A “Reflection” by me, as appeared in Liberty, June 1993, p. 7.
My interest in UFOs is very recent, and was sparked as much by my disillusionment with dominant intellectual paradigms as it was by compelling accounts of evidence of UFOs. What I had suspected for a long time became painfully obvious a few years ago: cultism is not just deplorable behavior from marginal groups — from the “basket of Deplorables” — for dominant groups can behave just as cultic. The differences are real, but mainly our appraisals of cultic behavior depend upon our group affiliation. We get one of those Russellian conjugations: I am a scientist or philosopher; you are a religious believer; that person over their is a cultic nut.
My UFO interest grew out of my research into the end of the Ice Age, actually. I found out, about five years ago or so, while researching Denisovans and (from another direction) global climate change, that the truths of the Younger Dryas have not been assimilated into academic thought, and that academics have been resisting the cataclysmic nature of the Ice Age’s cessation for over a century, and have often done so in horrifically ideological and cultish ways, treating their findings as dogmas and their dogmas as religion.
I’d known for decades that academic disciplines could be dominated by in-group cultism, and that Science The Procedure did not necessarily track Science The Institution. But to learn that it was almost more common than not? Quite a blow.
The classic case of a familiar academic cult is Keynesianism, which is based on a lie by Keynes himself — his politic pretense that British labour union refusal to allow nominal price drops after World War I and the pegging of gold at parity was the cause of the post-war depression there. Every decent economist knew this. But politically the unions were thought to be impregnable, and economists did not have the courage to simply drive the message home to the public. I regard this as an outright lie (following accounts by F.A. Hayek and W.H. Hutt), and the whole edifice of Keynesianism built on that Great Evasion of a Bedrock Truth. What a crock.
Quite a few other disciplines have been infected with the cultic bug, too, and I was aware of some of them. But my discovery that geology was corrupt in a similar manner was sort of the last straw for me. I gave up on my last bit of ridiculing “weird theories.” And then the AATIP revelations came out, and all bets were off. I repented of my former cultism and am now a full-blown “nut” who does not care what snobs think. I know them mainly to be frauds.
How in-group cultism can infect academia is interesting to watch. My latest excursion into this area has been revisionist history of Judaism and Christianity — the history of which I have been reading about, on and off, for three decades. In a few hours I talk to Ralph Ellis, whose books on the Hyksos-as-Hebrew-patriarchs and the historical Jesus are mind-blowing and ultra-plausible — but which no academic will touch with a ten-foot pole. I am merely curious and eager to learn more. If it is a scorned “heresy” matters not one whit to me.
One way to defeat the human propensity to treat intellectual matters in cultic fashion might be simply as Ray Scott Percival, a philosopher in the Popperian tradition, has written about in his recentMediumessays on “Fake News and the Manifest Truth Delusion”: “The biggest gain in the control of error would be through the separation of science and the corrupting influences of politics (e.g. state funding, licensing etc.) and the chilling effect of political correctness on open discussion.”
Which, amusingly enough, anti-Popperian philosopher Feyerabend proposed when we were young.
I am more than willing to revise my beliefs and manage my suspicions about UFOs based on evidence and competent speculation about possibilities. But we are still afflicted with a paucity of data that has not been, in the words of Charles Fort, “damned.”
A very cultic word, that. And apt for how governments and academics have publicly treated the subject.
It is time for academics to forswear their cultism and their willingness to serve as intellectual priest and pope, catechist or Grand Inquisitor.
One of the great mysteries of the progressive-programmed electorate is how it can forget so quickly one rationale for a policy (“flatten the curve” so as not to over-burden hospital infrastructure) and then embrace nebulous, unrealistic rationales (“beat the virus”). Mosts people are just too distracted and foolish to follow this crucial giving away of the moral high ground and intellectual respectability. Instead, they take it on faith.
And it really is faith.
But unlike faith in God, which puts you in an almost-impossible-to-test realm of epistemic extremity, faith in Salvation by Government is easy to show up as idiotic and disproven by facts and the unfolding of events.
Still, the faith is strong. Especially among moderately bright people. And why, you may ask? Well, I have mused upon this quite a lot. And evolutionary anthropologist Edward Dutton has investigated this sort of thing scientifically. But part of what we are dealing with is explained by class incentives: the moderate brights take up positions in the culture that have been heavily co-opted by technocrats using, chiefly, credentialist mechanisms — higher education — and the thing about moderate brights is that they excel at test taking and passing through low-end scholastic hoops. It’s very easy to navigate a world arranged by academics.
