The ultimate reductio was reached in the work of Karl Heinrich Graf in 1866. As Hupfeld had divided “E” into “P” and “E,” Graf in turn distinguished within P between two further sources. He claimed to have discovered material in “P” which could only have been written after the deuteronomic legislation allegedly discovered by King Josiah in 621 B.C. Thus, there was some “P” that could only have come from a period later than “D.” However, there was also historical material in “P” that could only have come from a period earlier than “D.” Thus, P (Hupfeld’s E1) became “P1” and “P2.” Thus, the chronological order from earliest to latest layers of source documents was P1 (the really old P), E, J, D, and P2 (the legalistic or priestly P).
Graf’s separation of “P” into two different sources of “P” was not to endure. In 1869 the Dutch critic Abraham Keunen argued that P was a unified source, because the legal and legislative portions could not be separated from the historical ones without resulting in complete confusion, since the proper understanding of the one required the other. But, since Graf had fairly well established that the priestly legislation occurred after the Babylonian Exile, the entire P document had to have been composed after the discovery of “D” in 621. This was a “gentle critical way” of saying that most of the laws in the Torah were really the product of a post-Exilic priesthood. It was a gentle way of saying that, rather than those laws being the basis for Talmudic Judaism, the reverse was true; Talmudic Judaism was the basis of those Torah laws. It was a gentle way of stating that the Torah had been composed as the result of an agenda by an elite, an elite that was, in its turn, continuous within Hebrew society throughout several centuries.
In any case, with Graf’s overturning of the separation of P and its redating to a period after D, only one final component needed to be added, and that was the component that the J document was the product of the Hebrews when they worshipped their local tribal god, Yahweh, and thus, the order of documents came into its now standardized chronological order: JEDP. It was this order that Julius Wellhausen gave in his massive reconstruction of ancient Hebrew history in his now classic work on the subject, Introduction to the History of Israel.
5. The Critical Suspicion of an Agenda
To put it succinctly, and regardless of its many problems, the higher critics who elaborated the Documentary Hypothesis were perhaps correct on one thing: they suspected that behind the biblical stories and the pious reasons advanced in them for various events, that there lay a hidden agenda of a hidden elite, manifesting itself, ever so faintly to be sure, in the philological and thematic differences between various passages. For these critics, many of whom had ceased to believe in any sort of God, criticism and the suspicion of “an agenda” at work in the texts became a way that they could plausibly read those texts and retain them in the canon of Western culture. If one accepts for the sake of argument that this is true, then perhaps they were too oblivious to the implications of their own insight, for such unity as the Torah had came not from an individual author nor even from the clumsy — yet “infallible” — hand of the Redaktor ex machina, but from the enduring influence and extent within ancient times of a surviving post-cosmic war elite.
6. The Suggestions of an Agenda at Work with the Critics: Weishaupt’s Strange Comment and a Hidden Illuminist Role in Early Old Testament Criticism?
The critics might have looked closer to home for the possible work of an agenda in their own midst, in addition to one behind the texts they were scrutinizing, and that possible agenda may be pointed out by noting that higher criticism of the Old Testament, particularly in the hands of an Eichhorn, began in southern Germany in the eighteenth century, a time, and place, rife with what would become a by-word for conspiracies and agendas: the Illuminated Freemasonry of University of Ingolstadt professor of Canon Law, Adam Weishaupt, better known as the founder of the Bavarian Illuminati.
However, there do exist serious grounds for considering a possible relationship between the two. Both Masonry and criticism at that time shared a basic presupposition with respect to the Pentateuch, namely, that the ancient history of man and of Israel as recorded there was at best an allegorical compilation from other, earlier traditions, traditions either deliberately omitted or obscured by the extant biblical text.
More importantly, it was the stated goal of Adam Weishaupt and his Illuminati “to acquire the direction of education — of church management — of the professorial chair, and of the pulpit” and to “gain over the reviewers and journalists” in order to spread Illuminist opinions, and thus it would seem highly likely that biblical studies would have been a principal target for this agenda.
