The Abode of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Part Two: Diaspora

Spanish colonialism in the New World began with Christopher Columbus’s establishment of settlement on Hispaniola in 1493. Spurred by the discovery of gold, Spain pressed its claim and spread quickly, to Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Cuba. By 1508, they were establishing themselves on mainland South and Central America, and 15 years later, Franciscan friars arrived to build missions across New Spain. Spanish colonial missions served more than one purpose: to convert the native peoples to Christianity while also pacifying them and acculturating them to Spanish society while the natural resources of their land were extracted. As the work of these monks among the natives of various regions continued, many ecclesiastics observed that these indigenous groups, far removed from each other by both distance and culture, seemed to keep Hebrew customs and resemble the Jews in some regards. Bartholeme de Las Casas went so far as to declare that they were “of the Lost Tribes,” an assertion that encouraged even further the efforts to convert them to Christianity, for the conversion of the Jews, as discussed in the previous episode, was seen as an important milestone on the road to the eschaton, or the conclusion of God’s divine plan for our world. Another view, however, suggested that Satan had led these fallen people into counterfeit Hebrew customs in order to make them resistant to Christian conversion, as were the Jews themselves, an argument that history has shown to be both anti-Semitic and inaccurate. These early, contradictory views of Spanish ecclesiastics regarding the Israelitish origin of the Native Americans can be observed clearly in the 1607 work Origin of the Indians of the New World and West Indies by missionary and chronicler Gregorio Garcia. He cites numerous perceived similarities between native peoples’ and Hebrew physical attributes, customs, dress, and religion, suggesting that the miraculous river crossing described in 2 Esdras actually represented the passage of the Lost Tribes across the Bering Strait. Many are the inconsistencies in his argument, such as that both the Jews and the Native Americans lacked cleanliness and that they both tended to bathe frequently. And if the bigotry against the Jews and the indigenous people wasn’t clear enough there, then consider his argument that both the Jews and Native Americans were ungrateful, the Native Americans to their Spanish colonial masters, and the Jews to the God that favored them, whose Son they had rejected. Perhaps most inconsistent was Garcia’s answer for why the natives of the Americas no longer spoke Hebrew when all the legends said that the Lost Tribes would only speak Hebrew. Well, clearly, he argued, their language had changed over time, but actually, he insisted, there are still traces of Hebrew in their various languages. Then again, he suggested, their language was entirely different only because the Devil had led them to take a new language so that they could not easily be converted to Christianity. Here, at the beginning of a new era in the search for the Lost Tribes, we see many of the same specious arguments, logical flaws, and racist themes that would come to characterize the more recent theories of what became of the northern tribes of the Kingdom of Israel after their deportation by the Assyrians.

With the regions previously believed to be the abode of the Lost Tribes having been explored more and more, the New World naturally became the next place where people believed the ten northern tribes of the Kingdom of Israel may have ended up. While the Spanish missionaries who first raised the notion gradually seem to have stopped believing it after decades of actually living among these indigenous peoples, the theory would emerge again in the 17th century, after a Portuguese man named Antonio de Montezinos, who had converted to Judaism and went by the name Aaron Levy, returned from some travels in South America during the early 1640s with the tale that he had discovered a tribe in the jungles of Ecuador that he was certain represented the remnants of the Lost Tribe of Reuben. He swore to the truth of this (as much as one can swear to the truth of a conjecture) in an affidavit, and in 1644 he told his story to Menasseh Ben Israel, a rabbi and diplomat, who believed him and took this as a sign that the Messianic age would soon dawn, when it was prophesied that Jews would be scattered over all the world. This spurred his composition of a book, The Hope of Israel, about which more will be said shortly. His book sparked interest and garnered support for the “Hebraic Indian” theory among Jews, who had previously dismissed the idea. And at the same time, Montezino’s affidavit was used as a central piece of evidence by a Puritan minister, Thomas Thorowgood, who spread the same theory among the English in his book, Jews in America, or Probabilities that Americans are of that Race. Support for the theory would continue, sporadically, through the 19th century and even in some circles up to modern day. Perhaps the best example of this theory’s mad proliferation of supposed evidence can be illustrated by the composition of the book Antiquities of Mexico, by Irish antiquarian Edward King, Viscount Kingsborough. So convinced was Kingsborough by the idea that pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations were actually the settlements of the Lost Tribes that he spent years and a fortune bankrolling the absurdly massive book, which reproduce ancient codices on huge pages that measured two feet by one foot. With more than five hundred of these gigantic pages in each volume and more than 9 volumes, one can reasonably assert that it became something of an obsession for him, and in the end, it consumed him, as the debt he incurred in printing the book put him in prison, where he contracted the typhus that would kill him shortly after his release. While unreadable, his work did end up furthering the theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans because one Barbara Allan Simon wrote a book called The Ten Tribes of Israel Historically Identified with the Aborigines of the Western Hemisphere, which appears to have essentially been a summary of Kingsborough’s work. And so the theory was dispersed, through the years and across the world, despite the quality of its evidence.

An image of Spanish colonial abuse of American aborigines featured in the massive “Codex Kingsborough.” Public Domain.

Not all versions of this theory were the same. As indicated above, Franciscan missionaries saw the Lost Tribes in Caribbean island natives as well as mainland peoples, while the Viscount Kingsborough focused more on lost Mesoamerican civilizations. In his effort to negotiate the return of European Jewry to England, from whence they had been expelled by King Edward I in 1290, Menasseh ben Israel appealed to Christians there that wanted to see the end times begin by suggesting that, if Jews were already in every land but England, they only had to be let back in to England for prophecy to be fulfilled and the eschaton to unfold. But his theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans was also rather different. He argued that the Ten Tribes has crossed the Bering Strait into the Americas, but that the Tartars followed them, made war on them, and drove them down through Central and South America. He cited tenuous similarities of place names as evidence: the Yucatan being named after Joktan, a great-great-grandson of Noah’s son Shem, and Peru being a transposition of the name Ophir, one of Joktan’s sons. Much of the evidence for the theory that Native Americans were the Lost Tribes also relies on the perceived similarity of words, such as Antonio Montezinos’s claims, which came from the fact that he heard this Ecuadorian tribe chant something that sounded vaguely similar to the Jewish Shema prayer. The most cited piece of “evidence” is that certain tribes seemed to call their god by a name similar to the Hebrew name Yahweh, such as the Taíno name for their great creator spirit, Yaya. Customs between the two cultures were likewise linked according to perceived similarity, like measuring their time by nights, and washing their newborns. Some even suggested that prophecy foretelling the Lost Tribes would resort to cannibalism was fulfilled by these indigenous peoples that they suspected of cannibalism, and that the prophecies of plagues that would descend on the Jews were fulfilled by the many epidemics that Old World colonists introduced. It wasn’t long before counterarguments appeared, most notably in Hamon l’Estrange’s Americans no Iewes, or improbabilities that the Americans are of that race. L’Estrange correctly points out that, if you look close enough at any languages, you will start to see words that sound alike, and that there is no uniformity of religion among the many native peoples of the New World, not to mention the fact that many tribes were pantheistic rather than monotheistic. As for the customs, he rightly observes that computation of time by nights and washing of newborns and other parallel customs are common in a myriad of cultures. Nevertheless, even L’Estrange argued for a biblical origin of the Native American peoples, suggesting that, rather than the Lost Tribes, they were descended from Noah’s other sons, Japheth and Ham.

More scientific arguments as to the true origins and dispersion of indigenous Americans would eventually appear, with the prevailing theory being that Native Americans are descended from Siberian and South East Asian peoples who crossed the land bridge that formerly existed in the Bering Sea more than 10,000 years before the Israelites were deported by the Assyrians, and DNA evidence appears to support this. But long before such empirical resolutions to this mystery appeared, a variety of pseudo-archaeological hoaxes helped to forever cement the theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans in the popular imagination. The first was in the early 19th century, when a man who claimed to be able to find buried treasure by scrying with a seer stone, an occupation that had landed him in court more than once as a disorderly person, turned his talents instead to founding a religion. With his head in a hat, staring at his seer stone, this man, Joseph Smith, dictated the Book of Mormon, supposedly divinely translating the “reformed Egyptian” of some engraved gold plates that he claimed an angel had led him to find, plates that he could not show to anyone. In the resulting book, it was “revealed,” among many other things, that Native Americans were descended not from the lost northern tribes exactly, but rather from Israelite refugees who lived in the time of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, who had crossed the ocean to settle in the Americas, along with one group from the time of the Tower of Babel and the confusion of languages who crossed to America on covered boats that are described like submarines. Much of the Book of Mormon is clearly inspired by ideas that were then in the zeitgeist, like the theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans and contemporary views against secret societies, which serves as proof enough that it was the work of Smith and not an ancient text. If you’d like to learn more about this, there is a wealth of further information in my historical novel, Manuscript Found!, which can be found on Amazon.

A depiction of Joseph Smith’s claims that an angel led him to the golden plates and gave him the magic spectacles he used to translate them. Public Domain.

Smith was not the last to make claims about discovering an artifact that indicated Israelite settlement in ancient America. Nor even was he the first. In 1815, while ploughing his field, a hosteler named Joseph Merrick found a phylactery, or a box containing Hebrew texts that is traditionally worn during prayer. In 1860, David Wyrick discovered more than one stone inscribed with Hebrew in a Native American burial mound. Starting in 1890, James Scotford and Daniel Soper “discovered” thousands of objects in Michigan that seemed to support the theory. And in the 1930s, an archaeologist discovered a decalogue stone, inscribed in Paleo-Hebrew with the Ten Commandments, in New Mexico. All of these finds and their implications of pre-Columbian Semitic contact with the Americas have either been logically explained or debunked, and since discussing each would be a significant digression here, I’ll be devoting another post to them. To conclude, though, I would reiterate that modern science and scholarship have relegated this theory to the fringe, even though it is still believed by the Church of Latter-Day Saints and even by certain Native American groups who have embraced the idea of descent from Israel. Today, though, it should be clear to every sensitive and conscious person that the theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans was very much anti-Semitic and represented yet another shameful aspect of colonialism. Identifying the Jews with a native population that was widely viewed as barbaric and primitive and in need of Christian salvation reveals a great deal about the global prejudice against the Jews, and the denial of Native American peoples’ own various histories and distinct cultures was just another form of indigenous erasure.

While this Lost Tribes theory was developing, another was growing back in England suggesting that the British themselves were descended from the Lost Tribes, rather ironic since Jews had been expelled from the country centuries earlier. British Israelism, or perhaps more accurately, Anglo-Israelism, began in 1649 with the publication of The Rights of the Kingdom by John Sadler, a friend and secretary of Oliver Cromwell’s. Also a millenarian and an acquaintance of Menasseh ben Israel, Sadler seems to have hoped that suggesting the British were of the Lost Tribes would further encourage the readmission of the Jews to his country and thereafter bring on the Millennium. His idea was seized and enlarged by one Richard Brothers in the 1790s, who turned it into more of a cult than an academic theory. He was not satisfied with identifying the British as the Lost Tribes. He further claimed that he was himself descended from the House of David and therefore destined to rule the “hidden Israelites” until the return of Christ. In fact, he went so far as to insist that he should reign as the king of England and to share with his followers prophecies that the king would die, leading to his arrest for treason and his imprisonment in an asylum for the criminally insane. Despite the fact that Brothers died a solitary and defeated man, halfway through the next century, Anglo-Israelism saw a resurgence, first in a popular tract published in 1840 which spread and gained traction among Bible study groups. The theory would further gain support in America in the 1930s among evangelicals struggling to reconcile their prejudice against Jews and their affection for the Hebrew scriptures.

The Coronation Chair at Westminster Abbey, said to contain the stolen Stone of Scone, which in turn is said to be one and the same as Ireland’s Lia Fail, or The Stone of Destiny. Public Domain.

In short, Anglo Israelism developed to argue that not just the British but other European nations as well were of the Lost Tribes, and then the U.S., Australia, and South Africa as well through migration. It claims that the Lost Tribes found their way to northern Europe and settled in England, Ireland, Scotland, Norway, Holland, Denmark, Luxembourg, Belgium, northern France, Sweden, Switzerland, and parts of Germany.  Like the theory of the Hebraic origin of Native Americans, this belief relies a great deal on fast and loose and questionable etymology. For example, the Danish are said to be the Danites, and the word “British” is claimed to be derived from the Hebrew b’rith, which means “covenant,” and ish, for “man,” making British mean “man of the covenant.” Likewise, the word Saxon is said by the believers of Anglo-Israelism to be from “Isaac’s sons,” or the “sons of Isaac.” The fact is etymologists who are educated experts derive the word Saxon from a Teutonic word that means “dagger,” which Anglo-Israelists account for by claiming without evidence that there were two different peoples called Saxons. A great deal of the Anglo-Israel theory also relies on a legend surrounding the so-called Stone of Destiny. Supposedly, this was a stone consecrated to God by Jacob and carried in solemn processions during the time of David, the stone believed to have been referred to in the psalm that speaks of “the stone which the builders rejected.” Many Christians view this line as a prophetic reference to Christ, but here it is seen as a physical object, perhaps also the stone on which Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac. According to the Anglo-Israelist version of history, this stone was a cornerstone in Solomon’s temple until the Babylonians destroyed it. After that, it came into the possession of the Danites, who were said to be a seafaring people, and they sailed with it until they wrecked on the shores of Ireland. Now, perceptive readers may realize here that the timeline is fouled up. The Danites and the other Lost Tribes supposedly disappeared during the Assyrian conquest, long before the Babylonian destruction of the temple, but let’s not get caught up in minutia. They certainly don’t. So there in Ireland, the Danites established a nation, and the sacred cornerstone was revered as the Lia Fail, the Holy Stone of Ireland. The Irish claim that the Holy Stone remains there, at the Hill of Tara, an ancient ceremonial place, but the Scottish claim that the Lia Fail eventually came into their possession, becoming the coronation stone that they called the Stone of Scone. I spoke about this artifact briefly in a previous episode. King Edward I seized the Stone of Scone and turned it into the Coronation Chair at Westminster Abbey, although there is further conjecture that the stone Edward Longshanks took was also not the real Stone of Destiny. Most late 19th century Anglo-Israelists seem to have believed the Stone of Destiny, Jacob’s Pillow, was still buried in Ireland in the Hill of Tara, the name of which they suggested was connected to the Torah. Others among them thought it was not the stone in the hill, but rather the Ark of the Covenant. Long story short, at the turn of the century, adherents of Anglo-Israelism dug up the Hill of Tara in several places, seriously damaging this historical site and, of course, failing to turn up the Ark or the Stone of Destiny, or any evidence to support their claim of descent from the Lost Tribes.

