And idiocy and disease were their general fate, though they were large and immensely strong. Because of their marvelous power and brawn, we find them glorified in legend and icon, which we may interpret as a remembrance of the extraordinary strength in the bloodline of the ground people, the race of Cain, the burrowers (Druks). They were so strong, their grip could break a horse’s leg, like the incredibly strong arms of Nittevo, Jacko, didi, and Orang Pendek (see chapter 12). Even the Ihuans, being the offspring of the Ihins and the ground people, inherited this corporeal greatness; they fought in popular arena games, unarmed, catching lions and tigers and “with their naked hands, choking them to death.”84
But back breeding brought disease and deformity. According to tradition, Mexico’s Cholula pyramid was built by gigantic men of deformed stature, the legend matched perhaps by the Old World cyclops and titans, also great builders, but bestial in both act and appearance, having “union with beasts.” Huge, misshapen, and violent also were the Fomorians of Celtic myth.
The book of Genesis says “all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth,” much as Oahspe recounts: “They bring forth in deformity on the earth,”85 for mortals descended rapidly in breed and blood when the Ihins mingled with the large Druks,86 their offspring afflicted with catarrh, ulcers, lung, and joint diseases (i.e., deformed). Earth before Apollo was overrun with monstrosities, men and women looking like a dog that is tired, with deformed spines.*124
Lesions have been found on Neanderthal skeletons as well as African specimens, which show abcesses, rheumatism, and joint disease. Paleontologists say the average life span of Au in Swartkrans, South Africa, was seventeen years! Even the lifespan of the Neanderthals was no more than forty years, while half of them died by age twenty. Numerous specimens had crippling ailments, many with rickets and syphilis. Smithsonian workers found many deformed bones and syphilitic lesions on ancient skulls in Patagonia.
In the tenth century, when the Scandinavian Vikings reached northeastern America, near Rhode Island, they found there a race “totally distinct from the Red Man . . . whom they designated Skrellingr [sic], or ‘chips,’ so small and misshapen were they.”87 It was “the same race as in Labrador . . . [whom] they contemptuously call Skralinger . . . and describe as numerous and short of stature.”88 In Mexico as well, the deformed little Puuc were hunchbacked like the Skralinger. Such crooked men in the Americas have been confirmed archaeologically: Owen Lovejoy excavated skeletons with “strange physical deformities . . . [and] many unusual bones.”89 And in Africa as late as the nineteenth century, de Quatrefages reported on deformed pygmies south of Abyssinia.
Asia also has its misshapen figures. In Tibetan legend, the Han-Dropa tribe, of unknown breed, were supposedly so weird that their Chinese neighbors tried to exterminate them. Puny and fragile, four feet tall, they possessed disproportionately large heads. Their eyes were large with pale blue irises. A similar whispery race was known to live in North America, south of Cherokee country, a tribe of little people called Tsundige’wi, with very queer-shaped bodies, living in nests scooped in the sand. The little fellows were so weak, said the Cherokee, that they could not fight at all, and were in constant terror from the wild geese and other birds that came to make war upon them.
Figure 9.8. Puuc depicted in Mexico’s Loltun Caverns. Illustration by Jose Bouvier.
Figure 9.9. “Misshapen gods” are represented in Olmec art by “jaguar-men” and other monstrosities depicting all types and stages between man and beast.
Figure 9.10. A large-headed African figurine.
Yet not one of these “hopelessly maladapted” races was the product of natural selection. The vagaries of hybridization—not mutation—once peopled Earth with surprising spawn, such as are recalled in our own “enlightened” age only in the fables and fairy tales of children.
10
WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG
The Question of How Life Began
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.
BOOK OF JOB 38:4
SEMUAN BEGINNINGS
The very ancient word semu (the root of words like seminal, inseminate, semen, semolina, etc.) can be understood in terms of raw beginnings, for it applies to the inchoate world and is no longer potent once a planet has attained maturity. Think of semu as a gestative period: in the youth of our world, each species was “brought into existence . . . using special processes which are not operative today [e.a.]”1 Creationists call this “a period of special constructive processes”2 (in stark contrast to evolution’s ploddingly slow and continual process of change and transmutation).