Even more importantly, Weishaupt himself refers once, in the writings captured by the Bavarian government, to his own “history of the lives of the Patriarchs” which, though apparently no longer extant, does indicate his own deep interest in biblical studies, and knowing Weishaupt’s predilections, we may easily guess that this history was hardly in line either with Catholic or Lutheran orthodoxy of the period.
The Illuminati did indeed make great strides in the recruitment of prominent clergy for the day. Captured Illuminist writings list as members of the order one “Baader, professor”, one “Barhdt, clergyman”, and a “Danzer, canon”, who most likely are Franz Xavier von Baader (1765–1841), Karl Friedrich Barhdt (1741–1792), professor of biblical archaeology at Erfurt, and Jacob Danzer (1743–1796), professor of moral and pastoral theology at Salzburg, a haven of Illuminati activities.38
But perhaps most importantly, Weishaupt boasts in one of his letters, “Who would have thought that a Professor at Ingolstadt was to become the teacher of the professor of Goettingen, and of the greatest men in Germany?” Goettingen, at the time that Weishaupt wrote his letter, was home to Old Testament professor Michaelis, and his more celebrated pupil, Eichhorn.
7. The Explosive Thunderclap of Delitzsch’s Dilemma
So, why was “Delitzsch’s Distinctive Dilemma” such an explosive thunderclap that its echoes reverberate down to our own times in obscure scholarly debates?
So how then may one summarize “Delitzsch’s Distinctive Dilemma”?1) On the one hand, the clear implication of Delitzsch’s cuneiform names containing the root “Ia” and even “Iave” centuries before the epiphany to Moses at the Burning Bush, as recounted in Exodus chapter 3, is that there was nothing inherently special about the name “Yahweh” itself, since it was known long before the Exodus, and that in turn demoted the Exodus passage from the status it always had had within within Jewish and Christian theology as a special monotheistic revelation, challenging conservative literalist fundamentalisms; and,
2) On the other hand, the presence of the name in tablets clearly datable to a time period from Hammurabi also meant that the careful chronological reconstructions of the Documentary Hypothesis — the critics’ ‘new fundamentalism’ — were on very shaky foundations at best, or clearly dubious and spurious at worst.
But there was a further implication:3) The presence of such names in very old cuneiform tablets also implied that the biblical text was indeed edited, but in a very different way, and for a very different purpose, than that proposed by the higher critics advocating the Documentary Hypothesis. Indeed, as Delitzsch himself pointed out, the presence of “Cosmic War” and “Fall of Man” themes in Babylonian art, themes paralleled in the biblical stories, suggested that the editing was wholesale and present throughout the region’s texts and artwork. It suggested, in other words, that there was an agenda at work throughout all texts from the region — biblical or otherwise — and that to learn what that story and agenda was, one would have to reconstruct that history by a careful critical process.
When we put these considerations into the implications of Koldewey’s musings on the sirrush, we get an even further expanded list of implications, for not only are biblical history and the wider history of religion and culture affected, so too, and by the same token, is the history of science and technology itse
lf. This implies that the “agenda” referred to previously, the agenda at work in the careful editing of texts, may be trying to hide something about four things: God, man, religion, and science itself.
Koldewey’s sirrush with its odd and bizarre mixture of serpentine, ornithological, and feline characteristics points the way, for with the modern science of genetics, the creation of such chimerical creatures looms as an ever more feasible reality, a reality that the ancient texts from Mesopotamia also implied once existed, and even implied the use and manipulation of a technology to achieve it. Could it all have been an agenda of massive misdirection, a case of sleight-of-hand designed to get the vast majority of mankind looking elsewhere, while an informed elite, looking at ancient texts and seeing a lost science and technology, was really digging and scratching in the desert sands in an attempt to recover and redeploy that lost technology?
That possibility informs the rest of this book, and to it, we now turn.
Two
MARDUK MEASURED THE STRUCTURE OF THE DEEP:
MEGALITHIC MEASURES AND THE SUMERIAN “REFORM”
“And [Marduk] measured the structure of the deep.”
