace biographer Dan Carter and presidential historian Ronald Feinman, as well as by respected news organizations, including the New York Times, and National Public Radio. Like Trump, Wallace fanned the fires of resentment and fear of progressive social change, in his case specifically over the Civil Rights Movement and its recent legislation, calling the Voting Rights Act “one of the most tragic, most discriminatory pieces of legislation ever enacted” and bemoaning the civil rights legislation for setting “race against race and class against class.” With this reactionary message, he drew massive crowds to disorderly rallies, just like his 2016 counterpart, and like Trump, he appealed to the poor white demographic, suggesting that politicians in Washington were out of touch with the people and that they had a rude awakening coming. As were Trump’s rallies, Wallace’s were troubled by protesters who called him a racist and whom Wallace mocked from his lectern. While Trump called his followers to Make America Great Again, Wallace urged his supporters to Stand Up for America. It’s almost as if Trump was working from a George Wallace playbook when he decided to declare the press his opposition and spend more time discrediting them than his opponents.  And much like Trump, he surprised many pollsters and analysts with his unexpected success, winning some 10 million popular votes and carrying 5 states.

We know that James Earl Ray was a strong George Wallace supporter because his brother John Ray, another Wallace supporter, has stated that James approved of his politics and even suggested that, after leaving Montreal following his failure to obtain a passport, he probably chose to go to Birmingham not because a shadowy mystery man directed him there but rather because he wanted to go somewhere people shared his views on race. After his sojourn in Mexico, Ray ended up in Los Angeles at the same time that Wallace was holding his raucous rallies up and down the state of California, and it would be no stretch to think he attended one of them. But even if he didn’t, we know that he read the Los Angeles Times, which devoted much column space in those months to Wallace’s effort to get his third party on the California ballot, and we know that in establishing his Eric S. Galt alias in L.A., he told people he was in town working for the Wallace campaign. In fact, he even appears to have done some stumping for them, of a sort. It turns out that his first trip to New Orleans from Los Angeles had not been made in order to rendezvous with Raoul—a character that he never mentioned to anyone until after his capture—but rather he made it as a favor to a woman he’d met, driving her, her brother and another friend there to retrieve her two daughters, but before he would take them, he demanded that all three sign a petition to get Wallace on the ballot. Finally, there is the indication that Ray may have been planning Dr. King’s assassination long in advance, and that George Wallace was an integral part of the plan. Ray’s brother Jerry told George McMillan, one of the writers researching the assassination, that there had been such a plan, and that Ray chose to establish his Eric S. Galt identity in Birmingham after returning from Canada because, much like Donald Trump can be counted on to use his pardon power as a sort of political patronage, James Earl Ray assumed that if he murdered Dr. King in Alabama, Wallace would make sure he went free. Of course, Jerry Ray would later deny that he said any such things, even though the statements are present in McMillan’s interview notes (Posner 169). And this would not be the only such statement indicating that James Earl Ray had entertained the idea of killing Dr. King for years.

Wallace campaign poster, via Wikimedia Commons

Ray claimed that he had only the vaguest knowledge of Dr. Martin Luther King’s existence, a dubious notion considering how much we know he read and kept up with the news, and that he certainly never spoke about him to anyone, but statements collected from people who knew him prior to the assassination contradict this. Back in prison, more than one inmate remembered how Ray would become agitated while reading weekly newsmagazines over the actions of civil rights leaders and King specifically, and one inmate, Cecil Lillibridge, recalled him scornfully calling Dr. King “Martin Luther Coon” (Posner 135). Likewise, statements made by Ray’s brothers, Jerry and John, who had visited him in prison and appear to have rendezvoused with him more than once after his escape, indicate that James Earl Ray was more than aware of Dr. King, that he was actually entertaining ideas about killing him.  Several weeks after his escape, according to Jerry Ray, all three brothers met in an old, rundown Chicago hotel and plotted some ways they might make money. Ideas bandied about ranged from as dangerous as kidnapping someone of importance for a ransom to as seedy as making and selling pornography, the latter being a scheme James Earl Ray found quite enticing. During this meeting, though, James told his brothers, “I’m going to kill that nigger King. That’s something that’s been on my mind. That’s something I’ve been working on.” According to their story, told to author George McMillan, both brothers refused to have anything to do with this plot. And later, both brothers claimed such a meeting had never taken place and denied they’d ever told McMillan it had. But the brothers were known to lie about their meetings with Ray. For example, John had visited James in prison the day before James’s escape, and there is reason to believe he aided his brother’s escape since James afterward used an alias and a social security number that John had previously been known to use. And despite prison records that prove the visitation happened, John claimed he had not visited James the night before the escape. And years later, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations questioned Jerry Ray about this meeting in Chicago at which James reportedly expressed intentions to murder Dr. King, Jerry tellingly did not deny it happened but rather refused to talk about it, hiding behind the Fifth Amendment on the grounds that discussing this meeting might incriminate him. Considering the fact that the bank robbery the brothers are suspected of committing together took place shortly after the meeting, it is possible that their discussion of kidnapping and robbery plans was what Jerry worried would be incriminating, but there is the further possibility that the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of the plots hatched by the brothers in that Chicago hotel room, and that rather than it being James’s plan alone, the brothers raised it and planned to pursue it together. The question, then, is why? After the assassination, Jerry said that if Ray had done it, “there had to be a lot of money involved” (Posner 41). But he told McMillan that he had refused to go along with Ray’s plan of killing King because “There ain’t no money in killin’ a nigger” (Posner 152). Yet shortly after the manhunt for his brother had begun, he reportedly told a friend who asked him if Ray had done it that “This is his business… If I was in his position and had eighteen years to serve and someone offered me a lot of money to kill someone I didn’t like anyhow, and get me out of the country, I’d do it.” So was there, after all, money in it for the man who killed Dr. King? And did the brothers discuss this, among other moneymaking schemes, during their brainstorming session in that Chicago hotel room?