A manifestly anti-Semitic pamphlet written by Christian Identity founder Wesley Swift, which, disturbingly, is sold on Amazon even today.

Now, British Israelism may seem like a silly belief, or in light of the damage they did in Ireland, a harmful falsehood, but as it spread in the U.S., it transformed into an even more overtly racist ideology that provided pseudohistorical and theological rationale for domestic terrorism. It began in the 1950s, among fundamentalist evangelical Christian figures who were also involved with the Ku Klux Klan. To be precise, a Methodist minister and Klansman named Wesley Swift, a right-wing California politician named William Porter Gale, and a militant Klansman named Richard Butler adopted Anglo-Israelism and adapted it into a full-fledged racialist theology called the Christian Identity movement. These men took the idea of the Israeli origins of white Europeans in a more extremist direction, taking it all the way back to creation to assert that there were two creations, one of Adam and Eve, and one of the “mud people” who proliferated beyond the Garden of Eden. Their evidence is the separate mentions of the creation of mankind in Genesis 1 and 2, although scholars see these as two accounts of the same Creation, taken from two different sources but collected together in scripture. According to Identity adherents, though, the two separate creations were of white people and people of color. Then Eve’s original sin is believed by them to have been sexual in nature, that she engaged in intercourse with an outsider—the Serpent in their view being a “mud person” who had managed to enter Eden. So by their reckoning, the only unforgivable sin is miscegenation. The product of this miscegenation was Cain, the murderous brother, who was banished to live among the “mud people” for the murder of his brother Abel, a product of the union between Adam and Eve, and therefore a white person. According to their abhorrent beliefs, there are two lines of descent from Eve: through Cain, who would go on to manipulate and rule the “mud people” because he was in some part still superior to them, and then the line of Adam through his surviving son Seth. Therefore, rather than descendants of the Lost Tribes, per se, white people are the supposedly pure race descended from Adam, while all people of color are descended from the “mud people,” and the Jews, excepting Christ of course whom they count as being of their white race, are descended from Cain, corrupted by the blood of the “mud people” and still secretly manipulating and ruling over them through their conspiratorial machinations.

Although it may at first seem counter-intuitive for anti-Semites to identify themselves as the true Israelites, this explicitly racist evolution of the Lost Tribes theory must be seen in the context of white supremacists’ notion of so-called Aryan people as superior. By co-opting the place of the Jews as God’s Chosen People, these white supremacists were able to use existing belief structures to both exalt their own race and denigrate the Jews. According to the despicable claims of Christian Identity leaders, America is a Zion or New Jerusalem meant only for themselves, the supposed true Chosen People: whites, but it is overrun by “mud people,” and the government, which they believe the Jews control, will never help them drive out all non-whites. So they have created a religious belief system that demands armed resistance to the government. Christian Identity proponents have been instrumental in founding numerous paramilitary militia groups, some of whom openly admit that they refuse to acknowledge the authority of the federal government, groups such as the California Rangers, a paramilitary arm of the Christian Defense League founded by William Porter Gale in 1960, and the Posse Comitatus, the anti-Semitic survivalist militia movement that Gale later formed, members of which have engaged in tax evasion and counterfeiting and then killed federal marshals who attempted to arrest them. The Christian Identity theology spreads openly as a rationale among many armed citizen militias. In the 1970s and ‘80s, it drove the Silent Brotherhood, a so-called  "Aryan Resistance Movement," to engage in counterfeiting and armed robbery in order to fund their plans for murder campaigns and the overthrow of the government. Thankfully, this neo-fascist terrorist organization was stopped, and most of its agents arrested, but it would be naïve to think that there does not remain a clear and present threat from similar cells of Christian Identity adherents. For example, Timothy McVeigh, the 1995 Oklahoma City bomber, was credibly tied to an anti-government, Christian Identity group, and even today, Thom Robb, the current leader of the Ku Klux Klan, preaches Identity Christianity to members who are regularly implicated in hate crimes and racially motivated violence.

These are not the only theories about what peoples may be descended from the Israelites. There have been claims that the Lemba, an ethnic group in Zimbabwe, are descended from Jews who left Judea, and that the Bnei Menashe group in northeastern India, who have adopted Judaism in more modern times, really are the descendants of the Lost Tribe of Menasseh as they claim to be. In Ethiopia, the narrative that the tribe of Dan settled there, in accordance with the tale of Eldad the Danite that I spoke about in a recent patron exclusive, remains persistent. A community of Jews in Ethiopia that calls itself Beta Israel embraces this narrative, tracing their presence there all the way back to the 4th century CE, though only unconfirmed rumors like Eldad’s story and rumors attributable to the Prester John legend place any Jewish presence there before the 14th century. Back here in the U.S., another group latched onto the Lost Tribes myth as a racial origin story, but rather than white supremacists, these were black religious communities. In the late 19th century, more than one black preacher, William Crowdy in Oklahoma and Frank Cherry in Tennessee, claimed through divine revelation to have discovered that black people were descended from the Lost Tribes. The idea spread during the 20th century, combining with black nationalist movements and resulting in a migration of these “Black Hebrew Israelites” to Liberia, and thereafter, to Israel, where they overstayed their visas and established a community under Israel’s Law of Return, despite the Israeli government not recognizing them as Jews. Meanwhile, some groups of Black Hebrew Israelites in America, much like their Christian Identity counterparts, developed an ideology of hate that encouraged violence. To these militant Black Hebrew Israelites, while they were descended from the Lost Tribes of the Chosen People, white Europeans were descended from Jacob’s brother Esau, or Edom, who was described as ruddy and hirsute. As Edomites were said in Obadiah to have done evil things to the Israelites, and were prophesied to have the same evil things done to them in return, proponents of this violent faction of the Black Hebrew Israelites have engaged in racially motivated violence against white people and against Jews, whom they call “fake Jews” and whom they blame for slavery. So, as we have seen, the legend of the Lost Tribes has been taken up in many cultures and nations, raised whenever confronted with an alien “other” and used again and again to justify fear of and violence against Jews and also other feared or resented races. Its history is as long and violent and misunderstood as history itself.

Further Reading

Callahan, Tim. “The ‘Lost’ Tribes of Israel.” Skeptic, vol. 24, no. 3, July 2019, pp. 8–13. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=138836779&site=ehost-live.

Hyamson, Albert M. “The Lost Tribes and the Return of The Jews To England.” Transactions (Jewish Historical Society of England), vol. 5, 1902, pp. 115–147. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/29777629.

Jackson, John L. “Black Israelites: DNA and Then Some.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 28, no. 3, 2013, pp. 537–539. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43898489.

Lyman, Stanford M. “The Lost Tribes of Israel as a Problem in History and Sociology.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 12, no. 1, 1998, pp. 7–42. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20019954.

Markowitz, Fran. “Israel as Africa, Africa as Israel: ‘Divine Geography’ in the Personal Narratives and Community Identity of the Black Hebrew Israelites.” Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 4, 1996, pp. 193–205. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3317528.

May, H. G. “Archaeological News and Views: The Ten Lost Tribes.” The Biblical Archaeologist, vol. 6, no. 3, 1943, pp. 55–60. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3209244.

McFarland, Michael, and Glenn Gottfried. “The Chosen Ones: A Mythic Analysis of the Theological and Political Self-Justification of Christian Identity.” Journal for the Study of Religion, vol. 15, no. 1, 2002, pp. 125–145. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24764349.

Sharpe, Tanya Telfair. “The Identity Christian Movement: Ideology of Domestic Terrorism.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 30, no. 4, 2000, pp. 604–623. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2645906.

The Abode of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Part One: Conquest

When the great King Solomon died some 930 years before the Common Era, the golden age of Israel united under a single monarchy died with him. Among the Twelve Tribes of Israel—the tribes of Judah, Benjamin, Simeon, Dan, Ephraim, Reuben, Gad, Menasseh, Issachar, Zebulun, Asher, and Naphtali—Solomon had always favored the southern tribes of Benjamin and Judah, in whose territory lay the city of Jerusalem. His successor, Rehoboam, could not manage to keep the kingdom united, and the northern tribes rebelled under Jeroboam. Once divided, many in the southern Kingdom of Judah, who kept their Mosaic traditions, viewed the newly established Kingdom of Israel in the north as apostates. Thus, when Assyrian Shalmaneser V conquered the northern kingdom some two centuries later, around 722 BCE, it was suggested that the subsequent deportation of the ten northern tribes was an act of God, a punishment for their idolatry. These ten tribes of the northern kingdom would come to be known as the Lost Tribes of Israel. Together, prophecy and folklore have transformed their story into simultaneously a legitimate historical mystery and a wide-reaching historical myth that has been baselessly used to both defame and glorify different groups of people. The tale of the Lost Tribes of Israel really only begins with their deportation and forced resettlement in, according to 2 Kings, the “cities of the Medes,” which would appear to be Media in north-western Iran. After that, they disappear from history, but the legend tells us that they did not integrate, that much as the Jews of the Diaspora later would, they maintained their cultural identity and fled eastward, away from the lands where they had been resettled. It would later be claimed that they eventually came, after more than a year of travel, to a land untouched by mankind, called Arsareth. It is here that the Lost Tribes remain to this day, protected and kept in place by a magical river, the River Sambation, or the Sabbatical River, so-called because it is impassable 6 days a week but miraculously dries up on the Sabbath, a day on which travel is forbidden. But at the dawn of the Messianic Age, it is said that the Sabbatical River will be parted for them, and they will return to their homeland and once more reunite all the tribes of Israel.

A relief from an Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III’s palace, picturing deportees from a city sacked by Assyrian forces; courtesy the British Museum.

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In my recent post on Prester John, I mentioned that the famous Prester John letter claims the Lost Tribes of Israel survived in that legendary Christian king’s fantastical kingdom. Much like the Prester John legend, the legend of the Lost Tribes has inspired many an intrepid explorer to search for them in distant Asia and Africa, and also like the Prester John legend, which was inspired in part by the Acts of Thomas, the Lost Tribes legend first took definite shape in the apocryphal work, 2 Esdras. Scholars believe this work was written sometime after the destruction of the Second Temple, when Romans captured Jerusalem in 70 CE. For a long time, this work survived only incompletely, as it contained a lacuna, or literal historical blind spot of missing verses in the middle of it. It seems all Latin versions of this work had been copied from an original from which someone had torn out pages. These verses were not restored until the 19th century. Although attributed to Ezra the Scribe of the canonical Book of Ezra, some scholars believe it to be the pseudepigraphal work of as many as five different authors. And indeed it is picked and pulled from as if it were a collection of works rather than a coherent work. For example, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church accepts only twelve chapters from the work, calling it Izra Sutuel, and these same twelve chapters are valued by others as a text called The Apocalypse of Ezra. Originally, I was thinking of this episode as an edition of my Apocryphal Catechism series, but the legend of the Lost Tribes reaches so much further than its apocryphal beginnings, and has become so much more than it appeared in 2 Esdras, Chapter 13, verses 40-47. These 8 verses established only that the ten exiled northern tribes left the land of their resettlement for a “further country,” deciding once again to obey God’s commandments. So God helped them escape by holding back the waters of the Euphrates that they might cross. This appears to be the beginning of the legendary Sabbatical River, for it’s said that in “the latter time,” God will “stay the springs of the stream again, that they may go through” and return to Israel. Here, in this apocryphon, we are given the name of the untouched land the Lost Tribes traveled a year and a half to find, Arsareth. Some have tracked down in fragments and other works from antiquity mention of an Arsaratha, suggesting that this was an Israelite colony in Assyria whose name meant City of the Remainder, but if that were the case, then it certainly was not in an untouched land 18 months’ journey away from the place of their resettlement. Other scholars suggest that, rather than a proper city name, this was a corruption through the apocryphon’s many translations of the Hebrew phrase erez aheret, or “another land.” So at the beginning of the legend, all that we have is the Ten Tribes making their way over a river to a distant region, where they will abide until the end times.

