Psychedelic Apes

by Alex Boese

  But, if emperor worship was an authentic form of belief, this complicated the story of its relationship to Christianity. Instead of Christianity filling a vacuum created by the collapse of paganism, scholars began to wonder if it may have arisen on top of a base supplied by emperor worship. The emerging consensus is that, in fact, this seems to be the case – that the imperial cults heavily influenced early Christians, who adopted a great deal of vocabulary and symbolism from them.

  New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, for example, has argued that it isn’t mere coincidence that Christians claimed their crucified leader to be a god just around the same time that the Romans were referring to their dead emperors as gods. The example supplied by emperor worship of how a man could turn into a god would have been hard to ignore. Similarly, Fordham University professor Michael Peppard has pointed out that the Emperor Augustus, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, was officially referred to as the ‘Son of God’, the identical title later applied to Jesus.

  It makes sense that the Christians would have incorporated elements from emperor worship into their own doctrine, even if only to contrast their own faith with it. After all, this was the symbolic language that potential converts around the Mediterranean were familiar with.

  Viewed from this perspective, all those parallels that Carotta found between Caesar and Jesus don’t seem quite as implausible. Mainstream scholars definitely wouldn’t agree that Jesus was actually Caesar, but could the Christians have borrowed elements from the cult of Caesar, adapting many of its stories to embellish the story of their messiah? The idea is controversial, certainly, but possible. In which case, Jesus wouldn’t be Caesar, but his biography might contain echoes of the fallen general’s life within it.

  What if the Early Middle Ages never happened?

  Try this simple test. Name something that happened in Europe between 614 and 911 AD.

  If you’re a history buff, it’s probably an easy question. After all, there are records of many different events from that period. There was the rise of the Carolingian dynasty in the eighth century, which culminated with the reign of Charlemagne the Great, or there were the Viking raids that spread terror throughout much of Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries.

  If you managed to name some things, congratulations. But if you couldn’t, don’t worry. Most historians wouldn’t ever say so, but, according to the German scholar Heribert Illig, ‘nothing’ would be the most accurate answer. Illig is the author of the phantom-time hypothesis, according to which the 297 years between 614 and 911 AD never took place – they were conjured out of thin air and inserted into European history. He believes that the events which supposedly occurred during this time – the rise of Charlemagne and all the rest – were total fabrications.

  As Illig tells it, it was in the late 1980s when he first stumbled upon the idea that approximately 300 years had been added to the calendar. Although he had earned a doctorate in German language and literature studies, he was supporting himself as a systems analyst at a bank. It evidently wasn’t his dream job, but he was making ends meet. Then, one day, he was thinking about the Gregorian calendar reform of the sixteenth century when he realized that there was a mystery lurking within it – one that led him to the idea of phantom time.

  In 1582, Pope Gregory had ordered a reform of the calendar. The problem was that the Julian calendar, established by Julius Caesar in 45 BC, was growing out of sync with the seasons. The Julian year was 365¼ days long, but this was 674 seconds shorter than the actual solar year. Over the span of centuries, these few seconds had started adding up. The Pope realized that, if something wasn’t done soon, Easter would soon be celebrated in winter rather than spring. His scholars, at his behest, determined that ten days needed to be skipped to get the calendar back in line with the solar year, and this is what the Pope decreed should be done.

  Here, as Illig saw it, was the mystery. Why was it only necessary to skip ten days? Every 128 years, the Julian calendar drifted an additional day apart from the solar year. This meant that, by 1282, a ten-day error would have accumulated, which was the amount of days the Church skipped. But, of course, they reformed the calendar in 1582, not 1282. There was an additional 300 years unaccounted for. They should have had to skip thirteen days, not ten. Why the discrepancy?

  Illig decided there was only one possible explanation. At some point between 45 BC and 1582 AD, approximately 300 years must have been added to the calendar.

  Illig realized that what he was contemplating would be regarded as outrageous by conventional scholars, but he nevertheless continued to follow this train of thought. If three centuries had been added to the calendar, he asked himself, which centuries were most likely to be the fake ones? They would probably suffer from poor documentation, he reasoned, and exhibit an overall lack of source material. After all, a forger could never match the richness of genuine history. Historians would probably regard those centuries as being particularly obscure and little understood. Was there such a period in European history? It immediately occurred to him that there was indeed. It was the centuries that made up the bulk of the era known as the Dark Ages.

  The Dark Ages is a vague term. Its temporal boundaries aren’t strictly defined. It’s generally applied to the period from the end of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD to around 1000 AD. Modern historians don’t like the term at all, thinking it unnecessarily judgemental. They prefer to call these centuries the Early Middle Ages. But the term Dark Ages has stuck in popular usage because the period does seem dark – we don’t know a lot about it due to the meagre amount of source material that survives. It was also a fairly grim period of European history, with the darkest period lasting for about 300 years, from 600 to 900 AD.