But it is not at all efficient, and it subverts the market order, for instead of using profit and loss as a test, other tests of efficacy come to dominate. And the domination of society by this class of people, these moderate brights, in a regulatory context, can be quite domineering.
Of course those domineering moderate brights don’t see it, because they have faith. It is the faith of statism. It is the major feature of intellectual life today.
When you are in a cult, its dogmas seem like Truth and its rites seem Profound.
Outside it? They seem stupid: full of falsity and triviality and gaucherie.
The rituals at these protests closely resemble what you would see at an Evangelical-style religious service. Collective kneeling or sitting in prayer. Hands raised reverentially to the sky. Liturgical chants. This is a new expression of secular, civic religion pic.twitter.com/XZo021AZgp
Human beings aren’t handling modernist secularism very well. So the postmodern response has been to replace religion (which educated folks generally think quite stupid) with politics.
But not just any politics — a cultish, ludicrous statism, swapping nearly every feature of the west’s dominant religion, Christianity, with some brummagem analog. But it has obvious spiritual consequences, as it must, it exhibiting itself in the acolyte as a personal and quite strident commitment to an ideology with enough internal contradictions to make the doctrine of the Trinity the very acme of Aristotelian clarity,
Libertarians have been talking about this for years. Calling statism a religion and progressivism a cult is something my friends and I have been doing since . . . well, how long, exactly? Decades, for me, since I first walked into a rented house in north Portland, Oregon, and was greeted by Tonie Nathan, the first woman to receive an Electoral College vote, rogue as it was, and introduced me around to the very smart people milling about talking about the complexities of the simple system of natural liberty.
Regardless of who makes the case, Michael Tracey or a myriad libertarians, the charge sticks.
But this is not exactly a happy judgment. Replacing God with the State and Sin with Racism has sad aspects. The saddest may be that self-righteousness has not been replaced, but doubled down upon.
Or, worse yet, group-righteousness. You can see it in the glare of the eyes as refracted in the spittle on the lips of people who, just a week before, screamed at us heathens for not wearing masks.
There is a reason for the ideological divide regarding pandemic “mitigation,” why progressives generally love the lockdown pseudo-quarantines: it feeds their prime conceit, the notion that the freedom of all must be sacrificed for the good of the most vulnerable.
In this case, the most vulnerable just happen to be aging Boomers and senescent Silents. And the corpulent. And other immune-compromised medical cases.
Having once been corpulent, and still being overweight, and having just entered my seventh decade of life, I knew early on that I was in a compromised position. But shutting down commerce to protect me is something that would never have crossed my mind.
The idea of demanding extreme mitigation strikes me as effrontery bordering on tyranny.
But progressives have no such compunctions. They hold to the principle of sacrificing the freedom of all for the lives of a few. That is their chief fixation. Because some people are vulnerable to misfortune, no one must be free to make their fortunes.
Traditionally, Americans see the political ideal as “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Progressives see this series in a different order: “Life, a stab at happiness, and liberty.” In cases where there is any conflict of the goals in this series, you sacrifice them by order.
That is, you first achieve life — and that’s life for everyone. Then you guarantee a chance at happiness for everyone, equally. Then, if the situation allows, you obtain what liberty you can for as many people as you can.
This revision of the order of ends, conceived ordinally rather than as many classical liberals and libertarians do, as a rhetorical pleonasm — three different views of the same thing, as Hokusai viewed Mount Fuji — is a key to understanding the progressive mind.
But we must add to this the messianic mindset: for progressives, as for most socialists, the “vulnerable” are seen as outsiders, as members of some out-group, and successful insiders are by definition or imaginative fiat their oppressors. That is, successful insiders, merely for not ensuring the success of those on the outs therefore must count as “oppressors.”
So the “privilege” of being an insider must be destroyed . . . or at least minimized — to rescue the un-privileged outsiders.
In America, the “privilege” of Americans is liberty, security, wealth, even health.
Progressives cannot help themselves: they must do their rescue. They must play messiahs. Their soteriology is always in play, and they are willing to conjure up revolutionary eschatologies to ensure the ritual acts of sacrifice. Well, strike “ritual.” VERY REAL acts of sacrifice: take from some to give to others.
