The Portent

by Michael S. Heiser

  “Agreed,” echoed Brian. “This is your domain. I’ll be a fly on the wall.”

  “I’ll bet,” she smiled skeptically in his direction. “Let’s start with the term ‘Aryan.’ It’s a Sanskrit word—that was the spoken language of most of ancient India. Today it’s only used for liturgical purposes by Hindus. It’s also a classical written language studied by scholars of Buddhism and Jainism, or linguists, like Dr. Weston. The term ‘Aryan’ was an ethnic self-designation in ancient India that meant ‘noble’ or ‘honorable.’ ”

  “Before the eighteenth century,” she continued, “scholars in the European world thought the most ancient language that was linguistically related to European languages was Iranian. That all changed by the mid-eighteen hundreds, when the British began to colonize India and report what they were finding. They discovered India had its own ancient texts, written in a language that was soon discovered to be closely related to Iranian and those in Europe. The term ‘Aryan’ began to loosely to refer to all the peoples whose languages fell into that family.”

  “I can’t believe that Europeans would think that Indian people were ethnically related to them,” Malcolm objected. “A lot of them are very dark skinned. There’s no way white Europeans would have believed that.”

  “They didn’t—and there was certainly a racist motivation undergirding that resistance.”

  Kamran waved to get Melissa’s attention, then signed something to Madison. “He says he agrees—the upper-caste folks he occasionally met treated everyone dark like they were lesser people. It was a problem even in his father’s church.”

  “I believe it,” Melissa replied. “Bigotry became a prime motivation for what would become known as the Aryan invasion theory—the idea that light-skinned Europeans invaded India in the distant past and civilized northern India, thereby producing the ‘noble’ or Aryan upper caste. That provided a palatable explanation for the linguistic connection for white Europeans.”

  “But how could even the upper-caste Indians be the same ethnic stock as Europeans?” Neff asked.

  “That was one of the great debates of the nineteenth century for several reasons. The question was inevitably tied to the issue of human origins. Remember, 1859 was the year Darwin published his Origin of Species. In many respects, Darwin’s ideas were a direct attack on biblical ideas like monogenesis—that all humans came from one pair, Adam and Eve. The Tower of Babel story had all people after the flood as having one language—which of course had to be the language of Noah and his sons, and of Adam and Eve before him.”

  “There’s the original one-people-one-language equation,” Clarise observed.

  “Everybody believed, on the basis of a literal reading of the Bible,” Melissa continued, “that Noah’s sons were the genesis of the other languages and peoples listed in the Table of Nations in Genesis 10. But as early as the sixteenth century, this view of human origins found trouble. Explorers began to encounter other peoples on the other side of the world—the Americas. No one knew where they came from, since the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 didn’t include them. All sorts of wacky theories were invented to explain the discrepancy. And Darwin made it worse since his ideas were at the forefront of science.”

  “The nineteenth century really blew things apart,” Brian added, “since that was the century when texts from Egypt and Mesopotamia were deciphered. All of the sudden, you had very ancient texts—older than the Bible—that had alternative histories and chronologies of civilization. When Europeans were able to read the literature of China, and of course India, you had more of the same problem. Where did the people of the world really come from, now that everyone knew the world was bigger than the Bible described—and what about all their languages, histories, and chronologies?”

  Melissa picked up the thought. “Since India’s sacred texts, the Vedas, had histories going back long before the invention of writing in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the logical impulse for scholars who cared about any defense of the Bible was harmonization—coming up with a way to align all this material with the Bible to show the Bible correctly had everyone coming from Adam and all the languages of the world emerging from one at Babel. On the other side, though, the opponents of the Bible’s view of history were having a field day. Many scholars began to propose that ancient India was the true source of information on human historical origins. They couldn’t wait to disassociate themselves from the Bible.”

  “Think about the implications,” Brian said in earnest. “Europeans who found the Bible intellectually distasteful also saw a way to disassociate themselves from the people who produced the Bible—the Jews. They could dismiss the Bible and the Jews as inferior.”

  “Even worse,” Melissa added, “in 1903 the book known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was published in Russia. This book presented a grand conspiracy of the Jews to conquer Europe and the world. By 1920 it had been translated and spread all over Europe and North America. That became another justification—for Indian or Aryan supremacy—and for what would become the virulent anti-Semitism of Hitler and the Nazis.”

  “It sounds as if a literal reading of the Bible drove people to reject the Jew,” Nili said in a troubled tone.

  “That was true in that historical context,” Brian said, “but remember these aren’t necessary conclusions. And that’s a good thing, because the issues are a lot deeper than this. It’s unfortunate, but a literal reading of the Bible at this time in history led to a lot of tragic ideas, especially when it comes to anti-Semitism.”

  “For a lot of people,” Melissa continued, “this was a winner-take-all proposition. The debate was heated, and to read it now sounds incredibly racist, first toward the Jew and then, for those Christians who honored Jews,” she looked at Malcolm, “toward the Negro race. This is why racism has historically been defended using the Bible. The stakes were much higher than blacks versus whites. India, Darwin, Adam, Noah, and the one-race-one-language teaching of the Bible were all in the mix. For a lot of people, to argue against racial hierarchy was to argue against the Bible.”

