“Energized, now that I’m off my feet and have had something to eat,” she answered. “Thanks again for suggesting the break, Fern. My stamina isn’t predictable.”
“Well, dear, you’re almost eight full months; that’s to be expected. Someone has to look after you,” Fern said in a gentle but scolding tone, making eye contact with Brian.
“I admit,” he held up his hands in surrender, “I deserve that. I just get absorbed in the content.”
“Well, you can see your lovely bride-to-be is well along,” she pressed him.
“When I look at her, I don’t even see that,” he said earnestly, turning to Fern. Melissa rolled her eyes, but smiled appreciatively. “I’ll try to pay better attention.”
“You do that,” Fern added. She stood up and went to the kitchen.
“Did I say something wrong?” Brian asked as he watched her leave.
“I’ll let you know later,” Melissa replied, suppressing just enough of her amusement so that he couldn’t be sure of her intent. “Now try to stay focused.”
All evidence of a meal was soon cleared from the rugged dining table, the center of social life at Miqlat. In between bites, Kamran and Madison had set up some recording microphones and photocopied a few things Melissa had requested. Everyone was present. Not unexpectedly, Summit curled up on a couch in another section of the Pit to read to Squish, who quickly settled in her lap.
Melissa put on her reading glasses, a sign that she was ready. “I’ll try to make this as brief as possible,” she began. “I know you’re all curious about how all this talk about an Aryan master race, Nazis, genetics, and Minoans relates to the late Dr. Weston and why the Colonel was interested in his work. It’s a convoluted but important path to navigate.”
“True that,” Madison said, shifting in her seat.
“I hear you. Let’s jump in again with racial theory,” Melissa continued. “It’s hard to underestimate Darwin’s impact on racial theory. Once the definition of race was divorced from language shortly after the mid-nineteenth century, scholars and scientists in all sorts of fields began to speculate on human origins. Hundreds of books, academic papers, and literary works would eventually form a pool of thought from which the Nazi racial ideas we’re familiar with would emerge. Much of what was produced was anti-Semitic in nature and pure nonsense when viewed against our current scientific knowledge. But for the times, it was all taken seriously.”
She paused, made eye contact with Brian, and nodded. He took the cue.
“There isn’t much that today’s ancient astronaut and alternative history crowd says that doesn’t come from nineteenth-century thinking,” said Brian. “The flawed science of nineteenth-century writers is simply taken as absolute truth and repackaged for a twenty-first-century audience. The period is a goldmine for conspiracists and fringe thinkers. The rule of thumb seems to be that if an old source disagrees with science today, that source must be on to something. Melissa and I suspect the Colonel will be drawing on this material for his own mythical narrative, while simultaneously engineering circumstances and faking evidence that will prop up some of these outdated ideas.”
“Human origins is a good launching point,” Melissa resumed. “It didn’t take long, especially with the growing prominence of evolutionary thinking, for polygenism to become not only respectable, but the dominant view of human origins.”
“What’s polygenism?” Fern asked.
“That’s the idea that the human race had many points of origin and therefore multiple lineages. It’s the opposite of monogenism, where all of humanity comes from one source—a single, original couple, like Adam and Eve.”
“Polygenism is now the scientific consensus,” Clarise added. “Human evolution is thought to have occurred in various places and at different times.”
“That’s certainly true,” Melissa added, “though many Christians continue to reject it.”
“But many don’t,” Malcolm noted. “I’m a biologist and a priest. I don’t have any problem with the consensus.”
“Neither do I,” Clarise added. “I have my own way of parsing origins and the Bible, but I don’t want to derail the discussion.”
“If you don’t mind, Dr. Kelley,” Sabi interjected, adjusting his wheelchair so he could look more directly at Brian, “I would like to hear briefly about what Professor Scott thinks about this. I am wondering how he approaches these things.”
“I was wondering that myself earlier,” Clarise added. “With all the problems related to Adam and Noah and Babel, which you referred to as being read in an overly literal way, where are you at?”
Brian leaned forward. “Well, this might sound odd, but I don’t struggle with it because I committed myself a long time ago to let the Bible be what it is in its original context and say what it says to its original audience. I don’t look at it as something it isn’t. God made it what it is, and I’m not second-guessing Him.”
“You’ll have to unpack that,” Neff said, “at least for me.”
“The Bible is a Mediterranean-centered document produced by people living between the second millennium BC and the first century AD. Those people knew nothing about any modern sciences like biology, anthropology, or linguistics. The Bible was never meant to be a science textbook for modern people—by God’s design. God was the one who made the decision to prompt people living at that time, in that place, with the knowledge of that worldview, to write what He wanted preserved for posterity.
“Had God given these ancient writers advanced scientific knowledge, no one to whom the books were written would have understood it. The same thing would happen if God produced the Bible today, knowing His plan for human history would last at least two more millennia. Writers today would write using the vocabulary and knowledge they have. If God gave them advanced knowledge of the future, no one today would know what they were talking about. It would defeat the whole enterprise of communication.”
Neff and the others sat quietly for a moment, processing the approach. “You know,” Ward spoke up. “That makes a lot of sense, but I’ll have to think about it.”