Now, for individualists, sacrificing some for others is a perversion, the most horrifying social act imaginable — we would call it the ultimate anti-social act. But progressives see sacrifice as the whole point. These people are post-Christians. No act of salvation is worth it without sacrifice. Not sacrifice of opportunities forgone to invest in improvements. Not that kind of sacrifice. They need to sacrifice some powerful and privileged (as imaginary as that power and privilege often is) people to make the whole thing feel right.
But whereas Christians believe that the only sacrifice worth fretting much about be Christ’s sacrifice for their sins, working out their own sacrifices with fear and trembling away from the madding crowd, progressives must do their sacrificing in public.
Progressivism is inherently Pharisaic.
Which is why they tend to be such “Karens” regarding mitigation and quarantine. The joy is in seeing themselves as righteous in public, and for that there must be an identifiable group to be saved, and an identifiable group to sacrifice.
But we can take this post-Christian interpretation too far. There is something quite chthonian in progressive soteriology. We may have to look back to Ba’al and Beelzebub to understand the kind of sacrifice they demand.
How far back? Let me consider that in some future essay.
“The proper relationship between any researcher and his or her audience is one of equality.” — Richard Dolan
The cottage industry that is UFO cultism — as described by a leading UFO researcher:
The issue, at base, is that the biggest, perhaps fastest-growing religion in our time is whorled around UFOs.
Richard Dolan is a researcher, one of the most respected researchers in the field, and one way to critique his stance (which I generally support) is to note that he is attacking his competitors in occult knowledge. That would be a sneaky and invidious interpretation, but it is worth laying on the table. Against that I take sides with Dolan, and readily admit that I see no reason to abandon good investigation techniques, accumulation of data, and the falsifiability criterion (where it can be applied). UFOs may be weird, but they are no reason to abandon reason.
I insist, however, in the spirit of Jacques Vallee, that we take this approach and apply it also to the investigation of the religious foment that is associated with the UFO/ancient alien biz.
Indeed, I am most interested in this subject as a religion — in part because I think religions should be studied on a scientific basis as well as from a more generally philosophical standpoint. In some of his later books, such as Messengers of Deception and Revelation, Vallee goes part way to that very study.
And the various UFO cults out there, with their usual list of prophets, priests, maximum leaders, secret gnosis, esoteric/exoteric teachings, political agendas, and the like, are indeed fascinating. We must go beyond Vallee’s and Dolan’s cult-bashing, though. The full panoply of sociology, economics, social psychology, and related disciplines must be marshaled to try to comprehend the social flux of our time. And in all of this, Dolan’s strictures must apply: evidence and source sharing — and general data transparency — between the field’s consumers and the purveyors of purported information. Secret knowledge if for conspiracies and cults.
It is worth mentioning that Gaia.com began as a yoga and meditation channel, and has slowly morphed into a ufology speculation channel hosting extensive discussions of myth and history. While scientific rigor is uncommon there, it is not without a voice; still, much more prominent is “spirituality.” While I do not dismiss any of these data and theories out of hand, most must be filed under Epoché — at best.
But we should ask ourselves:
Why is it growing out of hand?
Well, the evidence I know most about does not directly pertain to UFOs, but to government involvement in spreading confusion about UFOs, as testified since the beginning of the public UFO craze in 1947, by figures as diverse Major Donald Keyhoe and Carl Gustav Jung. Government incoherence — or seeming incoherence — on the issue is spreading irrationality. And thus a religious attitude of dogma and lack of interest in hard evidence. Now, I have to state: this might ALL be a psy-op; SOME of it undoubtedly is. The CIA has been involved in the UFO issue since its inception. Indeed, the CIA was legislatively created one month after the Mt. Rainier “flying saucer” sighting by Kenneth Arnold.
To what extent some people within the Deep State know a whole lot more about the subject than anyone on the outside, and to what extent a subset of those people are actively spreading disinformation about UFOs, including faked encounters, I do not know. But I think the evidence shows that these are factors.
And that gives us this to ponder: no matter what the UFO issue is really about, whether multiform or singular in explanation, our government is involved to an astounding degree, and it is behaving in ways that are inimical to the principles that we associate with republican governance, specifically the sub-ordinance of military to civil government, and civil government to citizen control.
Thoughtful researchers like Richard Dolan are on board with this perspective. Indeed, I know of no non-political interest group with more skepticism about government than the UFO enthusiast and research community. It is a pity that so many of them fall prey to wild flights of fantasy unhinged from evidence, as Richard Dolan decries. But this is in a sense understandable: for on this subject, the proverbial “elephant in the room” is not the UFOs themselves, but the United States’ Deep State.
