Faking History

by Jason Colavito

  Myths and other legends telling about observations - including details - that can hardly be attributed to fantasy. […] there are new, astonishing interpretations possible when the “ET factor” is included. Descriptions mostly appear as circumscriptions here, where the unknown is compared to things known in the respective era and culture using the principle of “Looks like...”.[171]

  But isn’t this exactly what the AATs themselves are doing—cherry-picking ancient literature for random paragraphs and incidents that “look like” their childhood fantasies of Apollo-era NASA rockets and spacesuits? As I have just shown, cherry-picking the ancient texts can equally well “prove” that the gods, far from being aliens, simply never existed at all.

  Of course, that particular picked cherry also has the benefit of being true.

  24. What Was the Scholomance?

  In Dracula, Bram Stoker includes an intriguing allusion to a mysterious devil’s school in Transylvania: The Draculas, he wrote, “had dealings with the Evil One. They learned his secrets in the Scholomance, amongst the mountains over Lake Hermanstadt, where the devil claims the tenth scholar as his due.”[172] The vampire himself was one of these scholars, a diabolic genius.

  This school is no mere piece of fiction, however. As has been well-documented, Stoker derived his knowledge of the Scholomance from Emily Gerard’s 1885 article on “Transylvanian Superstitions”:

  As I am on the subject of thunderstorms, I may as well here mention the Scholomance, or school supposed to exist somewhere in the heart of the mountains, and where all the secrets of nature, the language of animals, and all imaginable magic spells and charms are taught by the devil in person. Only ten scholars are admitted at a time, and when the course of learning has expired and nine of them are released to return to their homes, the tenth scholar is detained by the devil as payment, and mounted upon an Ismeju (dragon) he becomes henceforward the devil’s aide-de-camp, and assists him in ‘making the weather,’ that is to say, preparing the thunderbolts.[173]

  But what exactly was this Scholomance, and where did the legend come from?

  Gerard’s version of the story is not a professional anthropological report, but rather the story of an amateur traveling through the (then) Habsburg territories. By luck, a folklorist, R. C. Maclagan, produced a report for the journal Folklore in 1897 that included a more accurate version of the story then-current in Transylvania:

  Here we find that the drac is the devil in person, who instructs certain persons to be magicians and medicine men in a college under the earth. Of these, one in eight receives instruction during fourteen years, and on his return to earth he has the following power. By means of certain magical formulæ he compels a dragon to ascend from the depths of a loch. He then throws a golden bridle with which he has been provided over his head, and rides aloft among the clouds, which he causes to freeze and thereby produces hail.[174]

  Notice that now the school is under the earth, which forms one part of the solution to the puzzle of the Scholomance. There are two other parts that complete the picture. To understand this, however, it’s important to remember that before Transylvania was a Christian territory, it was part of the pre-Christian Roman province of Dacia, which before the Roman conquest was culturally affiliated with Thrace. In both regions, priests of the pagan gods retreated to the woods and secret places to learn the secrets of the gods.

  The first puzzle piece is the presence of the supposed scholars of the Scholomance among the Transylvanians. These scholars learned to control the weather and ride dragons, which are strange things for the devil to teach until one realizes that Transylvania (now Romania) has an indigenous legend of itinerant wizards who perform those same two miracles: riding a dragon and summoning storms.

  Later called the Solomanari (after the supposed connection between Solomon and alchemy), the Zgriminties or Hultan were shaman-priests who claimed control over storms and could summon a balaur (dragon) to ride. Before Christianity, they were seen as benevolent forces able to implore the gods to deliver much-needed rain to fertilize the crops. Christians defamed the Solomonari as devil-worshippers, but in reality they originated as pre-Christian pagan priests. They most likely worshipped the pre-Christian god Zalmoxis or Salmoxis (also: Zalmus), whose power they are able to wield. Remarkably little is known about this god outside of Greek reports, but the ancients declared that he taught astrology[175] as well as the doctrine of immortality.[176] According to Diogenes Laertius, he was the equivalent of the harvest-god Kronos (Saturn),[177] and Hippolytus asserted that those who followed this god as disciples (= scholars) worshipped him in isolated, underground chapels.[178] Christians, following Biblical authority,[179] saw this god as a devil or demon, as with all pagan gods (e.g., St. Augustine: pagan gods are “most impure demons, who desire to be thought gods”[180]).

  The earliest, and likely quite distorted, account of Zalmoxis occurs in Herodotus (followed by all later authors) in a passage that explains, I think, the origin of the Scholomance. Herodotus wrote that Zalmoxis was not really a god but a slave of Pythagoras, and that after being freed and gaining great wealth he

  prepared a banqueting-hall, where he received and feasted the chief men of the tribe and instructed them meanwhile that neither he himself nor his guests nor their descendants in succession after them would die; but that they would come to a place where they would live for ever and have all things good. While he was doing that which has been mentioned and was saying these things, he was making for himself meanwhile a chamber under the ground; and when his chamber was finished, he disappeared from among the Thracians and went down into the underground chamber, where he continued to live for three years: and they grieved for his loss and mourned for him as dead. Then in the fourth year he appeared to the Thracians, and in this way the things which Salmoxis said became credible to them.[181]