Of course, it is part of Ray’s legend of Raoul that he was drawn unwittingly into a plot to kill King on a promise of money, but if Ray had taken it upon himself to plan King’s murder as a moneymaking scheme before he claims he ever even met Raoul, then where would he have gotten the impression there was money in it? His prison acquaintance Cecil Lillibridge, who had listened to him rail against civil rights leaders, says that Ray also used to wonder aloud whether or not there might be some group out there that would reward the killer of a civil rights activist like King (Posner 135). Other inmates told interviewers that Ray spoke about murdering Dr. King for money, speculating that he might get as much as $10,000 for it. One inmate, Harry Sero, remembers suggesting to Ray that, what with King advocating boycotts, some wealthy businessmen might pay a lot to have King put out of the way. Ray’s comments appear to have graduated after that from speculative to seemingly assured, telling other inmates that some “businessman’s association” was offering a hundred grand for King’s murder, though he couldn’t name the group, simply saying he would find out who they were (Posner 136). Were there such bounties on Dr. King? The short answer is yes, of course there were, bounties ranging from $50,000 to $100,000 offered by a variety of far right hate groups like the KKK, the National Socialist White People’s Party, the Minutemen, and the American Nazi Party. Which of these groups Ray might have come into contact with, however, is a more important question to demonstrating that Ray may have undertaken the assassination in the hopes of collecting a bounty. There are reports that some prisoners in the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City were aware of a $100,000 bounty on King from the White Knights of the Mississippi KKK as well as of another bounty by a local criminal enterprise calling itself the Cooley’s Organization (Posner 137). But one such supposed bounty stands out. In the late ‘70s, the House Select Committee granted immunity to a St. Louis man in exchange for his testimony about being offered money to assassinate Dr. King. Russel Byers testified that in late ’66 or early ’67, a real estate developer with ties to the criminal underworld named John Kauffmann approached him about an opportunity and took him to see a wealthy segregationist named John Sutherland. Byers’s tale has him entering a well-appointed study adorned with memorabilia from the Confederacy to discuss a proposition. Sutherland, with a Confederate hat on his head, offered Byers fifty grand to kill King or to arrange his death, a bounty he said would be provided by a wealthy organization out of the South. Byers said he declined to take part in their plot. The House Select Committee was able to corroborate Byers’s story, and it seemed quite feasible that Ray might have found out about this offer before he escaped the penitentiary, as Byers’s brother-in-law was incarcerated in the same cell block with him, and Ray has admitted to knowing him. Then there is the fact that Kauffmann, the guy who brought Byers in on the plot, was a convicted amphetamine dealer, and during his trial, it came out that he was having the drugs smuggled into Missouri State Penitentiary, where James Earl Ray was using and selling them. A strong indication that Ray had heard of the Sutherland bounty on King comes from another inmate’s testimony, given long before Byers ever spoke about the bounty, that Ray had tried to bring him in on a plot to kill King for money, no longer claiming the bounty was ten grand or a hundred, but now naming the $50,000 amount we know was offered by John Sutherland and assuring the fellow prisoner that, if they killed King in the South, it wouldn’t even matter if they were caught because “who in the South like niggers?” (Posner 139).

An older Ray, in trouble with the law again, via Newsweek

So there is good reason to believe James Earl Ray had it in his head that he and his brothers might make a considerable amount of money by planning and carrying out King’s assassination. After their meeting in Chicago, Ray made his way to Birmingham in order to establish his alias Eric S. Galt as an Alabaman because, as Jerry Ray explained to George McMillan, James Earl Ray thought getting rid of King would help the George Wallace campaign, and he believed that, if he were caught, Wallace would surely pardon him for the murder, maybe not right away, but eventually, when the outrage had subsided (Posner 169). And in fact, John Sutherland, the wealthy lawyer who had put up the fifty grand bounty on king, was a major player in the George Wallace campaign, a fact that lends credence to the conspiracy theory that the Wallace campaign may have actually been linked to the King assassination. Months later, after Ray’s vacation in Mexico, when he made his visit to New Orleans while living as Galt in Los Angeles, rather than meeting with Raoul as he claimed, there is a chance that he actually met with one of his brothers there and that they further discussed the idea of killing King and collecting the Sutherland bounty. Since Ray’s departure, his brother John had opened a tavern in St. Louis in an area where numerous Wallace rallies were held, and it had quickly become a haunt for ex-cons and underworld types looking for jobs, just the kind of place where the bounty would have been whispered about. Then, after Ray’s visit to New Orleans, John converted the tavern into a Wallace campaign center, distributing literature and helping to register voters. And in another connection to the Sutherland bounty, John employed a woman whose husband was friends with Russel Byers, the man Sutherland had propositioned about killing King. After Ray’s visit to New Orleans, there are clear signs that he wasn’t just looking forward to skipping the country or engaging in some more light smuggling but rather planning something big. He underwent plastic surgery to change his appearance. He would later explain that he did this because he expected soon to show up on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, a rather telling excuse, since surely he didn’t think a small-time escaped armed robber would be placed on the Most Wanted list so long after his escape unless he had it in his head that he would soon be committing a far more heinous and high-profile crime. He even went so far as to manually adjust his bandaged nose after his rhinoplasty so that even his plastic surgeon wouldn’t know exactly what he looked like. As James Earl Ray prepared to leave L.A., Dr. Martin Luther King visited the city and spoke at numerous events over the course of a couple days. Less than a month later, King would lie shot on the balcony at the Lorraine, and James Earl Ray had also begun the final leg of his journey to be in that same city block at the same time. As he headed east, staying at cheap motels, newspapers reported that Dr. King would be in Selma, Alabama, on the 22nd, and Ray drove straight there, indicating that, after all, he was stalking the reverend. When King left Selma, Ray took his leave as well, driving then to King’s hometown, Atlanta, Georgia, and it is worthwhile now to remember the map the FBI would eventually discover in one of his rooms, with King’s home and the church where he preached both circled in pencil. It was during this stay at a rooming house in Atlanta that Ray made the two hour drive west to Birmingham several times to visit multiple gun stores, and of course, if he really had no idea that the gun he would be buying was going to be used to murder someone and instead just thought it was going to be a showpiece to impress their Mexican connection, there would have been no reason not to buy the gun right there in Atlanta. Driving so far to buy it betrays Ray’s concern that the gun might later be traced back to him. Astonishingly, Jerry Ray, in the 1975 interview with George McMillan that he would later claim never happened but which is corroborated in McMillan’s notes according to Gerald Posner, the author of my principal source, Killing the Dream, Jerry said he actually met up with James in Birmingham, cagily implying they had test-fired the first rifle Ray bought together and that he had concerns about whether the gun could “do it in one shot” (Posner 223). Recall that when Ray returned  the first rifle he’d bought, he said that he’d changed his mind after speaking with his brother. After exchanging the rifle, Ray brought it to Memphis. There is some debate over when Ray left for Memphis with the rifle, whether it was before or after the announcement that King was returning to that city for another march, but we know that he only arrived at the New Rebel the night before the assassination.