In his 2009 book, Christian pollster George Barna explores the varieties of religion in America. I’ve mentioned the book before, since I found it extremely interesting. But I just noticed something: he misses the religion that is coming to birth in our time.
There is no mention of UFOs in this book.
This is a big lapse, because, whatever else may be said about the “ancient aliens/flying saucer” aficionados, they are developing their lore at breakneck speed; it is in a foment as wild and diverse as was Christianity during its first 300 years; and there is a prominent and somewhat ominous spiritual component. Further, there are parallels to the bewildering complexion of religion 2000 years ago, with Gnostic, Orthodox, agnostic, philosophical, and misotheist sub-movements.
Of course, it may be that most members of the “seven faith tribes” that Barna explores in his polling data would be (outside his book) very dismissive of the “UFO nuts,” as to be expected.
“Everyone is.”
But that “everyone” is rapidly diminishing — especially now that several branches of the U.S. Government have admitted to the existence of so-far-as-yet-unexplained aerial phenomena that irregularly-but-not-too-infrequently appear in our oceans and skies, and appear to be (in many cases) craft of some kind.
This leaves the emerging religion in a very dangerous position: it could be captured by real beings of unknown variety — or charlatans and fake-outs. (Or both.) The weirdness of it all is quite dangerous.
You may think that Ancient Aliens is just rube entertainment. You would be wrong. I am not saying it is reliable or even mostly non-nut. But I am saying it is reaching increasing numbers of non-dismissive ears and imaginations, and that this is having a spiritual impact and will have an increasing political impact. The last election was truly interesting, since one of the two major candidates explicitly and repeatedly promised this community disclosure on the subject, from the U.S. Government. What this candidate did not appreciate was that she was, from what I can tell, more deeply distrusted in this community than in most. Not a few “UFO nuts” I have encountered believe that Trump was selected by elements within the Deep State to make a big push against her cult, which is regarded as untrustworthy in the extreme. We are talking Q-Anon kinds of conspiracy. PizzaGate and much, much more — but with the arrest and putative death of Jeffrey Epstein, PizzaGate has gained new legs. And even if this particular rumor turns out (as it looks) to be buncombe, the linkages between the trafficking of youngsters for sexual exploitation by the very rich and famous remains a thing.
Precisely what kind of thing, I do not know.
But it is noteworthy that John Podesta and the Clintons, who feature so big in PizzaGate lore, are all proud pushers of UFO disclosure.
With some amusement I also note that I write about UFO stuff more often than any of my friends would like. It creeps them out. As a known sympathizer with Barna’s so-called Captive Christians (odd name!) while having been for years a member in good standing of Barna’s Spiritual Skeptics, my affinity for UFOs may seem a bit out-of-the-blue. So, disclosure: my reasons for often bringing up this matter are not simple, but manifold:
UFOs have influenced our culture greatly, aesthetically and ethically and spiritually;
UFOs appear to have some unsettling truth-value, precisely what I do not know;
Honest people should feel therefore compelled to consider the issue — admittedly bizarre — in non-dismissive ways;
The issue has links to what I regard as most important story of our epoch, the cataclysms at the end of the Ice Age that are pregnant with paradigm-busting potential;
The subject is such an enigma and so fraught with deception and error that it provides a good challenge for nimble minds — as I hope mine can qualify for, for a while at least;
The subject is intimately related to all major traditional religions and esoteric religious traditions as well as to literature (science fiction) and dreams (ask Jung);
The emerging religious movement that is (just barely) contained within the UFO aficionado community almost surely will prove to have a huge impact on our social world, if we manage to survive what’s coming down the pike.
In my first paragraph, I deliberately echoed Catholic theologian John S. Dunne’s opening words in The Way of All the Earth (1972): “Is a religion coming to birth in our time?
It could be. What seems to be occurring is a phenomenon we might call ‘passing over,’ passing over from one culture to another, from one way of life to another, from one religion to another. Passing over is a shifting of standpoint, a going over to the standpoint of another culture, another way of life, another religion. It is followed by an equal and opposite process we might call ‘coming back,’ coming back with new insight to one’s own culture, one’s own way of life, one’s own religion.’