“I would agree,” said Nili. “You honor God’s decision to do things as He wanted, at the time He decided to act, for the reasons He wanted to do them.”
“That’s the goal, anyway,” Brian confirmed. “Whether human creation happened by a process or was immediate is of no concern. God was behind it and gets the credit. The Bible is ultimately about theological messaging—Yahweh’s status against the other gods, and the outworking of His will against all opposition, human or otherwise. To make the intent of the Bible our current squabbles or discoveries trivializes the message. And when people criticize the Bible for not being what it was never intended to be, it’s like criticizing your dog for not being a cat. It makes no sense at all.”
“In other words, you’d demand that a critic explain why their criticism makes any sense before even bothering to argue about it,” observed Neff.
“Exactly—and it’s not just a tactic. I’m being honest. I insist on the same for Christians.”
“What do you mean?” Madison looked intrigued.
“Christians talk a lot about interpreting the Bible in context, but then they filter the Bible through some other context. We shouldn’t filter Scripture through the early church or any church tradition, whether that’s Catholicism, Orthodoxy, the Reformation, or evangelicalism. The context of the Bible is the context that produced it. Everything else is a foreign context.”
“Including the nineteenth century.” Clarise added.
“Absolutely. When Christians of the late nineteenth century started talking about pre-Adamic races as a way to argue against evolution, they were imposing their own life and times on the Bible. They wanted it to speak to their current concerns, but it wasn’t written to address any of those concerns. Forcing the Bible into making dogmatic theological statements about issues it wasn’t written to address led to distorting its contents—and some tragic theology. I�
�d like Christians and anyone else to interpret the Bible within its own worldview and then judge it on its own terms. I think we just need to be honest with it. I know it can scare people, but I don’t think God wants me to protect Christians from their Bible.”
“Well, I can see now why you had the troubles you did where you taught,” Clarise observed with a smile. “No matter how much sense it makes, it would scare a lot of people if they thought the purpose of Bible study wasn’t affirming their creeds or beliefs.”
“I know. Been there and done that.” Brian forced a smile, then looked at Sabi. “Does that help?”
“Yes,” he answered thoughtfully. “This thinking is wise. Creeds have value for helping us focus on important ideas. So do the writings of faithful believers. But they cannot be placed above the Scriptures.” He smiled in Melissa’s direction. “Please continue.”
She smiled back and picked up her thought. “Back in the nineteenth century, the idea of humans originating apart from Adam and Eve was radical, to say the least. Darwin was new, and Christians by and large wanted to resist him. But even if you hated Darwin, that didn’t make the problems go away.”
“So what did they do?” asked Fern.
“For those who thought monogenism was no longer possible,” Melissa answered, “two forms of polygenism came into discussion among Christians: pre-Adamism and co-Adamism. Pre-Adamism was the idea that there were humans before Adam. Co-Adamism said there were other races of humanity along with Adam that were not related to Adam. Neither view caught on, which was no surprise. Pre-Adamism was actually suggested before Darwin in response to the question of where other races of humans came from. The problem became more pressing every time explorers discovered a new world with people living in it. But most Christians thought the idea of non-Adamic humans was heretical because of doctrines like original sin.
“Eventually, the focus of the fight over how to explain the non-European races became the Table of Nations in Genesis 10. The easy solution was to say the Table was incomplete. But some Christians thought even that was an assault on biblical authority, so they argued it was complete and that God must have used some process like evolution to produce the physical differences in the races.”
“It’s important to understand,” Brian clarified, “that neither Melissa nor I would try to argue for any of these ideas. They’re only to illustrate that the new discoveries of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries forced people to look at their Bible and human origins much differently. They were trying to solve problems in a way that let them keep their view of an inspired Bible.”
“I think Brian is framing it in the best way possible. The sad result of a lot of the effort,” Melissa lamented, “was a lot of racist thinking that became Bible-endorsed. For instance, to explain where Cain got his wife, some Pre-Adamite adherents taught that Cain left his own clan for a woman of inferior racial stock. The thinking was that a line of humanity that wasn’t from Adam had to be inferior since Adam and his kin were the most ‘God-like’ race. That belief eventually led to the notion that Cain’s mark was blackness—that his children were mixed or Negro. If you think about it for even a few minutes in light of the biblical story, that interpretation has no basis at all, but you’d be missing the point. Those interpretations were adopted to solve an intellectual crisis.”
“The thinking gets even weirder when it comes to the writings of people who didn’t feel any need to stay moored to the Bible,” Brian added. “Those who rejected biblical authority were free to come up with anything. And they basically did.”
“Brian’s not exaggerating,” Melissa agreed. “A lot of what was published in the late 1800s and early 1900s is a literary theater of the bizarre. The era birthed a lot of modern mythology, and it appears Dr. Weston bought some of it. We think the Colonel will be using some of the period’s ideas to stage his ET villain, for whatever purpose he ultimately has in mind.”
“Might as well start with theosophy,” Brian suggested. Melissa nodded.
“What’s theosophy?” Clarise asked.