  Herodotus says this story is how the Greeks understood the Thracian or Dacian (pre-Christian Romanian) god’s story. But the likelihood is that this is a distortion of the actual Dacian religious story, which probably involved the god’s death and resurrection in an underground chamber, a great hall where he taught the secrets of immortality and of life and death. The ethnocentric Greeks interpreted this as a version of their own Pythagorean philosophy, and in so doing sought to make the Dacian faith little more than a derivative of a Greek original. Modern scholars believe the myth of Zalmoxis as Pythagoras’ slave derives from the Dacian and Thracian priests’ forehead tattoos, which the Greeks misinterpreted as slave-traders’ brands.[182]

  It seems to me that the pre-Christian religious teachings of Zalmoxis are what first Greeks, then Romans, and then Christians misunderstood, the Christians slandering the old god as the Devil himself, and his underground chamber where he taught the secrets of immortality as the school of the Devil. Whether this underground cult center was entirely mythical or whether it reflects a genuine Dacian or Thracian cult center where worshippers received priestly indoctrination and training (perhaps at what Strabo calls Zalmoxis’ holy mountain of Cogaeonum[183]), it is impossible now to say. But, with this information, we now have the essential elements of the Scholomance and the scholars who study there. As for the dragon, so widespread are dragon myths in Greek, Slavic, and Christian lore that I’m not sure a specific origin for the Solomonari’s dragons is possible, or entirely necessary. Maclagan may well have been right in 1897 when he suggested that the dragon was a symbol for the thunderclouds the shaman-priests claimed to command.

  It is rather remarkable that in its essentials this story should survive in folklore for 2,500 years, more remarkable still that our archetypical vampire Dracula more or less accidentally draws on this ancient set of beliefs in the power of pagan resurrection to fuel his own unholy un-death. And as with the pagan gods, the cross and the communion wafer destroyed Dracula. Without Stoker’s conscious knowledge, Dracula recapitulates the process whereby the pagan scholar-priests and their god were demonized and forced to submit to the dominance of C
hristianity.

  25. Oannes: The Best Evidence for Ancient Astronauts?

  Not long before his death in 2012, the ancient astronaut author Philip Coppens appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast and discussed the three-hour online movie Ancient Aliens Debunked and the “very clever” ways filmmaker Chris White attempted to make criticism of Ancient Aliens as a TV show synonymous with debunking the ancient astronaut hypothesis as a whole. Coppens specifically told host Joe Rogan that White’s biggest omission was his failure to address the Babylonian tale of Oannes (which he mistakenly claimed was known to the much earlier Sumerians; this cannot be proved). Coppens asserted that this story is the “amongst the best evidence that we might have potentially been visited by” extraterrestrials in prehistory. He further told Rogan:

  You should really try to negate this if you want to pretend that you have completely destroyed the ancient alien theory. You can try to attack the Ancient Aliens series, but as long as you don’t go for the best evidence, like the Oannes story, and you do it on a scientific level, you kind of like, you argue why Carl Sagan thought this was interesting, why other scientists thought this was interesting, then you can make a documentary and pretend that you have completely destroyed the possibility that we were ever visited in the past by ancient aliens, but you haven’t.[184]

  OK. Fair point. So let’s look at Oannes to see just why this Babylonian fish-man is not an ancient astronaut.

  The story of Oannes is told only by Berossus (also spelled Berosus or Berosos), a late Babylonian priest who related the tale along with a cosmology in his Babylonian History, which does not survive. Summaries were made by Apollodorus, Abydenus, and Alexander Polyhistor, but of course none of these survive either. Extracts from these Greek summaries were recorded in Late Antiquity by Eusebius of Caesaria and in the Middle Ages by George Syncellus, whose books are the sole surviving record of Berossus’ work. We know Berossus existed because he is mentioned by other writers, such as Pliny, whose works survive. (Unrelated fragments of Berossus’ astronomical works were also preserved by Seneca.)

  But this isn’t the end of the story. The Greek fragments of Berossus are known to modern readers in the form given them in the early 1800s by I. P. Cory, whose Ancient Fragments (1826; 2nd ed. 1832) freely ran together material from Eusebius and Syncellus while excising the presumed contributions of the Greek-speaking authors to produce relatively linear narratives. These fragments were further adapted in 1976 by ancient astronaut author Robert Temple, who published them in the appendix to his Sirius Mystery from Richard Hodge’s 1876 revision of Cory’s Fragments. This is the form of Berossus’ work ancient astronaut hypothesizers know.

  Now, Berossus is generally an accurate writer, but the form of his work that comes down to us does not perfectly match cuneiform records where such records exist. For example, the Greek summarizers make Berossus state that during the Creation, Belus (Marduk) “cut off his own head, upon which the other gods mixed the blood, as it gushed out, with the earth; and from thence men were formed.”[185] However, the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish, differs on this detail in the cuneiform text. Marduk decrees that the god Kingu must be cleaved with an ax and his blood used by Ea to create man.[186] Now, had the work of Berossus—a priest of Marduk—come down to us perfectly, it is very unlikely we should see such a profound mischaracterization of a sacred act of the chief god himself. As a result of such mistakes, we simply cannot be certain that the Oannes passage is uncorrupted.