The details coalesce to form a clear picture, it seems to me, that there may have been numerous conspiracies to have King killed in the form of bounties being put on his head, whether implicitly or explicitly, by hate groups as well as, perhaps, by some Southern boosters of the George Wallace campaign, but that Ray was not necessarily part of those conspiracies in the sense that he may only have heard of the bounties second or third hand and undertook to murder King with the hope of collecting on them after the fact. The clearest evidence of any conspiracy is between James Earl Ray and his brothers John and Jerry, who if McMillan’s interviews can be believed, might more accurately be called accomplices than co-conspirators. And there is little reason to trust known dissemblers and convicted felons over George McMillan, whose journalistic work appeared in the most distinguished of publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Saturday Evening Post. Nevertheless, while close scrutiny of the available research paints a surprisingly clear picture of a virulent racist and lifelong outlaw driven to murder out of greed who after his capture and conviction devoted the remainder of his life to spinning a web of lies and conspiracy innuendo, there are still a couple details that give one pause and prove a bit harder to explain away. For example, most of the aliases that James Earl Ray used, among them Eric S. Galt, John Willard, and Ramon Sneyd, were the names of real people, all of whom lived near each other in the same suburb of Toronto. The fact that a few of these Canadian men could’ve passed for Ray has led some to believe that the mysterious Raoul, Ray’s supposed handler, had provided him with these cover identities, although Ray himself never claimed this. Instead, he said he probably got the names out of a phone book, a believable enough explanation until one discovers the fact that the real Eric Galt’s middle name was not “Starvo,” as Ray had given it, but rather St. Vincent. Curiously, though, the real Galt customarily wrote out his middle name abbreviated, as St. V., with the periods looking like little o’s, so that it appeared to read as StoVo. So the only reasonable explanation seems to be that, rather than getting this name from a phone book, Ray must have seen some paper on which Galt had handwritten his name and simply guessed at pronouncing the middle name, corrupting it from Stovo to Starvo. But there is evidence that Ray stalked some of the men whose names he would later use, as among his possessions was another map with marks on it, this one of Toronto with marks near the homes of these men. And we know that after the assassination, he contacted the real life counterparts of several of his known aliases, pretending to be a government official in order to ascertain whether they already had passports, since he would be trying to get a passport in one of their names. So considering this, it is perhaps not impossible to imagine that he had previously gone to Toronto, stalked some men who looked like him, and took some papers from Galt at least, perhaps from his trash in order to find out what his signature looked like. It certainly is a complicated routine to go through when other fugitives might just make up a name, but perhaps it just reflects the fact that he had given a lot of thought to how he might establish an ironclad identity and obtain a Canadian passport, which eventually he did.

Ray’s Canadian passport photos, via Another Nickel in the Machine

Then there are the hypnosis sessions he underwent in Los Angeles before setting out to assassinate Dr. King. Assassination conspiracy theorists are no stranger to the notion that unwitting patsies can be programmed to commit murder through hypnosis. This is a major element of the conspiracy theory that Sirhan Sirhan was not alone responsible for the shooting of Bobby Kennedy. Sirhan Sirhan was an enthusiast of self-hypnosis and actually practiced it on himself by following the instructions provided by a group of supposed Rosicrucians. Now, who the Rosicrucians are, or were, is a topic better left for its own likely sprawling edition of Historical Blindness, but it’s understandable that this tidbit has fueled many conspiracy theories. Well, it turns out that James Earl Ray was interested in self-hypnosis as well. He had read about hypnosis in prison, bought more books on it in Canada, and attended several sessions with a psychologist in L.A. who specialized in hypnosis and found Ray to be an excellent subject of it—much like it was found that Sirhan Sirhan was easily hypnotized. This, of course, all sounds very suspicious and sinister, until you read what his hypnotists had to say about him. When interviewed, Dr. Freeman, his L.A. psychologist, said Ray revealed no secret plan to kill King while under hypnosis, but that he did betray his immense dislike for African Americans. Ray also visited the International Society of Hypnosis and spoke with its head, Rev. Xavier von Koss, who disagreed about Ray being easy to hypnotize, saying he showed a “strong subconscious resistance” (Posner 209). And for what it’s worth, during his encounter with Ray, Koss also claims to have surmised that Ray wanted recognition above all else. And the simple truth about these assassins’ interest in self-hypnosis might be far more mundane that one would anticipate. The fact is, self-hypnosis was something of a self-help fad at the time. It was becoming popular as a self-improvement technique that could improve memory and sleep and help one overcome personality problems like shyness and social disorders like anxiety. Some more common uses of self-hypnosis that many may be more familiar with are its use in helping people quit smoking or lose weight. So rather than it being a nefarious brainwashing technique that some mysterious conspirators used to program both Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray, isn’t it a simpler and therefore more logical explanation that they just used it to overcome the shyness with which they were both known to struggle? In fact, as an escaped convict who may have also been planning a high-profile assassination, Ray’s shyness, his tendency to not look people in the eye and seem squirrely and nervous, was something he would have certainly wanted to correct, as it could very well get him caught. In fact, in the end, it did, as the immigration officer at the passport desk in Heathrow on June 8th, 1968, looked a little closer at him and his papers, double-checking his name against those on his “Watch For and Detain” list, because he seemed “slightly nervous” (Posner 45).