“The term means ‘divine wisdom.’ It’s a philosophical system that is part of a larger field known today as occultism or esotericism—a term that refers to alleged hidden wisdom that purports to offer its adherents enlightenment and salvation through that knowledge. When it comes right down to it, theosophy articulates an imaginary evolutionary journey of the human race, begun and assisted by advanced beings from other planets.”
“Sounds like Scientology,” Neff said dryly.
“It’s one of the intellectual threads you’d find there. But instead of Tom Cruise or John Travolta, theosophy tends to be identified with its major nineteenth-century theorist, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.”
“Russian?” asked Ward.
Melissa nodded. “Blavatsky was a Russian occultist. She was prolific, and so the system has come to be identified with her writings.”
“Blavatsky’s major works,” Brian noted, “were Isis Unveiled and the Secret Doctrine. The latter contains her explanation of the origin and evolution of the universe. Blavatsky talks about an unseen divine being that sort of broke up and oozed out to fill the universe—sort of like describing the Big Bang as an entity. Everything in the universe from the point of its filling then evolved through seven evolutionary cycles. She claimed her knowledge came from an ancient esoteric text called the Book of Dzyan and otherworldly ‘spiritual masters’ who channeled information through her.”
“After what we talked about already,” Melissa kept pace, “you’ll find it interesting that Blavatsky referred to these evolutionary cycles of life as ‘races’—more accurately, ‘root races.’ She wasn’t talking about skin color or other physical features, though some of what she did say would be used in later Nazi racial thinking. Blavatsky only gets to human life in the fourth root race, which for her began four or five million years ago. Her system is very complex and mixes planetary language with race terms, so it can be confusing. For example, she held that seven sub-races made up a root race; seven root races made a ‘globe round’; and seven ‘globe rounds’ made a ‘planetary round.’ ”
“Blavatsky’s system is monistic,” Brian added. “It teaches that all is one. She borrowed a lot from Gnosticism and Hinduism.”
“It sounded like her first three races were aliens,” Madison observed. “Is that what she was saying?”
“It’s probably easier to say they weren’t human,” replied Melissa. “Remember, these races—the whole system, essentially—are stages of human evolution as well as planetary evolution. The seven root races evolve out of some undefinable divine ‘stuff’ that filled the universe and eventually wound up forming into life forms on earth. The first root race was the most like the divine beings not of earth—basically extraterrestrials. Those entities evolved after the universe was filled with whatever divine stuff Blavatsky believed filled the universe—essentially seeding the universe. That god-likeness was diluted as time moved on toward the appearance of humans.”
“The seeding idea,” Clarise mused. “Your description sounds like the way astro-biologists and astronomers talk about panspermia—that life on earth was seeded by particles from space. And that came up in Brian’s conversation with the Colonel.”
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Brian smirked. “Theosophists would of course say they were ahead of their time by thinking that way. It’s their own theologizing science, and then claiming that science legitimizes their religious views.”
“But what they’re talking about and what scientists today are saying differ in many ways,” Melissa reminded them.
“Panspermia would have broad appeal,” added Clarise. “But it wasn’t clear to me whether the Colonel was going to use that idea specifically.”
“Yeah,” Brian agreed. “He held that card to his chest. But the bottom line is, if it’s useful, he’ll be on it.”
“I can see him making it part of a narrative about how the aliens have always taken a benevolent
interest in us,” offered Malcolm. “But it won’t be any use to him when it comes to demonizing his aliens.”
“That’s true,” said Melissa. “He’d have to look elsewhere within theosophy for that. He has a couple other serious options.”
“Like what?” Malone asked.
“They have to do with the other root races,” Melissa answered. “Blavatsky’s second and third root races were the Hyperboreans and the Lemurians.”
“The Hyperboreans?” Neff perked up. “The Colonel used that term specifically.”
“That he did,” Brian recalled. “The term and what it stands for is a clear link to the bizarre Nazi occult theology of Miguel Serrano, which has the Nephilim as its central biblical foothold.”
“In Blavatsky’s system,” Melissa noted, “the Hyperboreans and Lemurians refer to lost worlds or lost continents—again, don’t lose sight that this is earth evolution. If any of you have studied alternative earth history or hollow earth myths, you’d have seen the terms there. Her lost races were deemed advanced races that were Pre-Adamic in the biblical sense. They were intelligent precursors to humans and were far more advanced. The divine entities channeling Blavatsky were, according to her, trying to help us evolve back to the divine wisdom from whence we came.”
“That’s right out of the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens show,” Fern added.
“One of your favorites,” Malone teased.
“If you spent more time with me, I wouldn’t be interested,” she jabbed back, playfully.
“Sounds like standard new-age pop-culture mumbo-jumbo,” Ward scoffed.
“That’s where most people run into the ideas,” Nili replied.
“For people my age, it’s video games,” Madison interjected. “Some of these ideas are pretty familiar.”
“Like the Colonel said,” Brian turned to her, “pop culture has spread the memes everywhere.”
“Blavatsky’s fourth root race, the one before the human race, is the most interesting and relevant for us,” Melissa said, getting back on point. “Her fourth race was the Atlantean.”
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