For the evolution of this legend into an anti-Semitic motif, we must look to the 12th century, when the Lost Tribes were first conflated with the biblical Gog and Magog. I mentioned this in my last episode about the Prester John letter, that a brief mention of the Lost Tribes in the letter would later be twisted into the claim that these Lost Tribes were actually the evil and barbaric Gog and Magog supposedly trapped by Alexander the Great within the Caspian Mountains. The history of Gog and Magog is one of biblical contradiction and confusion. A Gog is mentioned in 1 Chronicles as a descendant of the prophet Joel, but any who might consider the legend of Gog and Magog literally would have to view this Gog as unrelated, for the prophet Joel, if it was he who actually wrote the Book of Joel, is believed to have lived and written during the Second Temple period and thus he and his sons were not among Lost Tribes in a faraway Arsareth. In Ezekiel, it is prophesied that Gog and Magog will one day lay siege to the land of Israel, and here Gog is identified as a person, the chief prince of “Meshek and Tubal” in a land called Magog. These tribal names, Meshek and Tubal, have long caused their own debate, with many believing they referred to descendants of Noah’s son Japheth, to whom various dubious theories of racial origin have traced a variety of peoples, including Scots, Poles, and Russians. Nowhere is it argued, though, that Japhetites were among the northern tribes of Israel deported by Assyrians, for it is traditionally held that, after the flood, Noah’s son Shem became the progenitor of the Hebrew and Arab peoples, as Abraham is counted among his descendants. Lastly, in Revelation, Gog and Magog appear again as the innumerable armies allied with the devil who march over the earth and attack Jerusalem. These sources actually don’t depict them as evil; Revelation specifically says that the devil deceives them in order to draw them to his side. But by the time they are included in the legend of Alexander trapping them in the Caspian Mountains, which some identify with the Caucasus, they have become heathen barbarians and unclean cannibals. In fact, later Islamic texts depict the inhabitants of Gog and Magog as inhuman monsters, with tails and huge ears that they use as bedding and claws with which they endlessly scratch at the wall that traps them. Considering depictions like this, it is clear that the equation of the Lost Tribes of Israel with Gog and Magog reflected and thereafter propagated anti-Semitic views.

A depiction of Alexander trapping the people of Gog and Magog. Public Domain.

The first person to suggest the Lost Tribes were one and the same as Gog and Magog appears to have been French theologian Petrus Comestor around 1173 in his paraphrasing of the Bible, Historia Scholastica. By Comestor’s retelling, Alexander had enclosed the ten Lost Tribes of Israel within the Caspian Mountains, and had been able to do so only with the help of the God of Israel. Comestor’s work saw widespread use in universities, and with translations in every Western European vernacular language, it became widely read as a “popular bible” for centuries. It is no surprise then, that after it became so popular, later editions of the Alexander Romance and the Prester John letter were altered to conflate these two legends, with the Alexander Romance’s mention of Gog and Magog thereafter transformed into a reference to the Lost Tribes, and the Prester John letter’s mention of the Lost tribes conversely changed into a reference to Gog and Magog. The conflation of the two reached their anti-Semitic height in The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a 14th century work purportedly written by an English knight, describing his fantastical journeys through the legendary realm of Prester John and the faraway territories of the Lost Tribes of Israel. The work is an amalgamation of previous stories from romances and extant encyclopedias. Who wrote it remains a mystery, and it seems likely that the narrating character himself, Sir Mandeville, was entirely an invention. The work claims that in the Caspian Mountains, the “Jews of 10 lineages” that men call Gog and Magog, have been enclosed. It claims that the Lost Tribes might actually escape their enclosure on one side, but still dare not because they understand no languages but their own. Further, Mandeville foretells how these Lost Tribes will go out into the world during the time of the Antichrist and will subjugate and destroy all Christian people. Even worse than this is the further implication that the Jews of the Diaspora have taken great pains to preserve their Hebrew language only so they will be able to communicate with the Lost Tribes and aid them in their conquest of Christians everywhere. Thus we see that these are really claims of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy of global domination, perhaps unsurprising when placed into historical context. A few decades before Comestor’s work, William of Norwich’s murder gave birth to that other Anti-Christian Jewish World Conspiracy theory, the Blood Libel, which I have spoken about in great detail in a previous episode. And The Book of John Mandeville is believed to have been written just a few years after the peak of the Black Death’s devastation of Europe, when, as I have also discussed in an even more recent episode, Jews were again scapegoated, falsely accused of starting the pandemic as part of a secret and deadly war against Christendom.

The writer of the Mandeville book seems to have taken some of his notions that the Lost Tribes represented a Jewish threat to Christianity from an earlier writer, Matthew Paris. In Paris’s Chronica Majora, and later in the Book of Mandeville, it’s suggested that the place where the Lost Tribes settled and/or were trapped was Scythia, a somewhat undefined Central Eurasian region where resided a race of nomadic horsemen described by Herodotus. These Scythians came to be erroneously identified with numerous warlike nomads, such as the Goths and the Hun. Essentially, Scythian came to mean barbarian hordes from somewhere out thataway. Considering the development of the Lost Tribes legend, it’s not surprising that they came to be thought of as Scythians eventually, and this led to their further identification with the Golden Horde. Matthew Paris was the first to identify the Lost Tribes with the Mongol invaders who at the time he was writing his massive chronicle were conquering numerous regions of Eastern and Central Europe under the command of Genghis Khan’s grandsons. But Matthew, along with most other Europeans, did not call them Mongols or even Scythians but rather Tartars, who had arrived from their homeland, Tartary, a vast and indistinct Asian territory. The name Tartar appears to be a corruption of an actual Turkic ethnic group, the Tatars, who were not so much the Mongols themselves but rather a people conquered by Genghis Khan and absorbed by his Mongol Empire. The name Tatar is believed by scholars to have been corrupted to Tartar as a pun on Tartarus, a hellish abyss from Greek mythology, for it was said that these invaders had ridden out of hell, that their homeland was an infernal region, a terrible and uninhabitable abyss. And Matthew Paris goes so far as to include a clearly fictional episode that is akin to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in its imputation of Jewish conspiracy to betray Christendom. He claims that, in a secret meeting like that described in the Protocols forgery, Jews, who believed the Tartars, or Mongol invaders, to be the Lost Tribes returned, conspired to aid their campaign against the Christian West by smuggling provisions and weapons to them. If one doubts Matthew Paris’s prejudice against Jews or that he might have invented a Jewish conspiracy like this, one should look further into how his work spread the Blood Libel conspiracy theory by repeating accounts of Jewish ritual crucifixion, and further examine his depiction of the Lost Tribes, or Tartars, as irrational beasts with claws and fangs and disproportional bodies.

Depiction of Mongols as cannibals in Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora. Public Domain.

In the 17th century, an English parliamentarian and millenarian writer named Giles Fletcher the Elder would further Matthew Paris’s presumption that the Tartars were the Lost Tribes. By the time that he wrote his work The Tartars Or, Ten Tribes, the Golden Horde no longer ruled its conquered territories in Russia, though some remnants of their Mongol-Turkish confederation remained. Fletcher, who had lived in Moscow as an ambassador for Queen Elizabeth most of a year in 1588 and ’89, believed he was uniquely positioned to finally provide evidence for what others before him had claimed, that the Mongols were the Lost Tribes of Israel. He recognized that his views were somewhat unorthodox, for at the time, most reputable Protestant thinkers believed the “millennium,” or the thousand year reign of Christ on Earth mentioned in Revelation, was only a symbolic reference to the time period between the Incarnation and the Second Coming—a view called amillennialism. The apocalyptic view that Fletcher espoused was manifestly heterodox, to put it mildly. He put stock in the idea that the Millennium would only begin after the prophesied battle of Armageddon, when Protestants would vanquish Roman Catholics and Jews, reunited with their Lost Tribes and all of them converted to Christianity, would simultaneously rout the Ottoman Empire. But he did not dwell on the eschatology so much as his evidence for identifying the Tartars as the Lost Tribes who would be converted before ushering in Christ’s earthly reign. His evidence was that the “Scythian or Tartar tongue,” which he narrows down further to the “Turkish language,” even though this was only one of the languages spoken among the confederation of peoples that was the Golden Horde, was strikingly similar to Hebrew, though he was no linguist and at King’s College studied Greek rather these languages he was comparing. Unsurprisingly, modern linguists do not find his claims convincing. More than this, though, he further claimed that there were among the Tartars ten hordes, corresponding to the ten tribes, and that Timur, or as Fletcher called him Tamerlane, the Mongol conqueror of the 14th century, had expressly claimed to be descended from the Lost Danite Tribe. Unfortunately, no other sources appear to corroborate these claims, making them seem wholly invented. Lastly, he pointed to the practice of circumcision among the Tartars as evidence of Israelite cultural remnants, even though this practice had likely been introduced into Turkish and Mongol cultures with the spread of Islam. So after all, this first attempt to identify the Lost Tribes with a known people falls apart under scrutiny. And one finds that the entire legend of the Lost Tribes likewise becomes hard to credit under close inspection.

Contradictions in the scriptures from which the legend derives should be enough to cast doubt on its historicity. First is the matter of the river the northern tribes are said to have needed God’s help in crossing as they left the lands of their resettlement and struck out eastward toward lands untouched by men. The foundation of this legend in the apocryphal text 2 Esdras states that this was the River Euphrates, but from a geographical standpoint, that doesn’t make sense. If the northern tribes had been settled in the “cities of the Medes” as canonical texts clarify, then they had already crossed the Euphrates on their way from Israel to north-western Iran. So then if they were crossing the Euphrates again, they would have been on their way back homeward rather than striking out into the Far East. And maybe they did return in some numbers, for there is scriptural evidence that the ten northern tribes were never lost at all, at least not in their entirety. Prophetic texts in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea all promise the repatriation and redemption of the northern tribes, which would seem to indicate that there was definite knowledge of the northern tribes’ survival, and knowledge that they had retained their cultural identity even in exile. In fact, throughout Ezekiel, the prophet makes references to tribes other than the only two that supposedly remained 200 years after the Assyrian conquest of the north, and in three different chapters addresses “the entire House of Israel” as though tacitly admitting that members of all tribes remained. Likewise, in the canonical Book of Ezra 6:17, at the dedication of the Second Temple, a sin offering is made for all twelve tribes as though the Ten Lost Tribes remained, at least in part. One explanation for these indications is that all the talk in canonical texts of the Northern Tribes one day returning and being redeemed was not really about the tribes having been deported and physically lost but rather about the northern tribes’ perceived apostasy. In this sense, the northern tribes were only “lost” in the sense that all sinners and apostates are lost. After all, less than two decades after the fall of the north, in 701 BCE, Jerusalem and the remaining two tribes also fell to Assyrian conquest, resulting in another deportation, this time from among the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, but this deportation isn’t even mentioned in the scriptures.

Map of the territories of the tribes of Israel, from Tim Callahan’s “The ‘Lost’ Tribes of Israel,” Skeptic, vol. 24, no. 3, July 2019, p. 9.

The fact that the Assyrian deportation of southern tribes never resulted in a legend of more Lost Tribes seems evidence enough that Assyrian conquest did not result in absolute obliteration or even complete deportation. But there is further evidence from Assyrian sources, such as inscriptions that summarized the exploits of their kings. These texts give actual numbers for those deported from occupied territories, and while some of the numbers recorded are suspected by scholars to be exaggerations, the number claimed to have been deported from the north is only 27 thousand or so, which would not appear to have been a complete evacuation of all their population, suggesting many from the northern tribes were permitted to remain in their homelands. Furthermore, there is reason to believe that northern tribes had ample opportunity to escape Assyrian deportation and seek refuge in the south. After all, the process of their conquest was not sudden. The dismantling of the northern Kingdom of Israel had begun all the way back in 738 BCE under the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III. More than one deportation took place as the Assyrians took the region piece by piece, and we know that Israelites were aware of the deportation policy because the prophets Amos and Hosea are recorded as warning them that they will be exiled. Then there’s the fact that their conquest was interrupted, as Tiglath-Pileser’s successor Shalmaneser V died just after capturing the major northern cities. Assyrian forces marched home to see the next king, Sargon, establish himself, and did not return to continue their subjugation of the Kingdom of Israel for two years, during which time, again, many might have escaped the conquered cities. Population records even show a surge of new citizens in Jerusalem, supporting the theory that many northerners fled to the more secure southern city. After Assyrian control was reasserted and deportation from northern cities resumed, archaeological evidence still appears to support the idea that this deportation was only partial. A consistency of style in later ceramics and architecture stand as evidence that the northern culture was not wiped out. All of this stands as convincing evidence that the ten northern tribes of the Kingdom of Israel were never truly “lost” at all, a view that conforms well with the fact that this legend did not actually appear until the end of the Second Temple period.

The more one looks at the story of the Lost Tribes of Israel, the more clearly it can be seen as myth. For example, the idea that there is still some undiscovered Eastern land where an innumerable people remain cut off from the rest of the world is simply not credible. In fact, with modern knowledge of geography and the known dispersion of peoples, it is even hard to believe that back then the Lost Tribes might have found a land untouched by man in which to remain separate from other peoples, rather than just settling among an existing people and integrating. Thus, for a modern person to believe in the literal existence of the Lost Tribes of Israel, he or she must search for historical peoples or isolated races and make the argument that the Lost Tribes culture evolved into one we know existed or even still exists. While in a bygone era, explorers might strike out to exotic regions in hopes of finding the realm of Prester John or the abode of the Lost Tribes, today it has become more of an academic quest, with those who seek the Lost Tribes searching history books and ethnologies. Thus, much as Giles Fletcher the Elder made his argument that the Mongol Empire was descended from the Lost Tribes, many a theorist has suggested that the Lost Tribes ended up in some other region, in Africa, Japan, Western Europe, or even across the Bering Strait in the New World. And in this way, the legend of the Lost Tribe would experience its own diaspora, and as we will see in part two, would come to be used in a variety of dubious new religions and racist ideologies.

Further Reading

Barmash, Pamela. “At the Nexus of History and Memory: The Ten Lost Tribes.” AJS Review, vol. 29, no. 2, 2005, pp. 207–236. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4131732.

Callahan, Tim. “The ‘Lost’ Tribes of Israel.” Skeptic, vol. 24, no. 3, July 2019, pp. 8–13. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=138836779&site=ehost-live.