Time, it is said, marches on, and like the marchers at whose head Dr. Martin Luther King strode, it has gone on to remember him well. Just days after his murder, with his killer still on the loose and the fires of rioters still burning, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, and several months later, before an election that LBJ had backed out of, he spoke again on the passage of a landmark Gun Control Bill that was directly inspired by the horrendous murders of both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy by men that never should have been allowed to get their hands on a firearm. But, of course, even after these tragedies which roused our nation to action, much like today, the influential gun lobby prevented the passage of comprehensive gun control legislation. Within weeks of the Gun Control Bill’s passage, we elected president Richard Nixon. After the failure of his presidential campaign, George Wallace returned to Alabama and licked his wounds, winning the governorship back in 1971 and once again campaigning for president in 1972, when he became the victim of his own assassination attempt. Unlike King, surviving the attempt, he lived to the age of 79. Despite publicly moderating his views on race, Wallace is not remembered well, unlike Dr. King, who is popularly viewed today as a visionary, a hero, a saint, and a martyr. As for James Earl Ray, he died in 1998 at 70, failing to ever win a new trial despite decades of sowing doubt about his guilt. Nevertheless, speculation about Ray’s innocence and the possibility of a conspiracy will not die.

View of Lorraine Hotel from the window where James Earl Ray was alleged to have fired the fatal shot at Martin Luther King, Jr., via Flickr (uploaded by Mr. Littlehand, licenced under the terms of the cc-by-2.0.)

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Further Reading

Posner, Gerald. Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Random House, 1998

The Killing of Dr. King, Part Two: The Legend of Raoul

Last time, after honoring Dr. King’s life and work before the day set aside for remembering him, we followed the FBI on the killer’s trail, looking at the evidence turned up along the way, until the suspect, James Earl Ray, was captured at a London airport. Already, conspiracy theories abounded, suggesting that the CIA, the FBI, Memphis police, the mafia, white supremacists, or black militants had plotted King’s murder. Flatly listing these theories tends to make them sound ridiculous, but there were good reasons to harbor suspicions in those post-Warren Report years, when New Orleans DA Jim Garrison was making noise about a conspiracy behind JFK’s assassination. And there were certainly some details around King’s death that contributed to the speculation. First, the failure of the police to set up road blocks and inform neighboring states about their search for a white Mustang suggested to many that local authorities were letting the assassin get away. The fact that a hoaxer led police on a wild goose chase with a phony CB radio broadcast also suggests to some the idea that a conspirator was working to help the assassin escape, even though that hoax broadcast took place more than half an hour after the shooting, when the shooter was likely already in another state. Then there was the fact that the principal witness at the rooming house, Charlie Stephens, who claimed to see a man matching Ray’s description leaving the shared bathroom carrying a rifle-length bundle, was a known drunk who appears to have been intoxicated that day, though police who took his statements indicated he was not exceedingly drunk. And Stephens was important to placing James Earl Ray in the rooming house, for while police did find Ray’s fingerprints on items in the abandoned bundle, they found none in the room he had rented and only a partial palm print in the bathroom. This is easily accounted for by the fact that, a career burglar and escaped convict, Ray himself spoke in some interviews about his habit of wiping his fingerprints. As for ballistics evidence, the FBI determined that the bullet fired into Dr. King matched the other bullets in the abandoned bundle, but that it could not be confirmed that it had been fired from the rifle in the bundle. This was simply because the bullet had been damaged and identifying marks could not be perceived, and in no way indicated that the bullet had not been fired from the gun discarded on the street outside the rooming house. Nevertheless, it has contributed to theories that the bundle was planted as part of a frame-up. As for the sniper’s perch, though most were certain the gunshot had originated from the building across the street from the Lorraine Motel, some few others thought it had come from some shrubbery above a retaining wall. Dr. King’s driver thought he saw some movement in those bushes, and months later, one of the rooming house residents said he was in the bushes drinking wine and had seen a figure with a gun dashing through the foliage. Later, it came out that the driver, who was known for telling tales, had actually been in the pool area and would have been unable to see the foliage across the road, and the rooming house resident had previously told the authorities that he’d been in his room, not in the bushes, and that he’d seen nothing. Nevertheless, the foliage above the retaining wall has since become a legendary place, like the grassy knoll at John F. Kennedy’s assassination. And just as Lee Harvey Oswald proclaimed himself a patsy before his murder by Jack Ruby, James Earl Ray insisted he had been set up. The difference was that great care was taken to protect Ray from a similar fate, and so he survived and had far more to say. The story he told his lawyers and the author William Bradford Huie involved a mysterious figure whom he had met in Montreal while on the lam. This man, named Raoul, had drawn Ray into a smuggling operation, bought him the Mustang and paid his living expenses, maneuvered him various places on the promise of eventually providing him with a passport, ordered him to buy the rifle as part of an arms deal, and eventually schemed to get him in Memphis, in the wrong place at the wrong time, a completely oblivious patsy.