  “Trust me,” Malcolm interrupted, “I get the racist flavor, but the fight over harmonizing all that stuff with the Bible, and producing a justification for racism, is a bit lost on me.”

  “Think about it this way,” Melissa replied. “The issue is that those who harmonized everything to the Bible still had to posit one original race at the beginning—a race that must have been near-perfect, since that original race began with the first, perfect man, Adam. For sure, that’s a literal over-reading of the Bible, but if you approach it in such a simplistic way, the idea of a first ‘closest-to-God’s-likeness’ race goes with it. I should mention that Brian’s take on the image of God undercuts all of that.”

  “Most Christians don’t think that way today, though,” Madison said confidently.

  “That’s true,” Brian noted, “but that’s largely because they’ve never been jolted by these issues and their implications. They’re so focused on specific apologetic thinking about evolution that problems like these never get on the radar. Even people who write about Genesis are largely unaware of how linguistics, Indo-European origins, and Sanskrit affect their faith. Most know nothing about India at all.”

  “Except for curry and Bollywood,” chuckled Malcolm. Some of the others couldn’t help but laugh. Kamran guffawed loudly and rocked in this chair. The two exchanged a fist-bump. Brian smiled and shook his head.

  “This is why we love you, Malcolm,” said Melissa.

  “The only reason?”

  “Don’t push it. Only you could interject some humor into all this.”

  “So how does this relate to migrations?” Ward asked. “You two and Clarise were tracking on something there.”

  “The migration problem runs in a lot of directions—geographically and intellectually,” Melissa answered. “We’ve already hinted at one—the Aryan-invasion idea that the great light-skinned civilizers invaded India and gave them their high culture
thousands of years ago. That alleged invasion was believed to have occurred on the tail end of a long migration from the north. Naturally, native Indian people in the nineteenth century felt disrespected by the whole notion that their cultural achievements should be credited to Europeans. They turned the tables and argued that Europeans came from India—that’s what became known as the ‘indigenous Aryan’ viewpoint.”

  “So that view has people from India migrating from south to north; it’s a reversal,” Neff clarified.

  “Right—and here’s another point where the Bible takes center stage again,” Melissa went on. “The question of human origins in the Bible moves from Adam to Noah and, after the flood, Noah’s sons. When people started thinking about tracing the human races back in time, the landing of Noah’s ark became an issue, since the assumption was that the one people from which all the races came was the one that survived the flood. That led to the conclusion that the European races—remember, they were viewed as the extension of the original, perfect race—had migrated from Mount Ararat to civilize the world. This human rebirth led to the question of the precise location of Ararat, and then the precise location of the Tower of Babel. The first was most important since it was thought that the answer would reveal humanity’s original homeland.”

  “The options for Ararat were more diverse than you’d think,” said Brian. “There were serious efforts to locate Ararat in Turkey—which is the more recent name for Anatolia, the old kingdom of the Hittites. Other candidates were Iran and Armenia in the region of the Caucasus mountains.”

  “So that’s why the reference to Anatolia caught your attention,” Clarise concluded.

  “It’s one reason. There are others.”

  “It’s important here to catch the implications again,” Melissa said. “Europeans used all the talk about Ararat to justify the Aryan-invasion theory, since eventually you have to get the original Aryans—the original ‘closest-to-perfection’ race—down to India from the north. Indigenous Indians quite understandably viewed the Bible as a document that dismissed them racially.”

  “Later in the nineteenth century,” Brian added, “the Germans would tailor the idea to their own Germanic mythology to divorce it from the Jewish Old Testament. Once the British and other Europeans were satisfied that the invasion idea solved the problem of how they could be related to people in India—people they were recolonizing just like their white European Aryan ancestors had done—they lost interest in the question and careful study of Sanskrit and the Vedas. The Germans quickly took up that cause. They had their own agenda for identifying the original master race. They weren’t pursuing it out of sympathy for the Indian, and they certainly didn’t care about harmonizing anything with the book of the Jews. They were more interested in exploiting the links between the Vedas and Europe, especially the more remote north and the Eddas.”

  “What are … Eddas?” asked Nili.

  “Edda refers to the old Norse, or Nordic, poetic and prose texts, from which we get Norse mythology—which was near and dear to the hearts of many Nazis, especially the SS. Those texts were written down in the thirteenth century in Icelandic, but the content is much earlier, dating at least to the Viking age. Himmler and his partners in crime at the Ahnenerbe basically viewed that material as sacred.”

  “Kamran wants to know what ‘Ahnenerbe’ means,” Madison spoke up, once again translating for Kamran.

  “On the surface, it was supposed to be a scientific institute,” Melissa answered. “It was actually a pseudo-scientific research arm for gathering alleged evidence for Nordic-Aryan supremacy. It was the SS organization that did things like investigate ancient rune inscriptions in Sweden supposedly left there by the original Aryans. It also mounted expeditions into Tibet in search of original Aryan bloodlines. Nazi ‘race science’ was born to detect racial relationships between all the peoples in the presumed migration routes from the north down to India, with the goal of creating a mythical profile of the ancient Aryans.”