A formative age, quite different from our own, has been recognized by scientists like Immanuel Velikovsky; even the late S. J. Gould posited “developmental locking” after the Cambrian, thus ending the age of flexibility in which body plans were established. “No new phyla have emerged since the Cambrian age, 500 million years ago.”3 The Paleozoic Era (which began with the Cambrian Period) was a time of great pliancy, an inscrutable plastic power, an arcane force, which “cannot be seen . . . at the present time.”4
The earth ceased to bear, like a woman worn out by age.
LUCRETIUS, ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE
Darwin, for his part, could only imagine that life itself began “in a warm little pond”5; indeed, the best analogy for semu today is the green scum that accumulates on ponds and pools of water.
Figure 10.1. Semu icon.
Let a sign be given to man so that he may comprehend semu. And so the jellyfish and the green scum of water*125 . . . [are] permanently coming forth in all ages, so that man could understand the age of semu, when the earth . . . [was] covered over with commingled atmosphere and corporeal substance called semu . . . in this day the earth does not produce semu abundantly.
OAHSPE, BOOK OF JEHOVIH 5:4
Figure 10.2 shows a pool of water with a negative current escaping. What is that current? Something on the order of “fluctuating electrical fields” are thought to account for the origin of life on Earth,6 living things having developed through the agency of some bioenergy field. Roughly equivalent to electromagnetic energy, vortexian currents escape through Earth overnight: these (atmospherean) currents are to Earth in the day-light, and from Earth in the night. A pool of water is charged during the day with the positive current, but during the night the negative current escapes upward from the water. The resulting decomposition is called semu, a mucilaginous substance that floats on the surface of the water. “In a few days this semu, by motion, assumes certain defined shapes, crystalline, fibrous and otherwise, like the strange configurations of frost on a windowpane. . . . They float against the ground . . . and take root and grow. . . . No seed was there. This new property is called Life.”7
Figure 10.2. Pool of water showing negative current escaping.
Indeed, Anaximander of Miletas (550 BCE) thought that life first started in sea slime; electrolytes of seawater are, after all, similar to the internal fluids of living organisms. Thus has the root of life come to be conceived of as a sort of primitive cell floating around in the “primordial soup.” A soft gelatinous matter (“abysmal slime”) taken from the ocean bed during dredging operations was once named bathybius, apparently an amorphous protein compound, capable of assimilating food, a diffused formless protoplasm.
Scientists like to point out that (1) comets hold organic molecules, possible building blocks of life, and (2) interstellar space is filled with clouds of dust containing microorganisms, cellulose, and other organic matter. Consisting of dust, air, water, heat, and colloids, a kind of protoplasmic substance fell to Earth from nebulous regions in the firmament; as it is said in the Popul Vuh: “From fogs, clouds, and dust, creation came,” just as other scriptures say that out of earth and atmosphere conjoined, “He created the trees of the earth and the flesh of animals.”8 Meteorites contain up to 30 percent organic compounds such as hydrocarbons and chlorophyll. And with precursors of DNA f
ound in the Murchison meteorite (which crashed in Australia in 1969), the ashes of dead stars, comets, and dust grains are now thought to contain the ingredients for life.
Figure 10.3. Plate 39 from Oahspe, Earth in semu.
The new science that I am studying also looks at coalification as a nonterrestrial dynamic. “There is a time for semu; and a time for falling nebulae to bury deep the forests and semuan beds, to provide coal and manure for a time afterward. . . . If luts, a time of destruction, followed soon after a semuan period, when portions of the earth were covered with rank vegetation, it charred them, penetrating and covering them up. Most of the coal-beds and oil-beds in the earth were made this way. . . . Luts belongs more to an early age of a planet, when the nebulous clouds in its outer belt are subject to condensation, so as to rain down on the earth these corporeal showers.”9 Thus did condensed nebula (dust and stones and water combined) cover up the forests; it fell like hot molten iron, and the trees were beaten down, covered up, and burnt to blackness.