When considering the likelihood of a plot against King, one has to begin with the local authorities. Dr. King had been considered a thorn in the side of numerous municipal and state authorities in areas he had visited. Alabama serves as a principal example. One of Dr. King’s most zealous adversaries was Alabama governor George Wallace, a segregationist who had staked his political career on racism, famously standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama to prevent black students from entering. His calls for Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever helped make Birmingham the frontlines for the Civil Rights Movement, and under his auspices, led by his terrible example, Birmingham police resorted violence during the SCLC campaign in that city. Another of King’s worst opponents had been the Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, “Bull” Connor, who, taking his cues from the bigoted governor, callously turned the hoses of the firemen and the batons of the policemen he commanded against King and his protesters. And later, demonstrating against illegal, racially motivated obstacles to voting registration that Governor Wallace tacitly allowed to persist in his state, King and the SCLC planned a historically lengthy march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, where on Bloody Sunday unarmed protesters were welcomed by tear gas and truncheons. Indeed, if Dr. King had been assassinated in any city in Alabama, the very first suspects might have been members of its police force, with implications that orders might have come down all the way from the governor’s office to rid their state of the troublesome activist. But King was killed in Tennessee, a state where he had not done any extensive organization previous to the sanitation strikes, which had only begun about a month before his arrival there. This is not to say that Tennessee had not seen its fair share of struggles for civil rights. On the contrary, since the ’50s there had been multiple bombings in Nashville in response to the desegregation of schools and in retaliation for student-led sit-in campaigns in the ’60s aimed at integrating lunch counters. And Dr. King did have some influence on the activism in Tennessee, as it was spearheaded by the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference, an affiliate of King’s SCLC, and King had sent one of his own to tutor them in the techniques of non-violent resistance. But Dr. King himself only came to Nashville after a bomb destroyed the home of a lawyer who represented sit-in participants, and he came not in a leadership capacity, but rather to express his admiration for all the work that had been done there without him, saying he was there “not to bring inspiration but to gain inspiration.”  

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. being arrested in Alabama for "loitering," via Wikimedia Commons

It’s not impossible to imagine that he had enraged many in Tennessee simply through his very famous work, which had spread to states all over the country, or even that police in Memphis blamed King, despite his non-violent message, for the violence that erupted during the March 28th demonstration that he attended, but it would have been a drastic step to resort to assassinating him, and they would have had a very short time to organize their plot. Some have pointed to the fact that police were not providing any security for Dr. King as proof that they were part of a conspiracy bent on seeing him killed, but in truth Dr. King preferred not to be surrounded by police officers, who of course represented the immediate opposition in any street demonstration and who only days earlier had shot a 16-year-old rioter to death. So wary was he of having a police escort that he and his group actually made an attempt to elude their police security detail before it was finally called off them in favor of surveilling the group from a distance. Others have contended that King and his entourage had been maneuvered to the Lorraine Motel in order to put him in the cross-hairs, a contention that is also untrue. King and his group customarily stayed at the Lorraine, an establishment owned by African Americans, and moreover always stayed in the same room. In fact, days earlier, during the March 28th violence, the police had warned him away from the Lorraine for his own safety, directing him to stay at a Holiday Inn instead, a change of lodgings for which Dr. King was subsequently criticized. Their failure to order roadblocks or extend their APB certainly reflects poorly on them, but they were dealing with rioting in the wake of the news that Dr. King had been murdered. And a bigger problem with the notion that King’s assassination was the object of a plot by Memphis police is that it simply doesn’t work with the idea that James Earl Ray was a patsy. Ray had only just arrived in Memphis the night before the assassination. Even King himself had not long been there and had been in and out of the city three times in the preceding weeks on impromptu visits, making a Memphis-based plot unlikely. Moreover, for the local conspiracy theory to work with Ray’s story about Raoul, it would require that the authorities in Memphis or Tennessee generally so wanted Dr. King dead that they planned his assassination long before the sanitation strike that drew him there had even begun. And it would mean they sent an agent to Montreal, of all places, to skulk around bars scoping out promising scapegoats, only to lead him on a circuitous escapade all over North America, from Canada to Mexico and from California to Georgia, before finally sending him to Memphis in order to frame him. While this seems manifestly unlikely, the idea that Ray was groomed as part of a plot at a higher level of government may seem less unlikely. After all, the FBI were present with the Memphis police in that nearby fire station, spying on Dr. King at the Lorraine.