  “But from where I’m sitting,” Malone said, stroking his mustache, “that really didn’t solve some things, at least in intellectual terms. It didn’t answer the question of why India isn’t mentioned in the Bible, for example. And outside India, it didn’t do anything about where the Chinese or Negros came from.”

  “On the surface, it wouldn’t appear to have any impact on those questions,” Melissa answered, “but the German takeover of the Aryan debate actually did provide an answer of sorts. The Germans wanted to make the Aryan question about race, not language. That separation was motivated by their wish to establish their own racial superiority over all other ethnicities—even other Europeans. Consequently, racial supremacy couldn’t be about language, since German was a common member of the Indo-European language family. They had to define race a different way. They succeeded in that by defining race in terms of biology and physical anthropology.”

  “So any race other than the Germanic or Nordic-Aryan was inferior,” Malone reasoned.

  “Right.”

  “But don’t we see race biologically now?” Malone asked.

  “No,” Clarise quickly answered. “Not the way the Nazis were defining biology. Today, race is about genetic lineage and differentiation. What Melissa’s talking about is the stuff the Ahnenerbe did—looking at the shapes of noses and heads, skin coloration, measuring the length or stoutness of a head or skull with calipers—to create some sort of pseudo-typology by which to delineate a race. All of that is at best subjective, and at worst, contrived.”

  “Absolutely,” Melissa agreed. She paused and slowly moved toward a chair. Neff stood up quickly and took her by the hand.

  “Thank you,” she said, easing herself down. “Just some back pain.” She waited a moment and went on. “All of this pseudo-science gained steam at the beginning of the twentieth century. Once the argument fell under the dictatorship of science, European talk about Hindus being Aryan brethren because of a common language family became as absurd as white Americans claiming a racial kinship with Negros because they all spoke English.

  “The Germans basically took the Aryan ball and then redefined the rules of the game. Their ideas dominated the intellectual discussion from about 1880 onward since they gained control of the conversation. By the time the Protocols were published and translated, race science had already gained intellectual traction. And as Brian could tell you, this was the same era that the Germans were dominating the field of the higher criticism of the Old Testament.”

  “That’s all true,” Brian noted. “Although biblical criticism served some useful purposes and had valid points, many of the leaders in the field were anti-Semitic and used their research to denigrate the authority of the Old Testament—the sacred text of the Jews.”

  “In terms of the Aryan question, the next steps were how to argue for a Nordic-Germanic homeland for the master race and prove a north to south migration route, Melissa went on. “Establishing a precise route would make it easier to distinguish the Aryan race from other races—like the Jews.”

  “How in the world could they do all that?”

  “Oh, they managed,” Melissa smirked. “They had a wealth of bad science and religious gobbledygook to draw on.”

  “Have I ever heard of any of it?” asked Neff.

  Brian chuckled and glanced at Melissa, who knew what was coming. “Only if you’ve watched TV shows about ancient astronauts.”

  62

  About the Aryan Root Race and its origins, science knows as little as of the Men from other planets.… Even the habitableness of other planets is mostly denied. Yet such great adept astronomers were the scientists of the earliest races of the Aryan stock, that they seem to have known far more about the races of Mars and Venus than the modern anthropologist knows of those of the early stages of the earth.

  —H. P. Blavatsky

  “That was so tasty,” Melissa congratulated Summit as she picked up her plate. “Thank you for making it for me. I’ve never had a curry chick
en salad before.”

  “You’re welcome,” the pink-haired girl solemnly replied, though Melissa detected the faint hint of a smile. Summit turned and walked off with the plate without another word.

  “Summit likes positive attention,” Fern said, making sure she wasn’t heard, “at least in small doses.”

  “She really is amazing,” Melissa said sincerely. “Clarise wasn’t kidding about her knowing where everything is in the library—which is surprisingly good, at least for my research. Her memory is remarkable.”

  “With her it’s something of a game, so she enjoys when people are doing research. She won’t let on to that, though.”

  “I’ve noticed. It’s hard to get an emotional read on her.”

  “Her emotional health is pretty good, considering the events that brought her here. Dr. Harper and I talked about her a few times, and she agreed.”

  Melissa bowed her head and sighed. Fern read the gesture immediately.

  “Try not to worry, dear,” she whispered, putting her hand on Melissa’s shoulder. “I know it looks hopeless, but don’t give up the thought that you’ll see her again.”

  “That just doesn’t seem possible,” Melissa admitted, looking up.

  “Look around,” Fern said, forcing a smile. “Impossible is all around you. We must give her to the Lord.”

  Melissa looked around the room, trying to draw encouragement from the amazing chain of events that had brought them here.

  “Do you need me to keep Summit busy somewhere else again for your next discussion?” Fern asked, changing the subject. “Since we’re meeting out here in the Pit, I’m guessing she’ll come and go.”

  “We’ll still be talking about Nazi beliefs, but nothing violent.”

  “We’ll see, then.”

  Melissa heard Brian call from behind her, “Almost done cleaning up.” She looked over her shoulder at him, and he took a seat next to her. “How are you feeling?”