  It’s as if, during these centuries, European civilization fell off a cliff. A handful of barbarian kingdoms had risen up in place of the Roman Empire and, while their rulers initially tried to keep Roman laws and customs in place, maintaining the facade that they were preserving the tradition of imperial order, as time passed, things crumbled. Infrastructure stopped being built. The great engineering projects of the Romans fell into ruin. Literacy rates plummeted, not that they were very high to begin with, and knowledge was lost as traditions of scholarship eroded.

  There’s been much speculation about what caused this decline. Theories have attributed it to the disruption of Mediterranean trade by Islamic pirates, or even to enormous volcanic eruptions in Central America that could have triggered climate change, impacting agriculture in Europe. But most historians now chalk it up to the effects of disease. A series of epidemics swept through Europe, beginning in the third century, and, as more time passed, these epidemics kept hitting. Population levels fell dramatically. There simply weren’t enough people to maintain civilization at its former levels, so much of the population of Europe reverted to a more primitive style of existence.

  But, Illig asked, what if the real reason for the decline was that it was all an illusion? What if the Dark Ages were dark because they were fake?

  In this way, Illig recast the obscurity of those centuries as a sign of chronological distortion, rather than of disease and low population. The truth, he said, was that, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Europe had experienced only a slight bump in the road before resuming a steady ascent to the economic and cultural achievements of the High Middle Ages. He singled out the years 614 AD and 911 AD as the boundaries of the falsehood. The first date corresponded to the Eastern Roman Empire’s loss of Jerusalem to the Persians, while the latter date marked the treaty between the Viking duke Rollo and Charles the Simple, King of West Francia. Both these events, he decided, had really happened, but everything in between, including the rise of the Carolingian dynasty, he dismissed as an invention.

  How could such an outrageous chronological manipulation possibly have taken place? Such an elaborate scheme must have had an architect. Who was it, and why would they have done it?

  Illig’s suspicions focused on a youthful ru
ler, Emperor Otto III, who was part of the Ottonian dynasty that established a vast kingdom throughout Germany and northern Italy in the tenth century. According to conventional history, Otto III was born in 980 AD and became king when he was only three, following the death of his father, Otto II. But as he grew into manhood, young Otto developed lofty ambitions. He not only wanted to rule the largest kingdom in Europe, he also wanted to lead what he called a renovatio imperii Romanorum or a ‘renewal of the empire of the Romans’. His plans, however, were cut short when he died of fever at the age of twenty-one.

  Illig offered a slightly different version of Otto’s life. He preserved the broad outline of the ruler’s biography, but placed him in an earlier century. By Illig’s reckoning, Otto was born in 683 AD instead of 980 AD. He still saw him as a young man of brash ambition, though. In fact, Illig speculated that his desire may have extended far beyond the political sphere, into the spiritual as well. Illig imagined that Otto wanted to play a leading role, not just in the affairs of men, but in the great divine drama of the universe itself. He yearned to be Christ’s representative on Earth, who would ring in the final millennium of creation before the arrival of the Day of Judgement.

  Christian doctrine at the time held that the world would exist for 7,000 years. Each 1,000-year period was thought to correspond to a single day in God’s time, analogous to the seven days of creation. By the calculations of seventh-century scholars, they were currently living in the sixth millennium. There were different estimates of when the seventh, final millennium would begin, but the year 1000 seemed to many like a good bet. After all, the Book of Revelation had foretold that Satan would stay bound for 1,000 years, which could be interpreted to mean that he would return 1,000 years after Christ’s birth, and that this would mark the commencement of the final millennium, triggering an epic struggle between the forces of good and evil leading up to the end of the world.

  These weren’t fringe ideas. This was the orthodox, official teaching of the Church. There was fervent anticipation throughout the Christian world for the arrival of the final millennium. Without a doubt, Otto III shared these beliefs. But Illig believed that Otto faced a problem in fulfilling his great ambition because he had been born too soon, in 683, which meant that the final millennium was still over 300 years off.

  So, Illig speculated, the idea might have formed in Otto’s mind that the date of the final millennium didn’t lie hundreds of years in the future, but that it was actually close at hand. This is a common psychological phenomenon among members of end-of-the-world cults. They always want to speed up the arrival of the apocalypse. They convince themselves that they’re witnessing the end times.

  If Otto truly believed this, then the actual date on the calendar would have been a minor inconvenient detail. He could simply change the date to match his fevered, millennial fantasy. After all, he was emperor! Perhaps he convinced himself that he was correcting the date, rather than altering it. Or perhaps he didn’t come up with the idea on his own. Pope Sylvester II might have whispered the idea in his ear to flatter the young ruler’s vanity. Some form of collusion between the Pope and Otto would have been necessary to pull off the scheme.

  Having decided on this grand plan, Otto would have sent forth couriers to deliver the order to clerics throughout his kingdom: add 300 years of history to the calendar! Obediently, they would have bent over their desks to begin working. We don’t need to imagine they would have done so unwillingly. After all, they probably shared the emperor’s millennial expectations; it was the mindset of the era, all part of the fervent hope to witness the unfolding of Biblical prophecy in the present.