— Enuma Elish, Tablet 439
“In reality there are no mainstream measuring systems in common use today that fail to owe a debt to the original, integrated megalithic system.”
— Christopher Knight and Alan Butler40
IF ONE IS TO BELIEVE the ancient Babylonian “cosmic war” epic, the Enuma Elish,41 then almost immediately upon the conclusion of that war, Marduk, the victor over the evil villain Tiamat, set out to “measure the structure of the deep.” The mind’s almost subconscious reaction to this bit of information is to chuckle and write the statement off as yet more proof that the Enuma Elish is nothing but a bit of ancient Mesopotamian science fiction imagination run amok, with no basis in the realities of the necessities of a postwar “cleanup” of the rubble.
Nothing, however, could be further from the truth.
Before proceeding to uncover that “truth,” however, it is necessary to reiterate three of the assumptions being made in this book that bear directly on our examination of the subject matter of this chapter.
Firstly, we have assumed that an “elite” survived that war, scattered throughout various places on planet Earth, and possibly elsewhere in local space. Secondly, we have assumed that those elites had agendas, both open and hidden, and that among the open ones were the quickest possible reestablishment of the basic necessities of civilization and the quickest possible global extension of them. Given the devastation caused by that ancient “cosmic war,” however, this goal necessarily had to operate over centuries and millennia of painstaking effort. Such an effort and long-range goal thus required that these surviving elites had to organize themselves — and their knowledge — in such a fashion to be able to preserve that goal and the knowledge base even if the foundations of that knowledge were lost in the short term. This in turn required what I have referred to as the creation of a “unified intention of symbol,” by which myths and stories were created to encode and preserve that science, technology, and history in multi-layered, complex imagery and symbols that would be decodable once mankind had reached a similar pitch of scientific and social development as had been the case in the prewar civilization.42 The possible hidden agendas have already been alluded to in the previous chapter, for “Koldewey’s Conundrum” and “Delitzsch’s Dilemma” point to the possible hidden manipulations of surviving technologies, and very possibly of religion itself, as some of the means to accomplish this long-term goal.
Thus we arrive at the third and final component of the assumptions that bear directly on this chapter, and that is that some fragments of the technology and scientific knowledge, howsoever rudimentary, survived that ancient cosmic war and were put to immediate use to re-establish and preserve those elements of civilization necessary for human survival and progress.
This assumption highlights in stark relief the dangerous “gap of history” in the standard academic models of human prehistory, for as many people know, the remarkably stable, advanced, and highly integrated societies of Egypt and Sumer sprang up rather suddenly and with very little antecedent preparation. They were just suddenly there. It was into this “gap of history” that an Oxford professor stepped, showing that there had indeed been “preparation,” and that this preparation had been done by an elite, that it was deliberately coordinated, and remarkably consistent in its spread over Europe and the Middle East.
A. AN OXFORD PROFESSOR OVERTURNS THE STANDARD MODEL: ALEXANDER THOM, HIS WORK, AND ITS IMPLICATIONS
That professor’s name was Alexander Thom, and the work he did was nothing less than brilliant. So brilliant was it, in fact, that his results continue to be questioned (a polite euphemism for “rejected”) by the history, anthropology, and archaeology communities within academia. Indeed, Thom was not a professional historian, anthropologist or archaeologist, and that was part of the problem. He was an engineer and a mathematician, and like engineer Christopher Dunn who would so vex Egyptologists and anthropologists by maintaining that the Great Pyramid was a machine,43 Thom’s conclusions would fly wholesale in the face of the revered assumptions of anthropology, archaeology, and historiography regarding the ancient pre-classical history of mankind. Thom’s work is relatively difficult to come by, but British authors Christopher Knight and Alan Butler are two researchers who have studied it thoroughly and popularized his findings, expanding on them and adding considerable insights of their own, and accordingly their works will be followed closely here.