A plot against King at the FBI is certainly not unbelievable, for it’s well-documented that one actually existed. The FBI had been keeping an eye on Dr. King’s activities since his earliest activism in Montgomery in 1955, with Director J. Edgar Hoover suspecting that King harbored Communist leanings and classifying him as a national or domestic security risk.  Indeed some of those closely involved with King and SCLC leadership were known members of Communist organizations, including Bayard Rustin, Hunter Pitts O’Dell, and Stanley Levison, but this should not be surprising of progressive activists in their era. Today, we know that the FBI tasked a sophisticated surveillance network with spying on King, complete with wiretaps on his phones and paid informants on his staff. Because of this surveillance, there is ample evidence of just how little Dr. King thought of Communism, which he called “an alien philosophy contrary to us.” But despite evidence that he was not a Communist insurgent, in 1964, King incurred the redoubled wrath of Director Hoover when he declared that the FBI was “completely ineffectual in resolving the continued mayhem and brutality inflicted upon the Negro in the deep South,” to which, like a child, Hoover responded by calling King a liar. True to his peace-loving nature, Dr. King arranged a meeting with Hoover, who received King with no outward animosity. Meanwhile, Hoover’s FBI engaged in an all-out smear campaign, maligning his character to Roman cardinals in an effort to prevent a meeting between Dr. King and the Pope that year, and sending a notorious package to his house in an effort to sow discord in his marriage. This package contained a tape with moaning sex sounds and a letter that addressed him only as “King,” continuing, “In view of your low grade, abnormal personal behavior (sic) I will not dignify your name with either a Mr. or a Reverend or a Dr. And, your last name calls to mind only the type of King such as King Henry the VIII and his countless acts of adultery and immoral conduct lower than that of a beast.” The letter called him an immoral, sexually psychotic fraud and a liability to the cause of civil rights, insisting that his extra-marital liaisons with both women and men would soon be made public, suggesting that the tape was a recording of him and insinuating that the only thing left for him to do was to kill himself. Although the letter made statements intended to indicate it had been written by an African American and perhaps someone in his own organization, Dr. King perceptively guessed that it had been sent by the FBI. Indeed, now, due to recently declassified files, we know that the FBI was preparing reports on Martin Luther King all the way up to the time of his assassination, still claiming that he was a Communist agent and that workshops King held were really only fronts for drunken orgies at which attendees committed adultery with prostitutes and engaged in homosexual acts. It is certainly true that Dr. King was no saint. Indeed, he once penitently confirmed as much to activist and singer Joan Baez who had seen him intoxicated the night before. In response, Baez said, “And I’m not the Virgin Mary. What a relief!” Ralph Abernathy, in his autobiography, did reveal that King, a man frequently on the road and away from home and family, had been involved in extramarital affairs, but there appears to be no evidence whatsoever for the salacious and defamatory claims made by the FBI in their efforts to ruin Dr. King.

NY Herald Tribune article from 1964, via the University of Virginia’s Office of African-American Affairs

Clearly the thought that Hoover’s FBI might have been responsible for the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., was well justified. But this would have to be a compartmentalized plot, for surely the President of the United States, to whom the FBI answers, would not condone such action against a non-violent reverend. Or can some credence be given to the conspiracist who claims the plot went all the way to the top? Well, above Hoover was the Attorney General, a role Ramsey Clark served at the time of King’s murder, but Clark is an unlikely suspect for involvement in a plot against King as he was a consistently staunch supporter of the civil rights movement. And above the Attorney General, of course, would be the President himself. Now, many take it for granted that King had positive relationships with both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, but both executives had J. Edgar Hoover pouring poison in their ears, trying to convince them of what a threat Dr. King really was. While Kennedy had made promises to King about getting civil rights legislation passed, behind his back he was signing his approval of the wiretaps Hoover had requested. After Kennedy’s assassination, President Johnson reached out and made clear his intentions to take up Kennedy’s civil rights agenda. And in fact he did, working with Dr. King on passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in an effort to end segregation and discrimination. King found in Johnson an accommodating ally. Although sometimes he prioritized other objectives, like his War on Poverty initiatives, over the most pressing concerns of Dr. King and the SCLC, like ensuring obstacle-free black voter registration in order to get black Southerners on juries and into civic service, nevertheless King found that with a little persistent pressure, LBJ always seemed to do the right thing, and in 1965 Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act to help remove illegal barriers to black voter registration in the South. And certainly, after Dr. King’s death, Johnson expressed grief publicly and continued to work to cement King’s legacy in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. It would be misleading to suggest, however, that Dr. King never represented a problem for LBJ. The simple fact that he was known to work with King, whom so many others in power despised, appears to have been an issue for him, and he was known to distance himself from the reverend, denying their relationship like Peter denying Jesus. And their partnership was certainly strained in the end, when Dr. King very publicly split from him on the issue of the Vietnam War. And of course, taking a stand against the conflict in Vietnam surely gave Hoover more ammunition against him, more reason to claim he was a Communist. So the question, then, is could Hoover have exploited this rift between Johnson and King to convince the Commander-in-Chief that some covert action was warranted to rid the country a man he portrayed as a dangerous agitator? This is pure conjecture based on speculation. All we really know is that the President’s often positive partnership with King was lately troubled and that the director of the largest domestic law enforcement organization was waging a very personal campaign against King, one that even included threats. Beyond this, to support the notion of a conspiracy, there is only the legend of Raoul.