Cogley, Richard W. “‘The Most Vile and Barbarous Nation Of All the World’: Giles Fletcher the Elder’s The Tartars Or, Ten Tribes (Ca. 1610).” Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 3, 2005, pp. 781–814. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1353/ren.2008.0809.

Epstein, Morris, and עפשטיין מ'. “אור חדש על בעיית עשרת השבטים / NEW LIGHT ON THE TEN LOST TRIBES.” Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies / דברי הקונגרס העולמי למדעי היהדות, ו, 1973, pp. 21–30. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23529107.

Hyamson, Albert M. “THE LOST TRIBES: AND THE RETURN OF THE JEWS TO ENGLAND.” Transactions (Jewish Historical Society of England), vol. 5, 1902, pp. 115–147. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/29777629.

Kirsch, Stuart. “Lost Tribes: Indigenous People and the Social Imaginary.” Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 2, 1997, pp. 58–67. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3317506.

Lyman, Stanford M. “The Lost Tribes of Israel as a Problem in History and Sociology.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 12, no. 1, 1998, pp. 7–42. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20019954.

May, H. G. “Archaeological News and Views: The Ten Lost Tribes.” The Biblical Archaeologist, vol. 6, no. 3, 1943, pp. 55–60. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3209244.

Nisse, Ruth. “A Romance of the Jewish East: The Ten Lost Tribes and The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs in Medieval Europe.” Medieval Encounters, vol. 13, no. 3, Nov. 2007, pp. 499–523. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1163/157006707X222759.

The Epistle of Prester John

After the ill-fated siege of Damascus brought the Second Crusade to an end in abject failure for Christian forces, a curious letter arrived at the court of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel Komnenos. It purported to be from a Christian king who called himself Presbyter Johannes, or John the Priest. Several aspects of this curious letter made it very interesting to the emperor, who would thereafter show it to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. You see, this priest king claimed to be the ruler of a vast kingdom, with numerous other kings in service to him, and his realm was beyond the reach of their Muslim enemies, at their rear as it were, in India. His kingdom was one of exotic wonders, grand wealth, and perfect justice. And as a devout Christian monarch, who in a show of humility had chosen to forego titles such as King and Emperor for the unassuming appellation of Priest, he might have proved to be just the ally they needed to defeat the Muslims besieging their Crusaders in the Holy Land. Indeed, the letter itself holds out hope of just such aid, when this Presbyter Johannes vows to defend Christians everywhere and to bring his armies to the Sepulchre of the Lord in order to “humble and defeat the enemies of the cross.” It is curious that such an offer would be addressed to Emperor Manuel Komnenos, as it’s thought he actually worked against the Crusaders’ latest efforts by encouraging Turks to attack them. And for numerous possible reasons, the emperor never attempted to reply to the letter. Some time later, Pope Alexander III made an effort to contact this Asian priest-king in the hopes of securing some kind of definite support. The Pope dispatched a messenger named Phillip with a reply letter, sending this emissary somewhere out into the mysterious regions they believed held the realm of this Presbyter John, or as he came to be known, Prester John. Whatever became of this missive and its messenger was never recorded.

The appearance of this manuscript in 1165 was not the beginning of this legend. Prester John did not emerge to leap fully formed off the page of this missive. Rather, some groundwork for the legend had been laid all the way back in the second century, with the apocryphal work The Acts of Thomas, which I discussed in some detail in a recent patron exclusive podcast episode. That work either originated or spread the tradition that after Christ’s ascension, the Apostle Thomas, he who had doubted Christ’s return until he was permitted to touch his wounds, spread Christianity in India. This tradition, as well as the story of the Magi from the Gospel of Matthew, whom it was said Thomas baptized during his subsequent travels, provided context for the Prester John letter. In fact, the letter makes direct reference to Thomas, Prester John mentions that he regularly dines with the bishops of his kingdom, among whom is the “Patriarch of St. Thomas,” and he describes his kingdom as extending “from farthest India, where the body of St. Thomas the Apostle rests, to the place where the sun rises, and returns by the slopes of the Babylonian desert near the tower of Babel.” The Prester John letter even refers to a specific passage of the apocryphal Acts of Thomas when it states that Prester John’s palace was built “in the image and likeness of the palace which the apostle Thomas planned for Gondoforus, king of the Indians.” This is indeed an odd claim, as it demonstrates only a passing familiarity with that work. The passage referred to actually has Thomas, who had introduced himself as a builder to the King of India, taking the king’s money to build him a palace but then turning around and giving the money to the poor. When the king asked where his palace was, Thomas said it had been built for him in heaven, prompting the king to throw Thomas in prison. But the Prester John letter is clearly not referring to a metaphorical palace built of good deeds. Rather, he mentions outbuildings and specific architectural elements and the materials out of which different parts had been built. Clearly the writer of the Prester John letter wanted to use the already dubious legends of St. Thomas’s acts in India to bolster the authenticity of the letter, but also doesn’t seem to have bothered to read up on his source material. The Acts of Thomas, however, was not his only source, it seems.

The Apostle Thomas in India, before being martyred by an Indian king. Public domain image.

Some 43 years before the appearance of the Prester John letter, 12th century sources indicate that a man who went by the name Johannes appeared in Constantinople. His language was strange, but a translator was eventually found who explained that this Johannes claimed to be a prelate from the shrine of St. Thomas—its Patriarch, in fact—who had come as a representative of the Christian Church in India seeking an audience with the Pope. Thereafter, he followed an embassy back to Rome and the Papal court, where he told tall tales of the capital of India, which he called Hulna, as a magical city with a river running through its center that deposited an endless supply of gold and gems on its banks, making the residents wealthy beyond imagining. This Johannes’s shrine was where St. Thomas’s body was supposedly preserved—the location that the Prester John letter would later use to mark the boundary of his kingdom—and every year on the saint’s feast day, he said they placed the red-headed corpse of St. Thomas on a chair, his cheeks still full of color and his hand outstretched to hold the eucharist wafers, which it was claimed the deceased saint would snatch away from the unworthy. This was the story told in an anonymous tract called De Adventu Patriarchae Indorum, or “On the Arrival of the Patriarch of the Indians,” and it could easily be dismissed as a fiction if it weren’t for the existence of independent corroboration of this visitor to Rome and his story, in the form of a letter by one Odo of Rheims, who claimed to have been present during this Johannes’s audience with the Pope. Of course, this only means the visitor existed and told his tale, not that the tale was true. If we attempt to check the story of this Patriarch Johannes, we would presume that his Hulna was actually the city of Khulna, in modern day Bangladesh, through which flow the Bhairab and Rupsa rivers. And in Khulna, there is indeed a Cathedral of St. Thomas, but it was not built until 1819 by the Bishop of Calcutta, an Englishman who we might presume was familiar with the story of Patriarch Johannes.

Certainly there is common ground between the wonders of Hulna described by this visitor to Rome and the wonders described in the Prester John letter. His kingdom, the letter claims, borders on Paradise, the Garden of Eden from which Adam was expelled, and contains also the fabled Mount Olympus, home of the Greek gods, though don’t try to reconcile this geographically with the mountain in Greece. Just as in Hulna there was said to be a river overflowing with gold and gemstones, so the Prester John letter describes a river called Ydonus that flows out of Paradise, carrying a rainbow of natural gems in its waters, including garnet, sardonyx, topaz, chrysolite, beryl, emerald, sapphire, amethyst, and onyx. It’s even said that children are raised to somehow survive for months underwater so that they can more easily collect these precious gems. Gold and silver too abound, and the letter frequently digresses to mention which parts of his palace are made of gold, and which carved of gemstone. For example, he describes how the palace is adorned with golden apples inlaid with garnet so that they shine both day and night. Prester John and his bishops dine on tables made of gold and of amethyst, and the king himself sleeps on a bed of sapphire, for it was thought that this gemstone banishes impure thoughts and thus encourages chastity. His is a land of milk and honey, seemingly literally, as he claims, “Our land flows with honey and abounds with milk,” and he tells of a magical spring flowing from Olympus, the taste of whose water changes hourly. This spring appears to be like the Fountain of Youth, for it is said that if one drinks from it after fasting, they will remain young and never grow infirm. Likewise, there is one gemstone that it’s said eagles carry into their land that can restore sight and even, when blessed and worn on the finger, makes its bearer invisible like Tolkien’s One Ring. Even in the uninhabitable regions of his kingdom, where there is found a sea of sand that moves as if it were water, in whose sandy waves swim strange fish, and a river of moving stones, still the letter claims there are great riches to be found, and if one were to snatch up a handful of that sand or flowing gravel, they would find it to be comprised wholly of gems and precious metals.

Detail of a 16th century chart featuring Prester John’s legendary Indian kingdom. Courtesy of
The Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

Some fantastical elements of the Prester John letter seem to have been influenced not by the tall tales told by the Patriarch Johannes of Hulna, but rather by a far older work, written sometime in the 3rd century CE or even as far back as the 2nd century, purporting to be a record of Alexander the Great’s exploits. This work, sometimes attributed to Alexander’s court historian Callisthenes though usually not since Callisthenes died before some of the episodes recorded in the account, is notable for its descriptions of the far East and India, which included a description of a menagerie of mythological beasts that haunted the imagination of readers for generations, including not only creatures that were unusual in the West, like elephants, camels and dromedaries, but also monstrous crabs, lions with three eyes, centaurs, unicorns, and the odontotyrannus, or “tooth-tyrant,” a horned monster so huge that it could eat an elephant. Among the strange races of men supposedly encountered by Alexander and described in this romance were giants, strap-legged men, headless men with faces on their torsos, and men with dog heads. Seeming to confirm these ancient legends, the 12th century Prester John letter mentions many races of wild and unusual men, one-eyed men, men with eyes in the front and back of their heads, men with horns, cyclopses, and giants, as well as a range of fantastical creatures. This menagerie included the elephants, camels, dromedaries, hippos, panthers, tigers, and wild oxen present in the Alexander Romance, and added crocodiles, lamas, hyenas, red lions, and white bears. Gone were the centaurs and unicorns, replaced in the Prester John letter by such mythological beasts as griffins, satyrs, fauns, and the phoenix. Famously, the Alexander romance describes two races of cannibalistic men from northern Asia called Gog and Magog, whom Alexander contained by sealing off a mountain pass with a massive wall. This legend appears to have sprung from a passage in the book of Revelations, which states that in the end times, Satan will rally the endless forces of the evil nations Gog and Magog to his cause. In the original Latin text of the Prester John letter, no mention is made of this legend, but later medieval versions of the text transform one passage about the Lost Tribes of Israel living beyond the aforementioned stone river into a passage about the cannibalistic nations of Gog and Magog, identifying the unclean and evil nations of Revelation with the Jews and thereby forging a long-lasting anti-Semitic theme.

While a literary tradition can be traced from the Prester John letter back to the Alexander Romance, and its inspiration might be found in the form of the strange visitor to the Papal court 43 years earlier, still more recent source material can be identified for the letter. About twenty-three years after the visit of Patriarch Johannes to Rome, and only twenty years prior to the appearance of the Prester John letter at the court of the Byzantine Emperor, another correspondence made the first use of the name Prester John. According to Otto von Freising, in his work De Daubus Civitatibus, or “On the Two Cities,” a bishop named Hugh who had taken up residence in a Syrian territory called Jabala that had been conquered by Crusaders, reported to Pope Eugenius III in 1145 that the Muslim foe in far Asia had recently suffered a humiliating defeat by the forces of a Christian king that he called Presbyter Johannes, rex et sacerdos, king and priest. According to this tale, this Asian priest-king was a direct descendant of the Magi, or one of the Magi, who supposedly followed a star to visit the Christ Child in Bethlehem. Like his ancestor, who had supposedly been baptized by the Apostle Thomas himself, this king was a devout Christian. He ruled a kingdom situated “beyond Persia and Armenia in the farthest East” and he had routed the “brother kings of the Persians and Medes, called the Samiards” in a resounding victory claimed in the name of Christianity. Indeed, this priest-king had intended to march all the way to the Holy Land to aid the Crusaders’ efforts there, and surely would have, if he had not encountered difficulty crossing the River Tigris. The report seems to give weight to the idea that a Prester John actually did exist. However, a close reading of Otto von Freising’s text indicates that it was perhaps not the Syrian bishop Hugh of Jabala who called this priest-king Presbyter Johannes, but rather, that the name was in common use, for when he reports the name, he writes, “as indeed they are accustomed to call him,” and this “they” may refer to those in the Papal court rather than those in the Syrian bishop Hugh’s town, Jabala, or those in the priest-king’s realm. So perhaps the name was applied in confusion with the “Patriarch Johannes” who had spread the news of Christianity in the East 23 years earlier and likely sparked something of an oral tradition or popular legend in the process. Then there is the possibility that the Syrian bishop who reported the victory of Presbyter Johannes had reasons for embellishing his tale. After all, he had also come to report that the fortress of Edessa had been overrun a year earlier by the Church’s Muslim enemies, and to plead for the Church to launch another Crusade in response. In that situation, surely he believed he could better convince the Pope to mount a new military expedition by suggesting that a legendary Christian kingdom would join its forces with theirs.

Otto of Freising, as depicted on a 13th-century stained glass window in the Cistercian Abbey of Heiligenkreuz, Austria. Public domain image.