Until the last several years, ufology was as alien to me as the religion of Ba’al or Quetzelcoatl. In investigating this sphere of inquiry, speculation, fabulation, and bold conjecture, as well as its attendant spiritual components, I am in a sense trying to do what Dunne discussed. And what a weird world it is: strangely familiar understandings of consciousness are what stand out, and stories of resurrection in new bodies (“containers”) and recirculation of souls and the like litter the UFO noösphere — including literal beliefs in the evolution of a noösphere. Notions out of Hinduism, shamanism, Christianity, Norse myth — they are quite varied. And then there are the politico-social movements, like Ubuntu, which I find quite congenial, I confess.
But there is something even bigger on the line here. The truth. There is some truth in the UFO reports. Or, truths. The UFOs are not just misidentified insect swarms, ball lightning and skunk-work test runs. But figuring out exactly what it is? Difficult. I have no intention of doing the dogmatic thing — the pretend-skeptic thing — of dismissing the subject altogether, on the basis of focusing on just a few mistakes, frauds, and confabulations of obvious lunatics.
An old theory of mine, though, does come into recollection: when I was young, and a Christian, I conjectured that God would be so outside of comprehensibility that any intersection between God and humankind would not look normal, have a normal feel to it at all. So it would be prejudicial to expect that intercourse with actual aliens would be any more comforting or comprehensible than intercourse with gods and angels and devils and the like would seem. An encounter with a Zeta Reticulan or Mantid or what-have-you would likely seem quite different from talking to a Tuvan or trading with a Quaker, as admittedly odd as those encounters can be in themselves.
Approaching a new field of inquiry with a dismissive attitude and strong preconceptions of possibilities might be a display of Dunning-Kruger more than anything else. Some humility might be in order.
And holding ideas in Epoché should hardly be difficult for a “skeptic”!
twv
Hunched over for work. And I cannot right now find my computer glasses.
This can seem puzzling, since some of the most socialist-minded people I know claim to be theists, and the modern libertarian movement, which advocates laissez-faire capitalism with the most reason and vigor, is majority atheist — or at least was, when I was involved (three decades ago) in polling its ranks.
But some of this is historical happenstance. Maybe. Communism/socialism/collectivism grew out of the ferment of the French Enlightenment and Revolution, and that was filled with thinkers who were atheists or at least “flirted” with atheism. Defenders and refiners of the emerging capitalist order, on the other hand, tended to arise out of the Scottish Enlightenment. These people included pious Christians and, more famously, cautious skeptics of theism — David Hume being the most famous, and his friend Adam Smith being even more circumspect than he.
Contrast these two versions of the Enlightenment. The French were more in-your-face, often challenging all establishments at once. The Scots and Englanders and Americans, on the other hand, appealed to the Christian majority, trying to get them to move towards liberalism rather than continue to defend the ancien régime. And there existed Christian dissenters, after all, who got along fine with the more secular liberals, perhaps because they were both trying to peel back the authoritarian state. The French, on the other hand, demonstrated less of a gift for compromise. Indeed, when the Revolutionaries gained power, not only did they disestablish the Church, they stole, er, confiscated, its property and set up a land-backed bond paper issuance that became a fiat currency that then hyperinflated which in turn drove the French people crazy, ushering in the Terror. The British liberals — the Whigs, chiefly — were more interested in a rule of law, in peaceful and mutually beneficial relations, and were reform-minded, not revolutionaries by temperament. Even the American Revolution was more a secession movement than civil revolt, one that relied as much on a nuanced interpretation of tradition than a complete overthrowal of established powers. The founding generation of Americans defended an ordered liberty, not a manic passion to remake the world over, anew, through massive State action.
This divorce in temperament between the two movements has something to do with the split that we see today. Hume was basically an atheist, but carefully hid his beliefs while he lived. Denis Diderot and the Encyclopedists, on the other hand, did not hide their atheism, now, did they?
This carried on into the 19th century. Herbert Spencer, Britain’s most principled liberal and proponent of free markets, was basically an atheist. But he hated the term. He deliberately wrote into his metaphysics a rather mystical component, an appreciation for the Unknowable force that lies underneath all reality, and he insisted that this doctrine disqualified him from the dread label atheist. But, in France, the rising radicalism for “anarchy” and for socialism sported that great misotheist, Pierre Joseph Proudhon. Meanwhile, also in France, the French Liberal School of economists carried on a sort of pious Deism, which can be seen in the works of both Frédéric Bastiat and Gustave de Molinari (who, though Belgian, worked in France, when allowed by its government, and edited Guillaumin’s Journal des Économistes).
By the time you get to Karl Marx, it is apparent that “the revolutionary” just seems to fit better with atheism than theism.