LBJ and MLK, via Wikimedia Commons

Even before his extradition to the United States, James Earl Ray, still stubbornly sticking to his alias Ramon Sneyd at the time, began shopping his story around through his attorney. Indeed, from the time of his extradition to the time of his guilty plea, he went through a couple of prominent lawyers, all of which he retained on the promise of sharing the profits from his story, which he anticipated would be substantial. William Bradford Huie was first to sign a deal with and interview him, but before long numerous authors were hard at work on numerous books. Nevertheless, Ray worked exclusively with Huie, a journalist known for checkbook journalism, or paying handsomely for his stories, and famous for his recent work in what would today be considered the true crime genre, with particular focus on notorious cases of interracial murder, such as those of Emmett Till and the Freedom Summer murders. When Huie published the first of his interviews with Ray in Look magazine, he faced contempt of court charges, and not for the first time, for the judge feared Huie’s inflammatory revelations would influence the outcome of the trial. Huie’s article told of how Ray had escaped from prison in Missouri and hid out in Illinois before making his way to Montreal in hopes of getting travel documents and going overseas. There, he haunted a waterfront tavern, making it known that he was in trouble with the law in the U.S. and that he would be willing to engage in unlawful activity in order to gather some money and obtain false identification. That was when Raoul, a man Ray described as being a blond Latin, approached him. Over the course of several meetings, Raoul convinced Ray to make a few trips over the border to Detroit with some packages that he assumed contained narcotics. After receiving some money for this apparent smuggling operation, on Raoul’s promise of an eventual bigger payoff and provision of a passport, Ray made his way to Birmingham, where Raoul eventually caught up with him, bought him the white Mustang, and sent him down to Mexico to do some gun running south of the border. After a significant period of time in Mexico and thereafter in Los Angeles, Ray used a New Orleans contact number and arranged to meet again with Raoul in that city. At this rendezvous, Raoul continued to string Ray along, urging him to come out to Atlanta for some more gun-running, still dangling the promise of a big payoff and the paperwork that would finally ease Ray’s passage out of the country. Chasing after those promises, Ray returned to LA and made preparations to move to Atlanta. Once he’d settled in Georgia, he met with Raoul, who gave him $700 to buy a hunting rifle with a scope and some ammunition. The reason Raoul gave him was that the rifle would serve as an example to their Mexican connection of the kinds of guns they could provide. Raoul then directed Ray to take the rifle to Memphis, thus setting the stage for the final scene of the plot.

This was the story of James Earl Ray’s grooming by Raoul as Ray told it. And on the surface, to a lot of people, it makes sense, for how could James Earl Ray, a hapless small-time burglar, manage to get away with a high-profile murder and then obtain the money and the false identification necessary to make his escape to Europe like some smooth secret agent? But there are significant issues with this tale, even beyond the simple foundational flaw that he was encouraged to come up with a sensational story in order not only to defend himself but also to sell books and thereby make a tidy profit. One issue is that for most of the rest of his life, Ray failed to identify this Raoul character, and his descriptions seemed to constantly change, shifting from a Latin to a French Canadian, with hair that changed color from blond to red, to dark, auburn, and sandy and skin that was at times pale and at others dark and ruddy (Posner 162). Once he fanned the flames of conspiracy theory by identifying Raoul with one of the Three Tramps photographed at JFK’s assassination, but even then he only admitted some similarity. Then there are the simple logic problems. Why would any smuggler worth his salt even trust Ray with stashes of narcotics and guns on the promise of a later payment for delivery, when Ray might easily have just taken the contraband for himself? Moreover, why would their Mexican buyers have even needed them to procure guns when U.S. gun stores at the time were selling firearms over the counter without requiring any identification? And if all these smuggling operations were simply a ruse meant to draw Ray into their machinations, why on earth would they engage him, a wanted escapee, in risky criminal activity that could have easily landed him back in prison, abruptly foiling all the time they had spent grooming him as a patsy?

A young James Earl Ray, via the LA Times

It is also not entirely inconceivable that James Earl Ray might have financed his own travels. He was after all, a burglar known for keeping himself in money by pulling the occasional heist. Immediately after his escape from prison, he took a straight job while lying low, washing dishes in a restaurant. Yet somehow he had enough money to live on when he made his way up to Montreal some weeks later. There is some indication that he met up with his brothers, Jerry and John, during this period, so perhaps they loaned him some money, but interestingly, at just that time, a nearby bank was robbed by two masked men with shotguns. Taking 27 grand, even a share of this haul would have easily bankrolled Ray’s subsequent travels, and records show that the next day, Ray bought the car he would drive to Canada for some $200. Moreover, the FBI suspected James’s brother John of the robbery, as he may have been involved in five similar holdups during the last two years, for one of which he was actually convicted. And the indications of James Earl Ray’s continuous thievery during the time between his escape from prison and his arrest for murder does not stop there. Ray told Huie that the night before paying a lease on an apartment in Montreal, he visited a brothel and after availing himself of its services, he robbed its pimp. By the time he got to London, he lacked the money to move on. He told Huie that he should have committed a robbery in Canada before getting on the plane. To renew his capital, he ended up robbing a bank there in London, leaving a thumbprint behind to prove it (Posner 249). He is often portrayed as being a bumbling and incompetent thief based on an early robbery of a taxi driver that had earned him a year in prison, but based on his successful escape from prison, the reports of various successful robberies he pulled, and indications of even greater heists he may have been involved with, the idea that he financed his own travels seems a lot more likely than that he relied on the piecemeal payments of the tightfisted Raoul.

Likewise, the notion that he would have allowed himself to be strung along for so long on the unfulfilled promise of obtaining a passport also strains credulity. For one thing, Ray had an idea of how to get a passport in Canada back when he was still in prison. He had read a newspaper article about an Italian criminal that had exploited the simple process of getting Canadian papers and had spoken with a fellow inmate about how one could use newspaper archives and city records to get a birth certificate and establish identity. Indeed, that appears to be the reason why he had gone to Canada in the first place. He had one misconception that held him back, though. He was under the impression that in order to get his passport he needed a voucher, a Canadian citizen willing to attest to his identity. So in Montreal, he bought himself a suit and got himself a haircut and went about trying to meet a lady friend that he could eventually convince to vouch for him. And he did meet someone, a polished woman in her thirties by the name of Claire Keating, with whom he had a fleeting romance. One of the bigger logical flaws of his story about Raoul was that he continued pursuing women, and Ms. Keating specifically, in his effort to obtain a passport even when Raoul had supposedly already offered to obtain the papers for him. One might suggest that he continued to pursue her for genuine romantic reasons, and considering the fact that she was by all accounts quite lovely and throughout his life his only other liaisons appear to have been with prostitutes, this would be quite plausible, were it not for the fact that he abandoned his pursuit of her as soon as he learned she worked for the Canadian Department of Transport. He was using her, and when he felt she represented a threat, he dropped her. Regardless, even according to Ray’s own legend of Raoul, the mystery figure never actually provided him with those long-promised papers. After making his escape from the scene of the crime and getting himself back up to Canada, he did that himself, using his old tricks to establish false identity and this time scheming to create a second identity that could vouch for him until he discovered he had no need for a voucher. In the end, we know exactly how he got himself overseas, and we have a clear idea of how he kept himself in money.