  Such a scheme might sound wildly implausible. Surely even an emperor couldn’t have engineered so outrageous a deception! But this, Illig countered, is to think like a person of the twenty-first century. In the modern world, it would be impossible to surreptitiously add 300 years to the calendar, but, in the seventh century, it would not only have been possible, it would have been easy.

  Most people in the Early Middle Ages had no idea what the date was. That information was irrelevant to them. Only a handful of clerics and scribes knew how to read and write, and only they cared about the calendar. Otto could have changed the date, and it wouldn’t have caused the smallest ripple in the lives of most people in his kingdom. Vast culture-wide indifference worked in his favour.

  Just as importantly, in the seventh century, almost no one used the anno Domini, or AD, dating system, so there would have been no resistance to altering it. At the time, it was still most common to date events by referring to the ruler in power. One would say, for example, that such-and-such an event had occurred in the fifth year of the reign of Otto III.

  The idea of using Christ’s birth as year zero had been introduced in around 525 by a Scythian monk named Dionysius Exiguus, but it was slow to catch on. It only began to gain in popularity around the time of the Ottonian dynasty, and even then its adoption was so gradual that it wasn’t until 1627 that it occurred to anyone to use its counterpart, BC, or ‘before Christ’. According to Illig, it truly wouldn’t have been difficult for a suitably determined emperor to have manipulated the anno Domini calendar. In fact, he argued, the reason we use the AD dating scheme today is precisely because the phantom-time plotters promoted its use.

  Illig published his hypothesis in 1991, detailing it in a German-language book titled Das erfundene Mittelalter (The Invented Middle Ages). Or would it be more accurate to say he published it in 1694?

  Historians in Germany were incredulous. Illig’s claims seemed to them to be so absurd that they scarcely merited a response, and if his book hadn’t started to climb bestseller lists, they probably would have ignored it. But the book did attract public attention, so they felt obliged to issue a rebuttal of some kind. But what could they say? How do you prove that 300 years actually happened?

  Illig’s hypothesis actually raised questions of a truly existential nature for historians, and this is arguably the most interesting aspect of it. They were questions such as, what allows us to say anything with certainty about the past? What is our knowledge about history ultimately based upon?

  These kinds of questions are so basic, they normally never get asked outside of dry academic discussions of historical methodology. Illig, however, was raising them in a very public, sensational way, challenging the validity of historical knowledge itself.

  So, historians patiently tried to explain the types of evidence that led them to believe the Early Middle Ages really had happened. They noted the existence of archaeological evidence from that period. This included buildings, some of them quite spectacular, such as the Palatine Chapel built for Charlemagne in Aachen around 800 AD. There was also comparative world history. The chronologies of other regions around the world, such as the Middle East and China, meshed seamlessly with European history. How could this be true if three hundred years of the Western calendar were invented?

  They regarded the most compelling evidence of all, however, to be the over 7,000 written sources that survive from the Dark Ages. These are internally consistent from one country to another. The information from English chroniclers matches that from French and German ones. For it to have been faked would have required a vast army of monks and clerics engaged in an international conspiracy of historical forgery. Such an idea seemed, on its face, ridiculous.

  Historians conceded that there was no single piece of evidence that, on its own, could prove the reality of the Dark Ages. Instead, it was the sum total of all the evidence, each bit supporting the other, that provided a solid foundation for belief.

  Illig, however, didn’t buy it. He and his supporters challenged each type of evidence. Why not consider the possibility of a vast conspiracy of forgers? they asked. After all, medieval clerics hardly had a sterling reputation for honesty. The modern ideals of historical accuracy simply hadn’t yet been developed, back then. For the clerics, the purpose of keeping records was to support the interests of the Church or kin
g. They happily faked the records, if need be.

  As for comparative world history, Illig speculated that other cultures had readily incorporated the phantom centuries into their own chronologies, his thinking being that, if ancient rulers were offered a blank historical canvas, they would find some way to fill it. And the archaeological evidence? He dismissed that as misdated.

  Faced with these arguments, most historians concluded that further debate was pointless. They adopted an unofficial ban on further discussion of Illig’s hypothesis, calling this policy Totschweigetaktik, ‘death by silence’.

  But Illig, in his peculiar way, did have a valid point. He was right that historical knowledge isn’t absolute. There’s always a lingering uncertainty attached to it. This is why there’s a tendency to look down upon it as not being as rigorous and objective as knowledge obtained from the experimental sciences, such as physics and chemistry. It’s viewed as inherently more speculative and circumstantial. This may be part of the reason why Nobel Prizes aren’t awarded for the historical sciences, not even for geology. It’s probably also why weird theories flourish in these disciplines, because the evidence is more open to interpretation.

  Given this, it is possible to systematically question the validity of every piece of historical evidence. Radical scepticism is an option. In fact, it could be taken even further than Illig took it. In 1921, the philosopher Bertrand Russell posed what has come to be known as his five-minute hypothesis. He noted that the entire world might have sprung into existence five minutes ago, complete with memories of earlier times. So, forget about the Early Middle Ages not existing. How can we even know that yesterday existed?*