And by this, I mean, memetically, by the mere association of ideas. Not as a matter of truth. (It might be helpful to repeat Scott Adams’s mantra: in some important sense “the facts don’t matter.”)
Whether or not there is a God, or many gods, or none, does not have a logical relationship with the State or any of its policies.
And it gets especially weird when you go back in history and realize that most rulers identified themselves all-too-literally as deities. All this seems ridiculous to us now. But it did not then.
And this is also at play: those who reject any kind of a deity, and, moreover, hate the very idea of a God, tend to compensate with advocacy of some form of statism, seeking to aggrandize the institution of secular power, doubling down on the prestige of government. Politics becomes their religion, the State their Messiah.
I find this absurd. I really feel no commonality with extreme statists — socialists and communists and the like — and would rather that, if people must believe weird things to get by in this weird world, let it be by some fanciful, fantasied deity that allows them to resist the temptation to deify that “coldest of all cold monsters,” the State.
In other words, let us steer clear of the great and manifest evils of communism, state socialism, and all political forms of collectivism. If not “by any means necessary,” then at least by mostly harmless made-up theology.
You see the most obvious typo: “by” when “buy” was meant.
Imagine a religion without beliefs, sans credo, but based upon mere suspicion.
Now consider environmentalism, the ideology in which what should be at best suspicions are held religiously as points of dogma.
Now, briefly to reïterate my long-standing position: anthropogenic global warming sure seems plausible. But that is mere suspicion. Beyond this suspicion, the “science” is all over the map. Sea levels have been rising steadily as measured on east and west coasts of North America since 1850 — long before the great releases of greenhouse gases from modern civilization. And if you look at reliable U.S. temperatures for the last 150 years, it is not at all evident that a general warming has occurred.
So, while there is room for suspicion regarding current and future climatic shifts of possible catastrophic proportions, there is not yet grounds for anything close to certainty.
Yet the dogma on the environmentalist left is clear.
How must we appraise this? Well, as always with religious people, it is by their fruits we shall know them. If they say our coasts are going to be under water in a few years — unless (of course) we act immediately in a massive and transformative way — then you would expect environmentalists to flock to the uplands. It sure is obvious that the “proper” transformative policies they demand are not being adopted.
Because environmentalists are not heading for the hills, I do not believe they really believe in their catastrophe scenarios. They are playing at belief.
Not as suspicion, but as fantasy.
I suspect they do this the better to hate on those who doubt. It is a proven “winning” religious strategy.
Facebook post by online philosopher Stefan Molyneux.
This is interesting. The religion of our age is statism, and its proponents are dangerous because dependent upon (and thus prone to) violence. Since statists and ultra-statists demand that state violence be marshaled to serve their causes, no wonder that they engage in threats and terrorism. Their philosophy is one of threats and terror.
And the scope of state action is immanent, part of the warp and woof of the secular world, so always a live option for acolytes.
Christianity, on the other hand, is a transcendent religion, not immanentist. So the religion’s forcible element is seen as taking place outside of the secular sphere. This allows its practitioners a sacred space apart from the world of hustle and bustle, thus encouraging them not to over-invest in everyday politics. It even allows them some skepticism and resistance to state power.
This is probably why statists have made such a strong, sustained attack upon Christendom for the past century, the last few decades especially: the State is a jealous god.
“God is dead, and we have killed him!” —F. W. Nietzsche
Ahmed Osman’s thesis in Jesus in the House of the Pharaohs (2004) strikes me as preposterous. Yet it is such a daring performance that I am sort of in awe. The book delivers (figuratively) a blow to the brain, in a way reminiscent of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) or something by Erich von Däniken — it is such a radical reinterpretation of history that I am left not believing but, instead, holding my hat over my chest as a salute.
And like Jaynes’s and von Däniken’s work, and especially like Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939), this book revolutionizes the past, in this case upending not only Jewish origin stories but Christian ones as well.
The sliver of plausibility for what Osman does lies in an interpretive difficulty: real history in the Bible before Ezra and Nehemiah is . . . problematic. Before the re-building of the Temple in Jerusalem the matching of story to archaeology proves iffy at best.
So one is tempted to dismiss much of the early Biblical “historical” matter as fiction, as myth, or as radically messed-up fact at the very least. The Jews, just back from Babylon — or while in it — constructed a mythology based on dim memory and oral tradition. And out of the need to tell good stories. The strange connection to Egypt sticks out in all this. Take, as just one oddity to be accounted for, the ancient Egyptian practice of circumcision — how did the Israelites’ adoption of it make them “separate”? Well, it made them different from the Mesopotamians. That it did.