While the existence of a Christian kingdom in the East may have been legendary, to imply that there was no factual basis for Hugh of Jabala’s claims that Muslim forces in the East had recently been defeated would be false. Historians of Prester John have pointed to the central Asian Mongolian empire of the Qara Khitai and their triumphant emperor Yelü Dashi as the source of the story recorded by Otto of Freising. The origins of this short-lived kingdom are traced back to China, after the fall of the Tang Dynasty, its realm divided by the Chinese Sung Dynasty and by Mongolian invaders from the north called Khitans, whose chief clan was named Yelü. These invaders seized Peking and established their own dynasty, the Liao Dynasty. However, their dynasty was soon conquered, and their emperor captured, by other northern invaders from Manchuria, the Jin. However, one prince of the Khitan, Yelü Dashi, refused to be ruled by the Jin and led a band of adventurers westward. This well-educated royal son proved to be an expert archer and horseman, and leading his band into Turkestan, he established a new empire that he called Qara Khitai, or Black Cathay, and he assumed the title of Gur Khan, or King of the World. In 1141, his Qara Khitai Empire went to war with a neighboring empire of Seljuk Turks, and in a grand battle near Samarkand, commanding an army of some 300,000 horsemen and outnumbering the Turks three to one, he won a decisive victory against a Muslim foe. It was word of this momentous battle that Otto of Freising seems to have been recording secondhand. The details appear garbled in more than one way, though. Rather than at a place called Ectaba, it was at a place called Qatwan. And the Muslim forces were not led by brothers called Samiard, but by a sultan named Sanjar and his nephew, Mahmud. As for the name, Johannes, if it had not been taken from the earlier encounter with the supposed Patriarch of the Shrine of St. Thomas at Hulna, some have suggested that the title Gur Khan, corrupted and Latinized, became Johannes. As for the Christianity of the figure and his kingdom, more must be said.

As it turns out, Christianity was thriving within the Qara Khitayan Empire that defeated the Muslim Turks at Qatwan in 1141. The Christianity practiced there, though, was considered Nestorian and thus rejected by the Western Church as heretical. Named after 5th century theologian Nestorius, Nestorian doctrine differed from orthodox doctrine in the particular way it viewed Christ’s nature as both human and divine. It seems rather complicated, but as I understand it, Nestorius saw the human Christ as separate from the divine Christ, a kind of indwelling of God akin to the duality of body and soul, whereas the orthodox viewed these natures as united in one person. After Nestorian doctrines were declared heretical in the ecumenical councils of Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451, some among his supporters moved eastward, to the Neo-Persian Sassanid Empire, and from there across Asia. Despite the legend of the Magi and the mission of the Apostle Thomas, this appears to be the beginning of Christianity’s spread in the Far East, and Nestorian Christianity was certainly present in the Qara Khitai Empire under Gur Khan Yelü Dashi, and indeed, many of the soldiers who fought under him against the Muslim Turks at Qatwan surely were Christian soldiers.

A depiction of Khitan horsemen in the 10th century. Public domain image.

However, to characterize the kingdom of Qara Khitai as Christian would be inaccurate. The Qara Khitai empire was exceedingly polyglot, a true multicultural melting pot, as the Gur Khan practiced religious tolerance in his kingdom. Thus there were indeed Christians, likely Nestorians, but there were also Manicheans, Buddhists, Confucianists, and yes, even Muslims. And Yelü Dashi was no Christian zealot bent on stamping out the infidel. In fact, based on his background and upbringing in China, he was likely a Buddhist himself. His war against the Seljuk Turks was not a religious one. Indeed, rather than planning to march his armies on to the Holy Land to aid his coreligionists, his military aspirations lay in China, where he desired most to retake the provinces stolen from his dynasty by the Jin. But the Gur Khan would never accomplish this goal. After his death, leadership passed to his wife as regent, then to his son, then his daughter before being taken from his family by his daughter’s father-in-law. Afterward, in the early years of the 13th century, the Qara Khitai empire would be overthrown by a rebel prince of the Naiman tribe called Kuchlug. This usurper was a Nestorian Christian, and once in power, he did away with Yelü Dashi’s policy of religious tolerance, demanding that Muslims convert. This has led some to suggest Kuchlug was really the inspiration of Prester John, but that doesn’t track, chronologically, since he didn’t even stage his revolt until half a century after the Prester John letter was written. Similar problems of timeline rule out other candidates, such as Toghrul, Khan of the Nestorian Keraite Turks and ally of Genghis Khan, who did not even come into power until he had killed his brothers years after the appearance of the Prester John letter. For any of these later candidates to work, one would need to challenge not only the dating of the Prester John letter but also the date recorded by Otto of Freising for when the account of Presbyter Johannes was given by Bishop Hugh of Jabala to the Pope.

Meanwhile, other scholars have looked not to Asia for a historical Prester John, but rather to Africa, for in the Middle Ages, at the time that the Prester John letter appeared, the word “India” as it was popularly used did not necessarily indicate any discrete region but rather suggested many vague and exotic faraway locales, for there were many Indias, or Indies. If one accepts this notion, then the African empire of Ethiopia fits the bill as Prester John’s kingdom rather well. Ethiopia, or Abyssinia as it was called by medieval Europeans, represents a kind of Wakanda archetype for the Middle Ages, a mystery nation about which little was known. While its geographical situation in Eastern Africa may not have been clearly understood, the West knew of Abyssinia as an island of Christianity, surrounded by Muslim territories. Indeed, this understanding was accurate. In the Book of Acts, the Apostle Philip is said to have converted an Ethiopian eunuch to Christianity, and tradition in Ethiopia credits its ancient Christianization to that eunuch, who came home and spread the word. What is known for a certainty is that sometime in the 4th century CE, an Ethiopian king became a Christian, and Christianity became the faith of the land. As Islam spread throughout Africa, this Christian kingdom found itself isolated from the rest of the Church and in constant conflict with its neighbors. Rumors only reached Christian Europe of this Christian stronghold in Africa through Ethiopian pilgrims who traveled to the Holy Land and spoke about their home. Marco Polo wrote in the 13th century that the Christian King of Abyssinia had sent an envoy to the Church of the Sepulchre in Jerusalem to make offerings on his behalf, and in the 14th century, these rumors solidified. Disparate reports began to refer to Abyssinia as the land of Prester John, and a Florentine who visited Egypt in 1384 declared that the sultan there lived in fear of Prester John, a Christian king to the south who controlled the Nile and could flood Cairo if the sultan did not pay him an annual tribute. One may protest that this king, living more than 200 years after the beginning of the legend, could not possibly be the Prester John that inspired the letter, but this theory actually suggests that Prester John was a corruption of a title held by every Christian monarch in Ethiopia. By the Middle Ages, Ethiopia was actually the only Christian nation to be ruled by priest-kings. Their monarchs served simultaneously as their chief priests. Moreover, their native word for “majesty” or “king” was Zān, pronounced much like the French would pronounce the name “Jean.” Thus through misunderstanding and mistranslation, perhaps, the name Prester John was born.

A 16th century map identifying Ethiopia as Prester John’s kingdom. Public domain image.

While both the Asian and the African hypothesis of the identity of Prester John provide some idea of the basis for the legend, neither really explain the authorship of the Prester John letter, for certainly it was not written by either a Mongolian Gurkhan or an Ethiopian Zān. It is universally accepted to have been a forgery or hoax, but who wrote it, and what was their intent? Clearly it was someone familiar with the legend of Prester John that was then circulating in Europe, or at least who knew of the report of Otto of Freising, leading some to suggest that it was a clergyman. A note on one later version of the letter claims it was first translated into Latin by Archbishop Christian of Mainz, leading some to hypothesize that he actually wrote it, rather than just translated it. However, linguistic analysis identifies some Greek words in the text, and some corruptions where its Latin translator had difficulty with Greek words, indicating it was originally written in Greek. This does little to help us identify who wrote the letter, but we might still speculate as to why it was composed. Due to its content, it has been suggested that it is a piece of utopian literature. Certainly passages make it clear how perfect the kingdom of Prester John is, even to an absurd degree. Not only is it a land of wealth and overabundance. There are also no scorpions, snakes or other venomous animals, and no poisons generally. Frogs don’t even croak to annoy Prester John’s happy subjects. They make their garments of a silk so strong that they must wash it in fire, and likewise, their buildings are roofed with an ebony wood that cannot be burned. And the table at which he dines has magical properties that prevent him and his guests from becoming intoxicated. His society is described as perfect in manifold ways; there is no poverty, no thievery, no greed, no flattery. Thus it certainly fits the mold of utopian literature. But determining what this utopian vision tells us about the author and the purpose of the work requires further analysis.

Utopian works typically convey some deeper message than just describing an impossibly perfect society. Usually they demonstrate the author’s worldview, an argument, as it were, that some concrete changes to the status quo should be made in order to become more perfect like the society being described. Hints at what the author of the Prester John letter believed should be changed come from the fact that the text is so insulting to the Byzantine Emperor. It insolently addresses him as a “Roman governor” and condescendingly offers him a place in Prester John’s household. If the letter writer thought so poorly of the Byzantine Emperor, perhaps the entire point of the letter was to criticize him, or more generally, all temporal or worldly powers. It was, after all, a time of conflict between the secular authority of emperors and the spiritual authority of the Church. Indeed, at the time that the letter was written, a schism had existed for years between the Papacy and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I, who had supported a series of anti-Popes in opposition to Pope Alexander III. In this context, it’s not hard to see the letter, which extolls the virtues of a priest-king and his perfect society, as an allegory for the benefits of reconciling temporal and spiritual power by uniting them in one wise and godly figure. We may never know the true authorship of the Prester John letter, and we may always be left to speculate which Asian warlord or African potentate may have inspired the legend that served as its premise. Certainly, throughout the 13th and 14th centuries, explorers like Marco Polo were driven by myths of Eastern opulence and even specifically sought to find the legendary Prester John in Asia. And as late as 1521, the Portuguese dispatched emissaries to Ethiopia in hopes of winning the support of the mythic Prester John in their Mamluk Wars, finding that the storied Ethiopian Empire was itself nearly overrun by Somali Muslims. What we can know for certain, though, is that somewhere in the Byzantine Empire in the mid-12th century, perhaps in Constantinople, a dissident Christian, likely a priest, wrote a work of utopian fantasy that he hoped would teach the emperor, if not the world, that all Christian powers, temporal and spiritual, must unite to defeat the infidel and usher in an age of perfection… only to be frustrated when many missed the point and believe it to be an accurate description of an exotic paradise. Never underestimate the power of an audience to completely misapprehend the meaning of a work of art and in the process forge an immortal myth.

Until next time … remember… when you receive a letter out of the blue claiming to be from an African prince, all may not be as it seems…

 Further Reading

Donvito, Filippo. “The Legend of Prester John: A Mysterious Letter to the Christian West.” Medieval Warfare, vol. 3, no. 6, 2013, pp. 34–37. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/48578296.

Helleiner, Karl F. “Prester John's Letter: A Mediaeval Utopia.” Phoenix, vol. 13, no. 2, 1959, pp. 47–57. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1086970.

Kaplan, Steven. “Dominance and Diversity: Kingship, Ethnicity, and Christianity in Orthodox Ethiopia.” Church History & Religious Culture, vol. 89, no. 1–3, June 2009, pp. 291–305. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1163/187124109X407943.

Lamb, Alistair. “The Search for Prester John.” History Today, 20 Feb. 2018, https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/search-prester-john.

Letts, Malcolm. “Prester John: A Fourteenth-Century Manuscript at Cambridge.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 29, 1947, pp. 19–26. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3678547.

Nowell, Charles E. “The Historical Prester John.” Speculum, vol. 28, no. 3, 1953, pp. 435–445. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2847020.

Hermes Trismegistus, Father of Alchemy (an Encyclopedia Grimoria volume)

Of all the stories history offers of ancient knowledge lost, the story of the Library of Alexandria is perhaps the most dramatic. Called a Museum, in the truest sense of the word as the seat or shrine of the Muses, it was really more of a university, with many scholars invited to study their great repository of texts. Built in 306 BCE as one of the flagship projects of the Ptolemaic Kingdom, Ptolemy appointed scholars to live in and work there and sent groups all over the Mediterranean to acquire texts for the library. Eventually, they even demanded that all ships mooring at Alexandria surrender any scrolls they were carrying to be copied. In this way, they accumulated, by some reckonings, as many as half a million papyrus scrolls in the library at Alexandria. They set about comparing and emending all known copies of Homer’s epics, work that resulted in the versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey that we have inherited today. Under chief librarian Eratosthenes, that learned bane of all flat-earthers who figured out a simple proof of the Earth’s curvature in antiquity, the library secured ancient official versions of the great tragedies of Athens by offering a huge sum of money as security, a deposit they afterward chose to forfeit so they could keep the culturally invaluable, and some might say stolen, texts at Alexandria. And aside from literature, the vast breadth of scientific knowledge housed in one place at Alexandria has led some to speculate that if it weren’t for the destruction of the library, mankind would have made certain major breakthroughs in steam power and chemistry far sooner. Thus the supposed destruction of the library at Alexandria goes hand in hand with the notion of a Dark Age after the fall of Rome, an idea that has been challenged by historians for several reasons that I have discussed before. Certainly the loss of the library at Alexandria dealt a blow to the development of human knowledge and achievement, but was it as dramatic as destruction by fire? It does appear that the library may have been burned at some point. Julius Caesar, during his involvement with the war between Cleopatra and her brother, set fire to his enemy’s fleet, a fire that is said to have spread through the city and might have been the culprit. However there were actually two libraries at Alexandria, one, a “daughter” library, at the Temple of Serapis, so even if some or all of one library had burned, the repository in the other may have survived. A few centuries later, however, in 391 CE, a Christian bishop of Alexandria, Theophilus, destroyed the Temple at Serapis and turned it into a Christian church. It is said that non-Christian texts were likely destroyed, just as the next Patriarch, Cyril, had the pagan head librarian, Hypatia, pulled from her chariot and murdered with broken pieces of tile. Thus, by this version of events, early Christians saw to it that the knowledge of the ancient, pagan world was destroyed forever. Yet another version of events has it that the library remained intact until 642 CE—if not at the razed Temple of Serapis, then perhaps at the main repository, having escaped the fires set by Julius Caesar or having simply been built back up over the course of centuries. It was in this 7th century that the Muslim Caliph Omar conquered the city of Alexandria. Since by his reckoning, the books at Alexandria either contradicted the Koran, making them heretical, or agreed with the Koran, making them redundant, he ordered all the books burned to heat bathwater. It was said it took half a year to burn everything the library held. But the problem is that this story is a fictitious libel against Muslims that did not appear until the age of the Crusades. What is more likely is that, rather than a sudden and dramatic destruction of ancient knowledge at Alexandria, there was a gradual decline, influenced by social changes. And whatever ancient works remained in 642 CE, the Arabs that looted Alexandria likely carried them home, for there is one topic, explored in works attributed to one particular Egyptian author, that reappeared in the Middle Ages in Arab literature. That topic, was magic, and like the Library Alexandria, it had much to do with ancient knowledge lost.