  Nevertheless, reading the fragments of Berossus as they currently stand gives us no confidence that they describe an extraterrestrial. In fact, Berossus says nothing about outer space at all:

  At Babylon there was (in these times) a great resort of people of various nations, who inhabited Chaldæa, and lived in a lawless manner like the beasts of the field. In the first year there appeared, from that part of the Erythræan sea which borders upon Babylonia, an animal destitute of reason, by name Oannes, whose whole body (according to the account of Apollodorus) was that of a fish; that under the fish’s head he had another head, with feet also below, similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish’s tail. His voice too, and language, was articulate and human; and a representation of him is preserved even to this day.

  This Being was accustomed to pass the day among men; but took no food at that season; and he gave them an insight into letters and sciences, and arts of every kind. He taught them to construct cities, to found temples, to compile laws, and explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge. He made them distinguish the seeds of the earth, and shewed them how to collect the fruits; in short, he instructed them in every thing which could tend to soften manners and humanize their lives. From that time, nothing material has been added by way of improvement to his instructions. And when the sun had set, this Being Oannes, retired again into the sea, and passed the night in the deep; for he was amphibious.

  After this there appeared other animals like Oannes, of which Berossus proposes to give an account when he comes to the history of the kings.[187]

  Such legends prompted Carl Sagan to write in the 1960s that “stories like the Oannes legend, and representations especially of the earliest civilizations on Earth, deserve much more critical studies than have been performed heretofore, with the possibility of direct contact with an extraterrestrial civilization as one of many possible alternative explanations.”[188] Sagan later discounted this when he learned more about myths and legends and why they are unreliable.

  Note that contra Coppens, Berossus clearly states that this event happened at Babylon (not Sumer), which was only founded in 1894 BCE, many centuries after the arts and sciences the creature claimed to bring with him were already in use at Sumer, Eridu, and Ur. (You can claim Berossus is wrong here, but if so, why trust anything else?) Note, too, that Oannes is described as a fish-man (and depicted in “literal” ancient art as a man in a giant fish suit) who lives in and returns to the sea. This is not outer space, and the only reason anyone ever thought it had anything to do with space is because at one particular moment in history—the 1960s and ’70s, when Sagan and Temple wrote—spacecraft routinely “splashed down” in the ocean, thus leading to an erroneous—and artificial—assumption of a connection between space and water.

  But the story is hardly unique. In the Book of Enoch, the Fallen Angels do exactly as Oannes and his brethren did:

  And all the others together with them took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them, and they taught them charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants. And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three thousand ells: Who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind. And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another’s flesh, and drink the blood. Then the earth laid accusation against the lawless ones.

  And Azâzêl taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all colouring tinctures. And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways. Semjâzâ taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, Armârôs the resolving of enchantments, Barâqîjâl, (taught) astrology, Kôkabêl the constellations, Ezêqêêl the knowledge of the clouds, Araqiêl the signs of the earth, Shamsiêl the signs of the sun, and Sariêl the course of the moon. And as men perished, they cried, and their cry went up to heaven . . .[189]

  The Hebrews got the better end of the deal, apparently, since Azâzêl gave them makeup and jewelry in addition to boring things like seeds and math.

  Nor is Enoch the only parallel. Osiris, in his role as civilizer of Egy
pt, did exactly the same thing, as recorded in Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris:

  One of the first acts related of Osiris in his reign was to deliver the Egyptians from their destitute and brutish manner of living. This he did by showing them the fruits of cultivation, by giving them laws, and by teaching them to honour the gods. Later he travelled over the whole earth civilizing it without the slightest need of arms, but most of the peoples he won over to his way by the charm of his persuasive discourse combined with song and all manner of music. Hence the Greeks came to identify him with Dionysus.[190]

  Now, you can be like Atlantis theorizers and assume that these are all independent stories of civilizing agents coming from a lost civilization (Graham Hancock does) or an ancient astronaut hypothesizer proclaiming them all aliens. (That the same evidence is found in both claims does little to boost our confidence in the correctness of either.) But I think it should be fairly obvious that this is a widespread cultural myth of the “civilizing hero” to whom the various accomplishments of society are retroactively attributed. There are dozens upon dozens of such heroes worldwide.

  Now, if we might like some facts about Oannes—which, of course, spoil the fun—we can begin by noting that Oannes isn’t his real name. This is a Greek rendering of Uanna, a name found in the cuneiform Library of Ashurbanipal as an alternate name for the better-known hero Adapa, whose oldest reference dates from 1335 BCE at Amarna in Egypt, in cuneiform materials supplied to Akhenaton. This figure was held to be the (human) son of Ea (Sumerian: Enki), the man who brought civilization to Eridu and who broke the wings of the wind when it overturned his boat. He later was tricked out of immortality but took his place among the Seven Sages. “Ea,” the tablets state, “anointed Adapa … to fish for his temple in Eridu.”[191]