Osman makes the connection with Egypt stronger than ever.
And what a whopper he expounds. In his first book, 1987’s Stranger in the Valley of Kings, he advanced the idea that Yuya, Master of the Horse under Thutmose IV and Amenhotep III, was actually the Biblical Joseph. In subsequent books, especially this one, he reinterprets everything in terms of 18th and 19th Dynasty Pharaonic history.
Osman proposes that . . .
1. Thutmose III was the Biblical King David, ruler of lands between the Nile and Euphrates (which Thutmose was, but no Israelite ever was). 2. Abraham and Sarai went down to Egypt, with Abraham notoriously passing off his wife as his sister, allowing Thutmose (David) to take Sarai unto himself and sire a son, Isaac, whose birthright is as a prince in Egypt. But they are sent north by the disgusted pharaoh, because Abraham had lied to him. 3. Joseph, grandson of Isaac, is sold into slavery by his brothers and, in Egypt, rises from slavery to high position as Yuya, Father to Pharaohs, in the reign of Thutmose IV. He served on into the reign of the next pharaoh, Amenhotep III, “the Great,” 4. who is the Biblical Solomon. This long-lived ruler revives an ancient religion, an intellectual and spiritual worship of one deity, represented in the Sun Disk — Atenism. 5. His second son, Amenhotep IV, inherits the throne. He becomes a big believer and priest of Atenism, and redubs himself Akhenaten. And — get this — he is Moses!!! 6. Alhenaten/Moses is kicked out and flees with his most devoted followers to the Sinai. His son Tutankhaten becomes pharaoh at a young age. Tutankhaten is a peacelover and not as big of a fanatic as his father, and accepts Amenism back into the mainstream of Egyptian life, changes his name to Tutankhamen and then travels to Sinai to convince his father to come back to Egypt and accept his co-pharaonic position — all a big happy family — but is killed by an Atenist priest. This is the death on Sinai that Freud wrote about and attributed to the death of “the first Moses” — but it was young King Tut. Tut’s body was sent back to Egypt for a rather bizarre burial. 7. Now, Tut also believed in an afterlife, a resurrection. He was both Moses’ colleague Joshua and . . . drum roll . . . Jesus — of Christianity! This is the stone the builders rejected. The builders of Judaism. Amazing thesis. 8. He is buried and succeeded by his uncle, Pharaoh Ay, the son of Yuya/Joseph, the Biblical Ephraim, and the New Testament Joseph of Arimathea, all three! 9. The next pharaoh, Horemheb, is the persecutor of the Jews in Goshen. 10. After Horemheb croaks, back comes old Akhenaten/Moses, to reclaim the rest of his people. Though the 19th Dynasty pharaoh that Moses encounters does indeed recognize Akhenaten’s royal staff, he is none too impressed with Moses’ entreaties: conflict ensues, Moses sneaks his people out. etc., etc.
Now, that is a story.
The Essene connection is not clear to me (perhaps I read it too hastily, or too long ago, having stretched out my reading over too long a period) but then the Dead Sea Scrolls’ Teacher of Righteousness is himself pretty obscure. Osman identifies him with Jesus, and, as I said above, Tut. This stretching back of the messianic tradition is that notion taken to its extreme. In The First Messiah: Investigating the Savior Before Jesus (1999), Michael O. Wise only pushed it back a century or so, and, with scholarly caution, did not identify the first “Messiah” with Jesus of Nazareth.
The Akhenaten-as-Moses theory is daring enough. But Osman’s no piker: he makes Christianity an underground movement in Judaism from the beginning.
Is this at all plausible? Well, I have long regarded Freud’s book as a “nut book,” more nutty than Velikovsky’s Oedipus and Akhenaten (1960). So how should I regard this?
Identifying the “historical Jesus” is an old game, for both scholars and nuts. Richard Carrier, in On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason For Doubt (2014), does the best job advancing the thesis that there was no actual, historical Jesus. (Carrier cites Michael O. Wise, for example, but not Osman.) There is no good historical evidence for Jesus’s existence in Judea c. 30 A.D. — the gospels providing no evidence at all, really — so it is not nutty to say there was no such person. I know it sounds weirder than a walnut, but the literary nature of the gospels provides a huge hint: we are talking about religious fiction here, and there was a major strain of Christianity that did not assert the physical reality of the Messiah at all. I refer, of course, to Gnosticism. And Carrier rightly makes much of the “spiritual Jesus” tradition to be discerned in what remains of that bizarre non-canonical text, The Ascension of Isaiah.