A depiction of the Library of Alexandria. Public domain image.

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Before reading this post, I would recommend reading last year’s post on Zoroaster, the First Magus, the first entry in my Encyclopedia Grimoria. And as I mentioned in the previous post, you may also want to listen to the first Apocryphal Catechism episode, Gnostic Genesis, as some talk of Gnosticism will come up as well. But my post on the idea that ancient Persian Zoroaster was the originator of all magic, and that priests of the Zoroastrian faith, or magi, were responsible for spreading the knowledge of magic serves as a preamble to this continuation of the history of magic. As that piece concluded, I wrote about the pseudepigrapha bearing the name Zoroaster, the books of magical spells that scholars have examined closely and argue originated in Hellenistic Egypt rather than ancient Persia. Thus now we continue our search for the source of all magic in Egypt, where the Library of Alexandria likely housed the works of one Hermes Trismegistus, a mysterious and towering figure in the history of magic. Even his name, Hermes, is for many synonymous with magic and that particular field of magic, alchemy. When one says that a thing is “hermetically sealed,” for example, it’s hyperbole indicating that something is very tightly, almost magically sealed. The history of the so-called Ars Hermetica, or Hermetic art of magic, is one of ancient knowledge supposedly lost in a Dark Age and then found again in the Renaissance, although this too, like most conceptions of a Dark Age, isn’t entirely accurate, as it will be seen that Hermetic texts were written about throughout the Middle Ages by both Western Christian writers and Arab scholars alike. However, as the word Renaissance indicates, there was certainly a resurgence of interest in Hermes Trismegistus during the 15th and 16th centuries. In the 1460s, one Marsilio Ficino was tasked by the Medicis with translating ancient Greek works into Latin, including the works of Plato and the work of the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus. In the early 1500s, working with Arab texts, the Swiss philosopher Paracelsus also became aware of the Corpus Hermetica, or the works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. However, working as they were from different source material, the Hermes of Ficino and the Hermes of Paracelsus were entirely different. To Ficino and Italian humanists, Hermes Trismegistus was a philosopher and perhaps even a prophet, for his conception of god and cosmology could be interpretated as complementary to Christian doctrine. But for Paracelsus, Hermes was the heir of a primeval knowledge, a preserver of hidden truth, the transmitter of the art of sorcery and alchemy to mankind.

So who was Hermes Trismegistus? This is the principal question with which we must wrestle really for the rest of the episode. According to Ficino, he was a man who lived in Egypt who was called Trismegistus by the Greeks, meaning “thrice-great,” because he had proven himself to be the greatest of men in three ways. He was first the greatest of philosophers, which earned him a place in the priesthood, where he then proved himself the greatest of priests, thereby earning him a kingship, in which role he became renowned as the greatest of Egyptian kings. To Ficino, this figure was not so ancient as Zoroaster or even Moses, and he saw in Hermetic philosophy a monotheistic tradition and hints of a foreknowledge of Christ and Christian doctrines like the Trinity. However, Paracelsus, working with Arab texts found a different history for the figure. By this telling, Hermes was “thrice-great” because he was three different men of greatness. First, he was the grandson of Adam and Eve, called Idris by the Muslims and Enoch by Jews. This first Hermes was the originator of astrology, rather than Zoroaster—or perhaps was one and the same as Zoroaster?—and was also a skilled builder, having presided over the construction of the pyramids. Although there will be further clarification of the name Hermes, by this telling, Hermes was only a title, from a Syrian word meaning “the knowing one,” for he had been the heir of a primeval knowledge of magic and science, which he thereafter preserved by carving it into the walls of a temple before the Great Flood. The next Hermes or “knowing one,” lived in Babylon after the flood and revived the primeval knowledge, for example teaching mathematics to Pythagoras. Finally, the third great Hermes according to the Arab texts studied by Paracelsus was the Egyptian figure who had brought forth the knowledge of alchemy, and this Hermes’ writings preserved the antediluvian knowledge that had allowed those before the flood to live to very advanced ages: knowledge of a little something called the Philosopher’s Stone. This ancient knowledge, according to alchemical texts, was not invented by Hermes but rather discovered by him. Some stories have it that he found it inscribed on a tablet in a cave, and likewise, rather than simply transmitting his secret knowledge to future generations in books that could easily be translated, he engraved his alchemical secrets onto tablets and hid them to be discovered only by the worthy.

The monotheist pharaoh Akhenaten. Public domain image.

These are not the only ideas that have emerged regarding the historical identity of Hermes Trismegistus, and a brief look at another may provide give some further depth to the Hermetic legend. A Coptic account has it that there were several Hermeses, and that the first had built a city in Egypt with a temple to the sun. Such claims, along with the strongly monotheistic teachings in Hermetic religious writings, has led to speculation that Hermes Trismegistus was actually none other than the Pharoah Akhenaten who had famously rejected the Egyptian pantheon of gods to establish a monotheistic religion worshipping the sun, a deity he called Aten. As it has been said of the first Hermes, Akhenaten built great temples to Aten in a solar city devoted to the worship of this Sun-Disk. Some enthusiasts of ancient alien contact have suggested that Akhenaten, who claimed to be the sole arbiter between a disk-shaped deity and man and was depicted as having an elongated skull, may have been some kind of extra-terrestrial or human hybrid, despite the fact that the sun was always seen as a disk shape in the sky and that such head shapes could easily be explained by a medical syndrome like hydrocephaly or a cultural practice like infant head binding. A more compelling but no less peculiar theory about Akhenaten was that he was one and the same as Moses, or at least that Moses was a follower of Akhenaten who applied Akhenaten’s monotheistic doctrines in creating the Hebrew religion. This was something of a pet theory of Sigmund Freud’s, and those who subscribe to it will point out that the word for the Hebrew God, Adonai, may even be derived from the name of Akhenaten’s solar disk, Aten. If some connection can be made between Akhenaten and Moses, we find even stronger parallels with Hermes Trismegistus, who according to much Hermetic tradition was a contemporary of Moses. And more than this, both Hermes and Moses were said to have revealed divine knowledge to the world in the form of engraved tablets. However, Moses is consistently portrayed as a separate personage in Hermetic texts, and too many elements of Moses’s story must be changed to identify him with the pharaoh Akhenaten. Furthermore, Akhenaten only reigned about 16 years, from 1352 to 1336 BCE, whereupon his son, King Tut, promptly reverted Egypt to the worship of its former pantheon, making it seem less likely that he was responsible for so vast a corpus as the collection of texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, or even that he would have inspired such a widespread tradition. So perhaps it’s just that the stories of these two figures contributed useful elements to the writers of the legend of Hermes Trismegistus.

The secrets of Hermetic knowledge are then said to have been transmitted to future generations in a like fashion. Certain apocryphal traditions speak of Noah receiving from an angel divine ancient knowledge concerning building practices that helped him construct the ark and concerning medicine so that he might preserve it for the benefit of mankind during the flood. This knowledge passed to Noah, according to one version, in the form of a tablet that had formerly been discovered by Enoch, grandson of Adam, in a cave. The tablet was an engraved sapphire, which Noah stored in a golden chest that would eventually be handed down to King Solomon. Another story has it that the antediluvian secrets of Hermes Trismegistus were given by Aristotle to Alexander the Great, or that Alexander found them in a cave, and that he thereafter hid them inside a temple wall, where they were later discovered by an Abbasid caliph and thereby entered the Arabic esoteric tradition. Yet another tale has it that Apollonius of Tyana discovered them when he found a hidden tomb beneath the feet of a statue of Hermes Trismegistus. Inside, he found a very old Hermes himself, seated upon a throne of gold, holding an engraved emerald tablet on his lap, with a book at his feet that revealed the “Mystery of Creation.” This last is from a Hermetic text titled “Mystery of Creation” attributed to Apollonius himself, or Balinus. This makes for an even more dramatic notion considering some of the claims made about Apollonius, an itinerant neo-Pythagorean teacher who was a contemporary of Jesus Christ. It was said Apollonius’s mother was visited by a heavenly being who told her her son would be divine, and that Apollonius healed the ill and resurrected the dead. After his enemies schemed to put him to death, his followers claimed he reappeared and then ascended. These parallels have led many to suggest he and Christ were the same person. And if you combined this notion with the idea that he achieved his perfection because of his discovery of this emerald tablet, then it suggests Christ himself was nothing but an adept of the Hermetic arts. However, most scholars see these stories about Apollonius as fictions spread by the later hagiographer Philostratus, who cites a disciple of Apollonius named Damis as his source, a disciple that appears to have been wholly invented by Philostratus. And regardless of the legitimacy of the Apollonius/Christ parallels, the later appearance of the Hermetic text attributed to Apollonius indicates it was pseudepigrapha, written by a pseudo-Apollonius.

Wandering philosopher Apollonius of Tyana. Public domain image.

But the legend of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus would endure and be taken very seriously by such great minds as Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, John Dee, and Isaac Newton. According to an early Latin translation of a Hermetic texts that purported to give the entire content of the Emerald Tablet, it reads as follows:

I speak not fictitious things, but what is true and most certain. What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is like that which is below, to accomplish the miracles of one thing. And as all things were produced by the mediation of one Being, so all things were produced from this one thing by adaptation. Its father is the Sun, its mother the Moon; the wind carries it in its belly, its nurse is the earth. It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole world. Its power is perfect if it be changed into earth. Separate the earth from the fire, the subtle from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment. Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then again descend to the earth, and unite together the powers of things superior and things inferior. Thus you will obtain the glory of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly far away from you. This thing is the fortitude of all fortitude, because it overcomes all subtle things, and penetrates every solid thing. Thus were all things created. Thence proceed wonderful adaptations which are produced in this way. Therefore am I called Hermes Trismegistos, possessing the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world. That which I had to say concerning the operation of the Sun is completed.

Whether or not it originated on a tablet of emerald, a few clear motifs can be discerned within this text. First, we find here the famous Hermetic saying “As above, so below.” This can simply be interpreted as an explanation of the central concept of astrology, that the movements of the planets above correspond to what happens here on Earth. At the end, we have a vague indication that the name “Thrice-Great” refers to his knowledge of three different aspects of the world’s philosophy, although it doesn’t clarify what those are. Much of its talk of the oneness of all things and the one Being that originated them could be construed as reflecting the Pythagorean concept of the Monad, which made its way into Neoplatonic and Gnostic cosmologies. In fact, some scholars see a lot in common between Gnosticism and Hermeticism, and it should be noted that some of the oldest Hermetic texts we have were unearthed alongside Gnostic scrolls at Nag Hammadi in 1945.

However, the text of the Emerald Tablet is not generally looked at by Hermeticists as a philosophical or religious text only, but rather as encrypted instructions for creating or revealing the Philosopher’s Stone. A common view of Hermetical writings is that they are encoded with metaphorical and symbolic language, for the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone could destroy humanity if it fell into the wrong hands as immortality and unlimited wealth would ruin men of low character. Indeed, alchemical texts are so packed with cryptic phrasing that from the name of one particular writer, Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, we have derived the word “gibberish.” In the Emerald Tablet text, we do see some indication that it may have been hinting at the steps in some process with the verbs “separate” and “unite,” but the Magnum Opus or “great work” of finding the Philosopher’s Stone would always be left up to trial and error and guesswork. It was something like a bunch of literary critics picking apart a classic poem and each coming up with a wildly different interpretation of its themes. It came to be commonly believed that one would first have to isolate the prima materia, or the first matter, and change it through a spiritual transmutation process. But ideas for how to find prima materia and transmute it varied wildly, such that in 1669, the German alchemist Hennig Brandt thought he could isolate it by boiling down more than a thousand gallons of little boys’ urine, uniting the resulting tarry material with sand and charcoal, and heating it at as high a temperature as he could manage. This resulted in white vapor drops that condensed into a waxy, glowing material that he called “light bearer,” or phosphorous. Thus the mystery of alchemical texts resulted in just the kind of unusual experimentation needed for advances in chemistry to be made. And one could argue that this was the Magnum Opus all along, the struggle for the advancement of science symbolized as a search for mystical treasure able to improve the human condition.

A 17th century depiction of the Emerald Tablet. Public Domain image.