The formation of coal seams, then, belongs to formative times, in the Paleozoic’s Carboniferous Period, when the first amphibians appeared. The profusion of plant life buried in the Carboniferous suggests a high concentration of carbon dioxide in the coal period; thus with CO2 locked up in coal deposits, the atmosphere would then be cleared, now suitable for terrestrial vertebrates—air-breathing reptiles.
Such deep vertical beds (some one hundred feet) are not formed today, nor is oil any longer being formed.10 Forty-foot high standing trees buried in coal seams bely the Darwinian (and uniformitarian) view of long and slow compression by overlying rocks; for it was pressure, rather than time, that caused coalification—and quickly done! If the average rate of deposition of sediments is something like 0.2 mm per year, “such a slow rate would be quite incapable of burying and fossilizing entire forests, dinosaurs, or even a medium-sized tadpole.”11 Exposed, they would simply rot away.
Figure 10.4. Depiction of coal found compressed between layers of rock.
SOMETHING CAN’T COME FROM NOTHING
Ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes out of nothing). It was during our planet’s travel through the semuan firmament that life began on the face of Earth. It was not “random mutations” that led to cellular life.
Just as the brain of Shakespeare was necessary to produce the famous plays, so prior information was necessary to produce a living cell. . . . Life cannot have had a random beginning.
FRED HOYLE AND N. C. WICKRAMASINGHE, EVOLUTION FROM SPACE
Could RNA molecules have been formed by a chemical accident in the primordial slime? Are men “raised like Vegetables out of some fat and slimy soil?” quoth Richard Bentley (1692).12 This idea was called, contemptuously, the “gospel of dirt” by Thomas Carlyle. Today, exponents of the “Godless particle” (Higgs Boson) say: “creating ‘stuff ’ from ‘no stuff’ seems to be no problem at all—everything we see could have emerged as a purposeless quantum burp in space.”13
Figure 10.5. Plate 6 from Oahspe, picturing Earth in the Semuan firmament.
Could life have been burped from nonliving matter, as Ernst Haeckel thought of his Urschleim (primordial slime)? Or is life actually a property of matter, as eighteenth-century enlightenment materialism suggested? Or is there instead an animating principle, an unseen power, a force? James Churchward, so ahead of his time, stressed the difference between elements (matter) and force (energy). Isn’t matter, of itself, dead, inert? Ironically, science, having thoroughly debunked the old theory of spontaneous generation of matter, invokes it once again, with molecules—godless particles—somehow self-assembling and jump-starting all life.
Yet, as biologist Michael Behe sees it, “staggering difficulties . . . face an origin of life by natural chemical process. In private many scientists admit that . . . [we] have no explanation for the beginning of life. . . . The involvement of some intelligence is unavoidable.”14
There is no evidence in the oldest rocks on Earth of any prebiotic matter. Could viruslike particles have “evolved” into cells? Are we descended from viruses? If so, can anyone explain how a protein molecule evolved? “The odds of the chance evolution of a protein,” said Francis Hitching “is about one in 10600.”15 Did mineral surfaces magically spring to life, organizing key molecules? Did volcanic sources “synthesize” amino acids? What catalyzed the synthesis of compounds?
Can experimental design apparatus really simulate conditions of baby Earth? Yes, say those whose claim comes out of laboratories: starting in the 1950s, radiation or other energy sources were applied to simple gases, obtaining a by-product of amino acids. Critics, though, think such claims are misleading; it would be “an outrageous fluke for amino acids . . . in a polypeptide chain . . . [to mutate properly] which is well known to geneticists and yet nobody seems prepared to blow the whistle.”16
Nurs’ d by warm sun-beams in primeval caves, Organic life began beneath the waves. . . . Hence without parent by spontaneous birth, Rise the first specks of animated earth.
ERASMUS DARWIN, “THE TEMPLE OF NATURE”
Do you mean to tell me, then, that inert dust found a way to become a living thing? Evolution overall is the idea that things made themselves (with a little push from nature—warm sunbeams perhaps). Today it is said that nonliving matter somehow gave rise to life; somehow a few particles of matter managed to arrange themselves spontaneously into living structures.