James Earl Ray’s fake Canadian Passport, via ABC News

As for the day in question, Ray contends that not only was he unaware of the plot against King, but he was wholly ignorant that King was even present in Memphis when he followed Raoul’s directions and drove there. We know that he checked in to the New Rebel Motel, alone, under his known alias Eric S. Galt, on the evening before the murder, and we know he was up late based on the clerk’s report of seeing his light on at 4am. What Ray tells us is that he met Raoul at the New Rebel, received directions to check into the rooming house across from the Lorraine Motel the next day and meet Raoul at the nearby restaurant Jim’s Grill at three in the afternoon. Ray claims he handed the hunting rifle he’d recently purchased in Birmingham over to Raoul in the New Rebel and never saw it again, the implication being that Raoul had asked him to buy it not for some weapons deal but merely to connect him to the murder weapon and to get his fingerprints on it. Of course, this story already doesn’t make sense in a few ways. For example, if the gun deal were real, they could have done it right there at the New Rebel, with no reason to switch hotels, and if that were just a ruse to get Ray into the rooming house and connect him with the sniper’s nest, why wouldn’t Raoul have just had him take the rifle there as well, on the understanding that they’d be completing their gun deal in the room? But regardless of why or at whose direction, Ray did indeed head to the rooming house the next day and check in under the alias John Willard, and then the various stories he has told over the years in crafting his alibi become muddled. He met with Raoul either at Jim’s Grill, in the parked Mustang, or in room 5B in the rooming house (Posner 230). We know that after checking into the room, Ray drove to buy a pair of binoculars, and he says he did that on Raoul’s instructions. After returning to the room and giving Raoul the binoculars, Ray made himself scarce at Raoul’s insistence. This is the critical hour before the assassination, and Ray asserts that he wasn’t even in the rooming house, claiming instead that he was in Jim’s Grill, or perhaps another restaurant or an ice cream parlor, but also at a movie theater, and maybe in a drugstore, plus sitting in his car for a while (Posner 231). Quite the vaguely busy hour. It was when he was sitting in his car that he heard the shot, and then Raoul, he claimed, burst out of the rooming house and got into the Mustang’s backseat, pulling a sheet over himself to hide. Ray drove him several block away, let him out, and that was the last he ever saw Raoul. The only problem with this alibi was that there were witnesses at a record store who saw a single man climb into an empty white Mustang after the shooting and drive off alone. True to form, Ray laughed it off, said that first story was just a joke, and emended his alibi (Posner 231). A gas station attendant named Willie Green had been quoted in a newspaper as reporting that during the assassination, a suspiciously nervous man was at his filling station pacing around the public phone. He said he believed Ray was the man he had seen and had identified him from a photo, and moreover, he believed there had been a white Mustang in the lot. In truth, the attendant’s claims to have identified the nervous man from a photo of Ray must have been false, as police did not have a photo of Ray when the attendant was questioned. And Gerald Posner, in his fantastic book Killing the Dream, which has been instrumental in creating this series, uncovered in the notes of the journalist who first quoted Green the detail that the gas station attendant had actually seen this nervous fellow sometime after the assassination, and that he had hung around the station until long after Ray would’ve been out of state.  Nevertheless, Ray’s new alibi became that he had been at a gas station—one he couldn’t quite pinpoint in his memory—getting a spare tire repaired. As for why he suddenly fled the city and the country, he explained that he spooked when he ran into a police roadblock—already a doubtful scenario since there was a recognized failure of the police to establish roadblocks—and afterward, hearing on the radio news of the assassination and the fact that police were looking for a white Mustang, he put the pieces together and headed to Canada.

Ray’s story about Raoul has been found by many, including the House Select Committee on Assassinations that convened in 1978 to further examine conspiracy claims in both the King and the JFK slayings, to be wholly unreliable. Some of the strongest evidence against his claim that he had bought the rifle at Raoul’s direction simply to show a prospective Mexican buyer the kind of weapon they might provide in an arms deal comes from the testimony of the several gun store clerks who dealt with Ray in and around Birmingham during the weeks leading up to the assassination. They said he asked numerous questions about different rifles’ accuracy and about the quality of different scopes. They remembered him inquiring how far a bullet might be expected to drop over certain distances. When he finally did purchase a rifle, he returned it the next day, explaining he needed a more powerful gun as he intended “to hunt bigger game” (Posner 13).  These appear to be the statements of a man with specific needs who plans to make a particular use of the firearm, not of a man picking up a rifle on behalf of someone else just to show to a third party. In the end, the House Select Committee on Assassinations determined that all evidence suggested James Earl Ray had pulled the trigger and killed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but they were a bit less definite on the question of whether he acted alone, suggesting that he may have had some help. So, if Raoul was simply a fabrication, meant to stir up conspiracy claims and help Ray sell his story, it seems the issue becomes who else might have aided or been aware of Ray’s plans to assassinate King, and in the reports of gun store clerks we have some further clues to this mystery. In explaining why he was exchanging the rifle he had bought for another, he said he had made the decision after speaking with his brother about it.

James Earl Ray and his lawyer testifying before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, via The Telegraph

Be on the lookout for the next installment in this continuing series, as we examine this and the further mystery of why James Earl Ray murdered Dr. King, in Part Three: Ray’s Reasons.

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Further Reading

Posner, Gerald. Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Random House, 1998