But, the Hermeticism inherited and propagated by Ficino in Italy is difficult to reconcile with the Hermeticism of Paracelsus and other alchemists. Working from entirely different sources, the two appear like entirely separate traditions, with Italian Hermetic texts portraying Hermes as a great teacher and prophet who invented the writing system of hieroglyphics and instituted the religious practices of the culture, a religion that seemed curiously compatible with Christianity, despite Egypt’s polytheism. It was these monotheistic teachings that may have caused Hermetic writings to have survived the purging of pagan texts from the library of Alexandria. Indeed, Clement of Alexandria, a Christian convert teaching in the early 200s CE, sought a way to unite pagan belief with Christian theology, suggesting that beliefs preceding the birth of Christ were not evil but rather served the purpose of preparing pagans for Christ’s coming. And after him, Lactantius, the Christian advisor to Constantine I, would explicitly argue that the Corpus Hermetica was congruous with Christian doctrine because of its description of a single creator god that is unfathomable, of mankind having a dual nature of spirit and flesh and that we might transcend to take part in the divine. In the syncretistic hotbed of Hellenistic Egypt, the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus seem to have appealed to many groups, Christians, Gnostics, Neoplatonists. But by how much did they predate such belief systems? According to Clement of Alexandria, who counted the number of ancient sacred books attributed to Hermes Trismegistus carried by Egyptians in their processions, there were about 36 books, but the further back into antiquity scholars look, the more texts are attributed to him. An author named Seleucus has been cited as numbering Hermetic texts at 20,000, and Manetho, an Egyptian priest figure from the third century BCE whose own existence has been debated, is credited as writing that there were more than 36,000 texts written by Hermes Trismegistus. Manetho also, however, does not call Hermes Trismegistus a man but rather a god. And it is here that we find the final origin story of Hermes Trismegistus, another story of syncretism.

Writings attributed to Manetho identify Hermes as the Egyptian god Thoth, which would trace the origin of this legend all the way back to Egypt’s Old Kingdom, to more than 3000 year before the common era, when a god portrayed as a man with the head of an ibis named Thoth invented mathematics and writing, regulated the movement of the stars, saw the future and served as an oracle, conveyed the dead to the nether realm, and generally acted as the arbiter between mankind and the gods. Millennia later, when the Greek and Egyptian cultures clashed within Alexander’s empire, and afterward, during the Hellenistic period, Greeks attempted to understand and explain the beliefs of other cultures in terms of their own culture, a process called interpretatio graeca. In other words, when hearing the pantheon of Egyptian gods described to them, they suggested that, because of similarities in their characters or powers, they were analogues or even one and the same with the goods of the Greek pantheon. So the sun god Ra must have been one and the same as their Apollo. By this reasoning, Thoth, a trickster and conductor of the dead with magical powers, must be the same as their god Hermes, the messenger of the gods. This is the understanding of Hermes Trismegistus that scholars of antiquity have settled on. Through the process of interpretatio graeca and syncretism generally, the god Thoth, inventor of language and astrology and bringer of ancient knowledge, came to be known as Hermes and thereafter as Hermes Trismegistus, and with a millennia worth of texts written in his name, he eventually came to be thought of as a flesh and blood man who had taken quill to papyrus and recorded his wisdom for all futurity. By this understanding, then, the many thousands of texts supposedly written by Hermes Trismegistus were actually written by any number of ancient scholars or priests, and perhaps not as pseudepigrapha as we would understand it, in the sense of falsely claiming your work was written by some other famous or legendary figure. Rather, more like the Bible, which was written by men but claimed to be the literal Word of God written through them, placing the name of Hermes Trismegistus on a text could have been a way of asserting your work’s canonical value or divinity.

The Egyptian God Thoth. Image courtesy the Brooklyn Museum, no known copyright restrictions.

So how can we reconcile the religious texts of ancient Egypt attributed to Thoth/Hermes and the magical texts of alchemy attributed to what seems to be the same figure? If we search for instructions of alchemy in texts that are known to be ancient, we find no evidence of the Magnum Opus or other alchemical references. Indeed, there is no evidence that any of the Arab works of Hermetica from which alchemical lore and practices derive were genuinely ancient texts. However, the first known alchemist, Zosimos of Panopolis, a Greek Gnostic working at the end of the 3rd century did make reference to Hermes Trismegistus, but only as a source of spiritual wisdom, not as a teacher or practitioner of alchemy. Certainly there are ancient Egyptian works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus that discuss astrology, which we have addressed before as a form of magic, in that it is oracular, but much of the Hermetic work on astrology is more concerned with astral medicine, with the movements of planets and configurations of stars corresponding to certain ailments and whether the ill will recover, and the selection of plants for treatment likewise being closely connected to what is seen in the heavens. Astral medicine may have been of great interest to many an alchemist, who were often also physicians, such as Paracelsus himself. Perhaps, though, this relationship between the heavens and the creation of poultices and tinctures may have over a very long time evolved into the more recognizable notions of alchemy. Certainly the most wild magical practice discussed in ancient Hermetic texts, that of creating living statues, literally ensouling an inanimate figure with a spirit that can talk to you and help you, sounds very similar to the later claims of alchemists that they could create a miniature living person, called a homunculus.

Interestingly, in the 17th century, French scholar Isaac Casaubon looked at the corpus hermetica and instead of remarking how these ancient Egyptian works were surprisingly consistent with Neoplatonic notions about the creation of the Earth, or how remarkably compatible their monotheistic doctrines were with Christianity, he argued that these aspects of the texts proved they were frauds. Rather than ancient pagan works that seemed to hint at Christian concepts like the Trinity or even prophesy the coming of Christ, Casaubon said they must be forgeries written during the time Christ or the dawn of Christianity in an effort to evangelize to pagans. He looked at the language, arguing that certain words used or certain figures referenced in the texts were anachronistic and proved they could not have been written at the time of Moses, as it was claimed. And while many have disagreed with Casaubon, his thesis makes sense not only for the Christian theological elements found in Hermetica, but also the Gnostic, and the Neoplatonic concepts reflected therein. Moreover, it helps to explain why the Arab alchemical texts translated into German appear not to have any connection to the ancient works. Much as we saw with Zoroaster, the name Hermes Trismegistus became an easy way to lend authority and authenticity to a work. So with a history going all the way back to the most ancient gods of Egypt, and through the Hellenistic world developing a human persona whose name would thereafter be misused in pseudepigrapha or outright forgery to proselytize and create the false impression of ancient origin, we find the figure of Hermes Trismegistus no less indistinct than that of Zoroaster, and in seeking out the origins of magic, we again find nothing but uncertainty and dubious legend.

A Renaissance-era depiction of a Hermeticist. Public domain image.

Further Reading

Ebeling, Florian. The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus: Hermeticism from Ancient to Modern Times. Cornell University Press, 2007.  

El-Abbadi, Mostafa. “The Fate of the Library of Alexandria.” Britannica, www.britannica.com/topic/Library-of-Alexandria/The-fate-of-the-Library-of-Alexandria.

Elsner, Jas'. “Beyond Compare: Pagan Saint and Christian God in Late Antiquity.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 3, 2009, pp. 655–683. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/598818.

Martin, Robert D. “Strange Head Shapes: Revisiting Nefertiti, Akhenaten and Tut.” Psychology Today, 30 July 2019, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-we-do-it/201907/strange-head-shapes-revisiting-nefertiti-akhenaten-and-tut.

Plessner, M. “Hermes Trismegistus and Arab Science.” Studia Islamica, no. 2, 1954, pp. 45–59. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1595141.

Quispel, Gilles. “Hermes Trismegistus and the Origins of Gnosticism.” Vigiliae Christianae, vol. 46, no. 1, 1992, pp. 1–19. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1583880.

A Very Historically Blind Christmas III: The Epiphany of the Magi

In 1158, amid sieges by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, the embalmed corpses of three men were discovered beneath a church in Milan. One appeared to be that of a young man, another a middle-aged man, and the third, an old man, representing, as it were, the different stages of manhood. Because of their ages and how the idea corresponded with certain legends, these preserved remains were presumed to be the bodies of the Three Wise Men of the Christmas Nativity story and were thereafter hidden in a moat to prevent Frederick I from taking them, but take them he did, and gifted the relics to the Archbishop of Cologne, where they were purported to perform miracles and became the chief relics of the three most revered saints in Western Christianity, housed in the grand Shrine of the Three Kings. According to the 14th-century History of the Three Kings, the Three Wise Men of the Nativity story, also called the Three Kings and the Magi, agreed to be buried together at a certain hill on the border of India where their ways parted on their journey home after presenting their gifts to the Christ child, a place they called the Hill of Victory. How their remains ended up at Milan is another interesting tale, this one involving Flavia Julia Helena, later Saint Helena, the beautiful daughter of the fabled King Cole, or Coel the Old, in Roman Britain. Helena married Constantius and gave him a son, Constantine, who in 312 CE converted her to Christianity. In 325, she was said to have gone on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where she discovered numerous important relics, including the hay from Christ’s manger, the nails used in his crucifixion, and even the True Cross itself. It was said that, after her pilgrimage to the Holy Land, she traveled to India, discovered the Hill of Victory, and brought the remains of the Three Wise Men back to Constantinople, where they remained until a bishop transported them to Milan sometime during a mid–4th-century period of Christian persecution in Constantinople. But there is much to doubt about this story, which was written centuries after the relics’ discovery in Milan. For example, it attributes their discovery to a much mythologized figure in St. Helena. First, her origin is suspect, with most scholars maintaining that she came from Asia Minor rather than from Britain, and that the figure of Old King Cole identified as her father may be entirely fictitious. Second, the idea that she discovered all the relics it is claimed she found in the Holy Land is hard enough to believe without her also mounting an expedition to India and finding a long-lost tomb like some ancient Indiana Jones. But also, the ages of the relics don’t make logical sense. They do indeed appear to be the remains of men aged around 15, 30, and 60 years, as modern science has confirmed by examination of skull sutures, but this would not make sense unless these Three Wise Men had died almost immediately after presenting their gifts, and all at the same time. The different sources comprising the legendarium that tells us their names—Melchior, Balthasar, and Caspar—do not agree on who came from which country: was Melchior or Balthasar a king of Arabia who presented a gift of gold? Was Caspar king of the Hindus or king of Tarsus? Was Balthasar actually king of Ethiopia and thus dark-skinned as he is often portrayed? Inconsistencies abound, but the legendarium is clear that all three lived past 100 years old, making the relics at Cologne problematic. But there are far more problems than these associated with this major element of the biblical Christmas story.

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Before continuing to read, may I suggest you read my posts “Zoroaster, the First Magus” and “Gnostic Genesis” before listening to this episode. The former is perhaps the most important, as I discuss the historical magi, their beliefs and what was commonly believed about them, which provides essential background for much of this Christmas Special. The latter, while less essential, provides some useful background on what apocryphal writings are, which will come up along the way on our journey of the Magi. But to begin, rather than delving into the apocrypha from which much of the legend of the Three Kings derives, we must look to canon, and the only canonical scriptures that mention the visit of the Wise Men is the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 2: “Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, / Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.” Here in two verses, out of a passage of 12 verses only, we have the origin of a vast legendarium. Strange, then, that the other gospel featuring the Nativity, that of Luke, makes no mention of these visitors from the East. Moreover, the inclusion of the Wise Men in the actual nativity scene appears not to be supported by scriptures. I talked a great deal in my first Christmas special about confusion over the actual time of Christ’s birth, owing to Luke’s description of shepherds watching their flocks by night, and here we have a similar confusion. When Matthew’s wise men visit Herod, the king asks them “what time the star appeared” and after the wise men depart, he orders the Massacre of the Innocents, demanding the slaughter of all children “two years old and under,” which seems to indicate that the Wise Men first saw the star two years earlier. Yet the star that had signaled the birth of the King of the Jews appears to still remain overhead—another odd detail, for if this magnificent celestial sign had glared in the heavens above for so long, why was Herod so curiously unaware of it?—and it led the Three Kings not to a barn or a cave, as some versions have it, but to a “house” where they presented their gifts to a “young child” rather than an infant. So it seems some artistic license was taken to include the Wise Men at the actual nativity, and it seems further license has been taken all along the way as their legend grew. For example, how do we know they were kings, or that there were only three of them? This appears to have grown out of the mention of three gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and the fact that these were treasures befit for a king, which only other kings could afford to give. Then there is the connection to a prophecy in Isaiah that predicts “Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising” and that “they shall bring gold and incense.” But how much of this was speculation, how much folklore, how much a purposeful attempt to fulfill prophecy and further some other religious or political agenda?

A detail of the Three Wise Kings from the Atlas Catalan, 1375. Public Domain.

Certainly the visit of these Wise Men has become a touchstone in Western culture, its mythic standing resulting in its appearance in all kinds of art. Numerous masters have paintings that depict the adoration of the Magi, including Botticelli, Bruegel, and Hieronymus Bosch. They have been the subject of much poetry as well, with both William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot having penned memorable verses about them. And the Christmas carol, We Three Kings of Orient Are is not the only song to immortalize their legend. But their legendarium really begins in apocryphal texts, such as the protoevangelion, or infancy gospels, from the 2nd century CE. These dubious texts, which have been called “mythological trash” by some scholars, offer more details on the birth and early years of Christ. The gospel of pseudo-Matthew doesn’t have them adoring the Christ Child at birth, replacing the Wise Men with an ox and an ass that worship him instead, and this account seems to indicate even more clearly than the canonical Gospel of Matthew that the Magi had seen the star rising in the east two years before making their trip and thus found Jesus as a small child in a house. However, the Infancy Gospel of James places the Wise Men more specifically at the scene of the Nativity, describing how the Wise Men were led by the star to a cave, rather than a barn. An Armenian Infancy Gospel, some centuries later during the late 6th century CE would number them three, give them their names, and make of them kings from specific places. After that, much of their mythology first appeared in medieval romances, which themselves tied the Wise Men to already dubious apocryphal legends, such as the detail that they were baptized in India by Thomas the Apostle during his travels on the Indian subcontinent, even though the only work to describe these travels, the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, makes no mention of them. Further, it was alleged that one of the Three Kings was a forefather of Prester John, a legendary Christian king in India that most scholars believe was a fabricated character of medieval fantasy. And perhaps one final legend shall suffice to demonstrate how entangled the story of the Three Wise Men is with myth and folklore: that of La Befana, the Christmas Witch. In Italian folklore, Befana was an old woman whom the Wise Men passed by on their journey. She asked the travelers where they were headed, and the Wise Men told her about the star they followed and the newborn king to whom it would lead them, and they invited her to join them. However, La Befana was far too busy sweeping and declined to accompany the Wise Men. Later, when she realized that she had lost an opportunity to worship the redeemer that the world had been waiting for, her bitter regret kept her alive to wander around Italy, rewarding the good children by leaving gifts and candy in the socks they hung to dry by their hearths, and leaving only garlic, onions, and coal in the socks of children who had been less than well-behaved. Clearly this legend is all twisted up with other Christmas folklore that I have discussed previously, but La Befana visits children after Christmas, during Epiphany, the Christian holiday celebrating the Three Wise Men and the revelation of Christ as the incarnation of God. Indeed, the witch’s name, La Befana, is even derived from the word Epiphany.