But the real problem with the historical Jesus subject matter is not the paucity of candidates for the man, but the surfeit. Jesus is Yeshua is Joshua, and that was a common name among the Hebrews. Carrier wades into the most startling example, taking note of a “Jesus When” problem, discussing the Nazoreans’ messiah with that name, c. 100 B.C. (pp. 281-285). Indeed, this “Ben Stada” (son of the Unfaithful) or “Ben Pandera” (son of a man named Pandera who had sex with a woman named Mary) was the only executed Jesus the Babylonian Talmudic writers knew of.
That this tradition lived on in the propagandistic Toldoth Jesu is hard to miss. I had an argument with an incredibly smart Jew once about these stories. He refused to take this tradition seriously, though, even countenance it at all, apparently because he thought that it would raise the ire of today’s Christians, conjuring up Christian anti-semitism.
Today’s evangelical Christians (whom I know best) will not likely be budged, in no small part because they tend not to read the historical matter of the Nazoreans or Gnostics or much of anything else that might challenge their faith. They are told by Josh MacDowell and Bill O’Reilly that the evidence for the Son of God living and dying and resurrecting in Judea in the days of Herod and Pontius Pilate is clear. It is not. But that is OK. Harmless fictions? I hope so.
One problem Christians will not properly confront is the problem of pious fraud. Bart Ehrman’s Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why The Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (2011) makes the standard case clearly. But without getting into the thicket of the canon, note what we find in Josephus, a historian quite extra-canonical:
Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.
Antiquities of the Jews, Book 18, Chapter 3, § 3
This is an obvious interpolation into the historian’s text. Almost all scholars are agreed upon this. It would be most out of character for the turncoat Jew to parade Christian piety in one passage and nowhere else. It makes no sense other than as a forgery.
But what follows is instructive. Well, what follows immediately are two brief tales of scandal, and then a new chapter, which begins like this:
But the nation of the Samaritans did not escape without tumults. The man who excited them to it was one who thought lying a thing of little consequence, and who contrived every thing so that the multitude might be pleased; so he bid them to get together upon Mount Gerizzim, which is by them looked upon as the most holy of all mountains, and assured them, that when they were come thither, he would show them those sacred vessels which were laid under that place, because Moses put them there. So they came thither armed, and thought the discourse of the man probable; and as they abode at a certain village, which was called Tirathaba, they got the rest together to them, and desired to go up the mountain in a great multitude together; but Pilate prevented their going up, by seizing upon file roads with a great band of horsemen and foot-men, who fell upon those that were gotten together in the village; and when it came to an action, some of them they slew, and others of them they put to flight, and took a great many alive, the principal of which, and also the most potent of those that fled away, Pilate ordered to be slain.
Antiquities of the Jews, Book 18, Chapter 4, § 1
This rout of a peaceful Samaritan religious figure, we learn, so upset the Samaritans that they petitioned the emperor, who called back Pontius Pilate to Rome. Pilate was removed from “service” in the area because of his execution of Samaritan pilgrims. This is interesting because it links Pilate to a religious execution. Of an unnamed Samaritan.
Why the lack of a name? Well, Josephus does not name every last one the people he writes about. But Charles Kos, a YouTuber and historian, suggests another reason. The name was elided. Because the name was Jesus. This man, a proverbial Good Samaritan — and the Samaritans were, after all, a people practicing an alternate form of Judaism — was, Kos speculates, the Jesus who spurred the creation of crucial historical elements of the gospels. The Pilate story, for one.
It seems to me not at all implausible that this Samaritan’s passion tale was united with the Nazoreans’ account and the Gnostics’ mythos to create the gospels as we know them.
But Ahmed Osman goes much further. He brings King Tut into the mix, and creates a re-interpretation almost as radically implausible as the standard Christian theological account of the Word and the crucifixion and the bizarre, ghostly Resurrection.
Osman’s story is impressive, I will not deny it. But does it convince?
He had me at Yuya. The idea of Alhenaten as Moses is not altogether too bizarre a leap. But Tut as Jesus?
I will let the question hang there. As if on an Ankh cross.
twv
My reading stack just gets bigger and bigger. Here is some spillover.
Wirkman Comment 