Geologist George Frederick Wright, however, found it hard to believe “that plant life has had the power of taking upon itself the forms and prerogatives of animal life. . . . It is impossible rationally to believe that a principle of life is the product of chemical forces [which are] but the machinery of a mill. . . . If anyone wishes to believe that the marvelous adaptive capacities of plant life sprang from the dead forces of nature, he is at liberty to do so, but at the risk of his reputation for sanity.”17
Figure 10.6. George Frederick Wright, turn-of-the-century American geologist.
Notwithstanding scientific feint, inert matter shows no potential to organize itself. How could complex information codes be generated without intelligence? I am one who doubts it. Just as consciousness cannot be put to matter, so too is life itself independent of matter, something more than “atoms in a bag.”
Particles had to have a form of awareness that let them know how to behave.
PETER J. BOWLER, EVOLUTION: THE HISTORY OF AN IDEA
THE QUICKENING . . . AND THE COOLING
The molecules needed for life are widely distributed in the universe.
ERNST MAYR, WHAT EVOLUTION IS
Perhaps, offers the materialist, life was engendered by the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, or in a volcanic setting of “fire and mire.” Perhaps it was “bolts of lightning” that turned simple chemicals to organic molecules, like the mythical Zeus hurling thunderbolts at Earth. The problem here is that macromolecules tend to fragment, not form, under such highenergy barrages. Asking chemical reactions to produce life from nonlife is about the same as asking favorable mutations to make a man out of a monkey. Organic molecules are a collection of parts. What would make them gel?
I rained down semu on the earth; and by virtue of My presence I quickened into life all the living. Without seed I created the life that is in them. . . . Thus made I him out of the dissolved elements of every living thing that had preceded him.
OAHSPE, BOOK OF JEHOVIH 5:14 AND BOOK OF INSPIRATION 6:19
The ray of light that goeth out of Me taketh root in mortality, and thou art the product. Thou wert nothing; though all things that constitute thee, were before. These I drove together, and quickened. Thus I made thee.
OAHSPE, BOOK OF INSPIRATION 1:7–10
Elements (matter) are one thing; forces (energy) are the other. The formula of life entails not only ingredients (elements, raw materials) but also a force, an unseen dynamic, the power behind things, the punch, the spark, the quickening. Some ineffable cause or power, thought Alfred Russel Wallace, “must necessari
ly come into action when protoplasm appeared.”18 Indeed it was in ancient Indian cosmogony just such a quickening power, wielded by the High Lord of the Upper Heavens, when he sent whirlwinds abroad, which gathered in the substance of the world egg, and rained it down upon Earth. “Thus did Eolin touch the earth with His quickening hand, and instantly all the living were created.”19
This quickening is also expressed in Genesis’s “breath of life,” as it is in AmerInd creation (Algonquin and Blackfeet) wherein Manito first molded men from Earth’s clay, then breathed life into them. Among the Chinese, it was the deity Nu Kua who made the first humans out of clay from the banks of the Yellow River, then quickened them with the breath of life. The breath of life is also a part of anthropogenesis in Hawaii, Australia, and the Kei Islands of Indonesia.
Here is the Oahspe version of creation: “In the Semuan Age, the time of ripeness, all the living were quickened into life, for the earth had moved into its season for the bringing forth of living creatures. . . . [With] the triumphant entry of oxygen to the earth’s surface. . . . [came] the gestative age for the animal kingdom, a time of propagation. . . . Those that were quickened into life, and not attached to the earth by fibers or roots, were called animals . . . created not in pairs only, but in hundreds of pairs and in thousands and millions of pairs. . . . And, in time, semu covered the earth abroad with Asu, till hotu came and the creation of new living things ceased.”20 And this was approximately 75,000 years ago. Man was the last creation in semu, and his advent was a thing apart from the anthropoid apes or any other of our “fellow primates.” With the advent of Asu man at 80 kya, there would surely be no time for Darwin’s evolution, which entails the accumulation of small changes over vast eons, measured by current orthodoxy in the millions of years. (See figure 10.7.)
Mysterious Origins of Hybrid Man Page 33