So enmeshed in myth and legend is the story of the Wise Men that in order to find some solid ground from which to start an investigation into their identities, many have looked not to them but to the object their fascination, the Star of Bethlehem, which as a celestial event at least seems approachable through science. Because of its description as an unusual sight which remained for so long, at least throughout the entire months-long journey of the Wise Men, if not for the implied 2 years, rather than a star per se, many interpret it to have been an astronomical event. A fireball or meteor would seem to fit the bill, but as that would disappear within moments, we must look for other phenomena. A supernova has been suggested as another likely candidate, as supernovas can be visible for years and in early records were mistaken for stars, even called a “guest star,” but the earliest record of a supernova was recorded by the Chinese in 185 CE. It seems unlikely that only the Gospel of Matthew, written some 75 to 100 years after the events described, would provide the only record in all cultures of such a bright and easily visible natural event. And this fact casts doubt on the entire notion that this astronomical event occurred for two years. As for events that might have lasted for months, a comet could provide an explanation. However, unlike supernovas, comets were more commonly observed in that era, and were typically seen as the finger of a god, a portent of calamity rather than as a sign of a coming king among a certain people or in a certain place. Then we have the description in Matthew, after the Wise Men meet with Herod, that the star “went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was.” This certainly does not behave as one would expect a comet to behave, and so it makes sense that many Christians view the Star of Bethlehem more as a miracle than an astronomical event—something more like the pillar of fire illuminating the Israelites’ night journey out of Egypt in Exodus. To a modern reader, it may sound more like a UFO, and interestingly, there are many parallels between depictions of UFOs today and angels in the past, both appearing as lights in the sky.

The Adoration of the Magi by Bartholomäus Zeitblom, c. 1460. Public Domain.

Interestingly, at least one apocryphal text, the Infancy Gospel of James, seems to confirm the idea that the star was actually an angel, for after their visit with the Christ Child, it says they were “warned by the angel not to go into Judea,” according to the “Scholars Version” translation using the definite article “the angel,” when the Wise Men had not earlier been shown to be in contact with an angel but rather being led by the star, giving the impression that the star had been an angel all along. However, The Infancy Gospel of James also employs different wording, making it seem like the star did not move before them and stand over the place where Christ was: “Then, the star which they had seen in the east led them until they came to the cave and stood over the head of the child.” Here we see that it was the Wise men themselves who stood over the child’s head… and one cannot help but wonder if that is what the Canonical Gospel meant to say, a slight distinction, a confusion of subject and verb, lost in awkward phrasing and translation, that makes an important difference. But then again, as mentioned, the Infancy Gospels are not the most reliable of sources. Among the novel embroideries of the Infancy Gospel of James, we see Mary being fed by angels as a child, and rather than delivering the Christ Child by any normal means, there is a flash of light and Jesus simply appears at her breast. Then there is the strange cameo of Salome, granddaughter of Herod, who appears in the Nativity scene here despite her being described in Mark as being youthful when Jesus was an adult. Intrigued by the story of a virgin birth, Salome wants to see for herself, but when she inserts her finger into Mary to determine if her hymen is intact, her hand is “consumed in fire.” Only holding the Christ Child restores her hand to her. All this to demonstrate that the Infancy Gospel of James may indeed be the “mythological trash” that scholars have said it is, making it unreliable as evidence for what the Star of Bethlehem was or how it led the Wise Men to the Christ Child. But, then again, is it any less unbelievable than other wonder-filled books of the Bible that have been established as canon?

For a more rational interpretation of the Star of Bethlehem, we must consider why these Wise Men are sometimes called the Magi. The original Greek word used in the Gospel of Matthew that has been translated as “wise men” was mágoi (μάγοι), a seemingly direct identification of these men from the east as followers of the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism. It is curious that the term magi would be translated as “wise men” since the magi were largely seen as practitioners of evil magic. Even elsewhere in the Bible, the term is applied, in its singular form, to the most wicked sorcerer of all, the originator of all heresies, Simon Magus. However, it may be that the word was simply being used by Matthew to indicate that the men were astrologers, for Zoroastrian magi were widely credited as the inventors of astrology. And here we find an interesting explanation for the Christmas Star. As astrologers search for portents in the stars and alignments of planets, perhaps this is what led the Wise Men to Bethlehem. In fact, a few noteworthy planetary alignments have been suggested by astronomers as possible candidates. Keep in mind that the exact year of Christ’s birth has never been determined with any certainty, and he likely was not born at the end of the year 1 B.C. as the former calendrical reckoning of “Before Christ” would imply (evidence of which, having to do with the known dates of King Herod’s life and reign, I discussed in my first Christmas special). So if we are not tied to that date, we can see a triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 7 BCE that may have inspired astrologers to make a journey to the land of the Hebrews. Three times that year, Jupiter, a planet representing royalty, passed before Saturn, a planet seen as a protector of eastern Mediterranean peoples, and this took place within the astrological sign of Pisces the Fishes, which to many eastern astrologers meant a portent for the Hebrew people. If that didn’t fit the bill, another possibility exists.

The Journey of the Three Kings (1825) by Leopold Kupelwieser. Public Domain.

In 3 BCE, a number of curious planetary alignments occurred. In August that year, while Venus and Jupiter were in conjunction, Mercury and the Sun and Moon were in the sign of Leo the Lion, a sign associated with the Jewish tribe of Judah. Then the next month, Mercury aligned with Venus and the Sun entered the sign of Virgo the Maiden. Considering that a prophecy foretold of a virgin birth in the House of Judah resulting in a savior, these planetary movements may have been interpreted as confirming the prophecy’s imminent fulfillment. After that, Jupiter aligned with the brightest star in Leo, Regulus, and would pass it again two more times in the next year, 2 BCE. Then, in June of that year, exactly 2 years from the summer of 1 CE, when, it should be remembered, it was more likely for shepherds to be watching their flocks by night as described in one version of the Nativity, a spectacular “double planet” conjunction of Jupiter and Venus occurred that would have been unlike anything astrologers of the day had ever seen. Indeed, we did not see a similar occurrence for another 2000 years, in 2016. A similar “double planet” conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn on the 21st of December this year is likewise being hailed as a “Christmas Star.” Before we say case closed and declare that Matthew was certainly referring to these conjunctions, though, it must be pointed out how strange it is that, considering the astronomical knowledge of the day, Matthew used the word for star rather than referring to the event as a conjunction of planets, and Herod and his court, who would have been familiar with astrology, had no idea about this conjunction. Moreover, a conjunction of planets would not explain how the star appeared to move as it led the Wise Men, or how it stopped over the place where the Christ Child was. And perhaps most strange is that Matthew would indicate by this passage the efficacy of astrology, a forbidden practice and belief considered to be false and against God.

Now we get to the heart of the matter. Who was this Matthew who wrote the only canonical Gospel that mentions these Magi from the east who followed a star to Jesus, and what can the historical and geographical context in which it was written tell us about why this singular passage appears? Little is known about the author of this gospel, but it can be discerned that he was a speaker of Greek, and a Jew who had converted to Christianity. He is believed to have written the document in Antioch, sometime between 80 and 90 CE, almost a hundred years after the events he is recording. Antioch was connected via some nearby major commercial roads to cities like Edessa and Hierapolis, which had inherited much from ancient Persian and thereafter Parthian cultures, including thriving Zoroastrian traditions. Indeed, as a center for education, Antioch received eager-to-learn young people from these other cities, who brought with them Zoroastrian beliefs. As such, Antioch was a multi-cultural milieu where syncretistic beliefs began to sprout up and where astrology was popular. As such, it is perhaps no surprise that Matthew incorporated astrologer Magi into his version of the Nativity. Indeed, it may have represented an effort at syncretism, an attempt to reconcile Christianity with the practice of astrology, for if astrology had successfully predicted the birth of the Messiah, it couldn’t be all bad, right? But more than this, the very notion that Magi, or priests of the Zoroastrian faith, would recognize Jesus as the foretold savior is a syncretism of Christianity and Zoroastrianism, for as I discussed in my previous post on the topic, Zoroastrians too believed in the coming of a savior figure who would be born to a virgin mother.

The Adoration of the Three Kings, anonymous. Public Domain.

Another possibility may be that, rather than trying to co-opt Zoroastrianism, Matthew may have been inventing details in order to make it seem as though Christ’s birth represented the fulfillment of known prophecy. First, there is the prophecy of the wicked Gentile diviner Balaam in Numbers Chapter 24, which states that “there shall come a Star our of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel.” Interestingly, some early Christian writers viewed Balaam as an astrologer and even sometimes suggested he was Zoroaster himself. Then there is the prophecy from the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 60, which indicates that “Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising” and mentions specifically their arrival on camels and gifts of gold and incense. Some writers, including Catholic scholar Dwight Longeneker, who has written a whole book about the topic, use this verse of prophecy to try and narrow down who the Magi were. Based on these verses mentioning that Gentiles would come from such places as Midian, Ephah, and Sheba, he argues that they were not Persian Zoroastrians but rather astrologers from the neighboring kingdoms of Nabatea and Sheba, and that the word magi was a common misnomer for any astrologers. To support his claim, he argues that these Kingdoms were linked to the kingdom of Herod by a trade route, on which they traveled to sell incense and myrrh, made from resinous plants native to their lands. This is all rather convincing, but only if you believe that what Matthew wrote had to be true, when in fact, he was likely aware of these prophecies and working them into his account. His inclusion of the brief story of the Wise men recalls both Balaam the Gentile astrologer’s metaphor of a King in Israel as a rising star AND the notion of Gentiles coming from afar to offer gifts specifically of gold and incense. So what is more likely, that this one version of the Nativity, written almost a hundred years later, with details not corroborated by contemporary sources, proves these prophecies accurate, or simply that these prophecies served as Matthew’s source material?

As we consider what may have driven Matthew to invent the story of the Wise Men and the Star of Bethlehem, yet further agendas present themselves. In emphasizing that wise Gentiles recognized Christ as the Messiah, perhaps he was not trying to validate astrology so much as he was trying to present a negative view of the Jews, who were not as accepting of Christ’s divinity. Certainly this has been one reading of the story. Or, there is the idea that, rather than validating astrology or co-opting Zoroastrianism, the story of the Star of Bethlehem was intended as a repudiation of those beliefs. After all, early Christian literature sometimes described the Star as being brighter than anything else in the sky, causing all other heavenly bodies to be dim. By this reading, the Star represented Christianity rising victorious over Zoroastrianism and astrology, a symbol of God’s destruction of magic. Lastly, it is also possible that there was a more political motivation behind the story. The arrival of Persian magi who sought to give respect not to Herod but rather to a new king appears to represent the Persian or later the Parthian rebellion against Roman rule, which the Jews had long associated with liberation. The Persian king Cyrus had previously liberated the Jews from Babylonian captivity, so during the Roman occupation of Judea, many looked again to the enemies of their enemies, the inheritors of the Persian Empire, the Parthians, for a second liberation. By this reading, Matthew’s Gospel is revolutionary literature. What all of these interpretations have in common is that they view the passage concerning the Magi not as fact but as metaphor, which of course would make all the subsequent mythologizing of their characters nothing but fantasy. It seems this figurative interpretation of scripture was actually rather common among early Christians. It is very odd, then, that today, after the Scientific Revolution and Age of Enlightenment, so many still insist on an absolute, literal reading of the Bible.  

The Adoration of the Magi by Matthias Stom. Public Domain.

Further Reading

Bakich, Michael E. “What Was the Star of Bethlehem?” Astronomy, vol. 38, no. 1, Jan. 2010, pp. 34–39. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f6h&AN=45390790&site=ehost-live.

Estakhr, Mehdi. "The Journey of the Magi: Its Religious and Political Context." World History Bulletin, vol. 32, no. 1, Spring 2016, p. 24+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A603404338/GPS?u=modestojc_main&sid=GPS&xid=59f778a1.

Grigson, Geoffrey. “The Three Kings of Cologne.” History Today, vol. 41, no. 12, Dec. 1991, pp. 28–34. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f6h&AN=9112233542&site=ehost-live.

Hegedus, Tim. “The Magi and the Star in the Gospel of Matthew and Early Christian Tradition.” Laval théologique et philosophique, vol. 59, no. 1, Feb. 2003, pp. 81-95.  Érudit, www.erudit.org/en/journals/ltp/2003-v59-n1-ltp477/000790ar/.

Longenecker, Dwight. “Who Were the THREE WISE MEN?” Catholic Digest, vol. 82, no. 2, Dec. 2017, pp. 52–55. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f6h&AN=127134763&site=ehost-live.

---. “‘We Three Kings’. (Cover Story).” Catholic Answer, vol. 28, no. 5, Nov. 2014, pp. 15–17. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=98513445&site=ehost-live.