Born in the year 1894 in Scotland, Thom attended the University of Glasgow and later returned there as an engineering lecturer. During World War II Thom did work for the British government, and after the war was over, returned to the academy, this time assuming a post as a Professor of Engineering at the University of Oxford where he remained until he retired in 1961. Like so many others associated with the University of Oxford Thom developed an interest in the “pre-history” of man, suspecting that all was not well with the “standard model”:Thom’s interest in Megalithic structures began in his native Scotland, where he noticed that such sites appeared to have lunar alignments. In the early 1930s he decided to study some of the sites and began a process of careful surveying that was to take him almost five decades. In addition to his lecturing, Alexander Thom was a highly talented engineer in his own right and he taught himself surveying, which enabled him to look at more Megalithic sites — and in greater detail — than anyone before or since.44
In this concentration on close engineering and surveying observations of ancient structures, Thom was very much like another famous contemporary, Sir William Flinders Petrie, the surveyor par excellence of the Giza plateau in Egypt.
Thom’s excavations and surveying work took him five decades, surveying sightsfrom the gaunt and impressive standing-stone circles of the island of Orkney in the far north of Scotland, right down to the giant avenues of stones in their frozen march across the fields of Brittany in France... [where] Thom spent each and every summer for almost five decades carefully measuring and making notes. Together with family and friends and associates, he gradually built up a greater database, regarding megalithic achievement in building, than anyone before or since.45
Thom eventually published the results of his studies and surveying in an article written in 1951 for the Journal of the British Astronomical Association. The article was entitled “The Solar Observations of Megalithic Man.” And over the next three years Thom expanded on this by adding three more articles for the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, as well as publishing three books on his findings.46
Almost as soon as he had published his first article, the grumblings of discontent were heard from archaeologists and anthropologists, and by the time of his final articles and books, that grumbling had grown into a deafening silence after an initial flurry of stubborn rejection. As Knight and Butler state the case, “The difference in
approach between Thom and the general archaeological community is fundamental,”47 and boils down to a “collision of techniques.”48
Well might archaeologists have complained, for in essence, what Thom did was to prove that the supposedly “primitive” megalithic builders of Britain were profound astronomers, surveyors, and engineers in their own right. Just precisely what had Thom done to earn the ire of archaeologists? He had made “a startling claim”:He maintained that he had found that the structures left by late Stone Age man had been built using a standard unit of measure that was so precise that he could identify its central value to an accuracy that was less than the width of a human hair. The idea that these simple people from prehistory could have achieved such accuracy flew in the face of all the worldview of most archaeologists.49
But that was not the only problem, for this unit of measure, spread throughout Brittany in France and the British isles, was consistent in that accuracy, and moreover, was based — as we shall see in a moment — on extremely accurate astronomical and geodetic observation. How could it be, then, that “the supposedly unsophisticated people of Stone Age Britain possessed a fully integrated system of measurement based on a deep understanding of the solar system”?50
This, of course, was the real problem, for it implied a sophisticated knowledge base from which the ancient sites were constructed, and that of course raised the dreaded possibility that something much more sophisticated by way of a civilization had pre-existed the Stone Age peoples. In short, Thom’s work raised the dreaded possibility of the “A” word, of “Atlantis.” In any case, this standard unit of astronomical and geodetic measure Thom called “The Megalithic Yard,” and it became a banner around which supporters of the theory of a pre-existent and sophisticated civilization rallied. Indeed, its mere existence posed a kind of historiographical problematic for the standard views of human civilization’s development, for “if he was wrong, the subject of statistics needs a fundamental reappraisal; but if his findings were reliable, the subject of archaeology needs equally careful reassessment. Further, if Thom was right, the development of human civilization may have to be rewritten!”51 Knight and Butler quickly determined that the “only hope of resolving the issue, once and for all, was to attempt to find a reason why this length of unit would have had meaning for Neolithic builders, and then to identify a methodology for reproducing such a length at different locations.”52
Genes, Giants, Monsters, and Men: The Surviving Elites of the Cosmic War and Their Hidden Agenda Page 4
