Hidden Bodies: A Brief and Incomplete History of Astronomical Discovery

It is not certain when Aristotle wrote his book On the Heavens, but it is thought to have been written sometime around 350 BCE. In it, he addresses the debates on cosmogony of his day, for example asserting the weakness of the argument of flat-earthers. As I’ve discussed before, the view of the Earth as spherical was common, even popular, all the way back then, and championed by Aristotle. However, in laying out his model of the universe, he favored a geocentric cosmology, viewing Earth as the center of the universe, an immutable and eternal constant with other planets, the Sun, and the stars revolving around it, and beyond the stars, a spiritual plane that he called the Sphere of the Prime Mover. Even then, though, there were alternative views. As Aristotle notes, the Pythagorean philosopher Philolaus believed that the Earth revolved around a Central Fire. However, this Central Fire was not the Sun, in his view, which he said also revolved around the center with the Earth, and he further believed that on the other side of this Central Fire at the universe’s center was an Antichthon, or Counter-Earth, a strange idea that survived long enough to become the fodder of sci-fi. Modern astronomers have even been obliged to disprove the existence of such a phantom planet, which would be detectable because of its gravitational influence on other planetary bodies. But Philolaus’s model influenced Aristarchus, who saw the Central Fire as being one and the same as the Sun, building a heliocentric model of the universe and even suggesting that the stars were themselves other suns. But Aristarchus’s model was often rejected in favor of the Aristotelian geocentric model, thereafter developed by Hipparchus of Nicaea and Ptolemy of Alexandria, who tweaked the model to suggest that each heavenly body, in its orbit of Earth, also moved in an epicycle, or a small circle, performing little loop-de-loops as it revolved around us. The heliocentric view of the universe would not rise again, as it were, until the 16th century, when Polish monk Nicolaus Copernicus’s On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres set forth a model of the universe that the Church rejected. Then in 1610, when Galileo recognized that the planetary bodies he’d been observing were moons orbiting Jupiter, not revolving around Earth, the geocentric model of the universe was in its death throes. However, this new model still held that we were very close to the center of the universe: our sun, Sol. This notion would not be shattered until the 20th century, when head of the Harvard College Observatory, Harlow Shapley, placed our solar system in the boondocks of the Milky Way galaxy. Still, the Milky Way, it was thought, even by Shapley, was the only galaxy there was. Until Edwin Hubble showed that there were other galaxies beyond ours, proving it to Shapley in what Shapley described as a “letter that destroyed my universe.” Thus goes the march of scientific progress. When we believe we understand something, our illusions are obliterated by the next discovery. Today, we have the multiverse theory to suggest that our universe may not even be the only one, making our existence feel more and more insignificant.

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In my recent blog post, covering the history of immunological science and the development of vaccine technology, as well as in a patron bonus on germ theory, I found it interesting to explore both the hits and misses of scientific progress. It illustrates well the scientific principle that only through experimentation, collection of evidence, observation and comparison can truth be established. We see in the history of science the concept that, as Isaac Newton once wrote, each generation stands on the shoulders of giants, building upon what has already been proven and disproving what has not in order to achieve a more perfect understanding of our world and universe. I find this gratifying because of how very different it often seems from historiology. Don’t get me wrong. Professional historians work tirelessly to revise and perfect our understanding of the past. The term “revisionist history” in fact has unfairly developed a negative connotation, when in reality, every professional historian engages in measured and evidence-supported revision. But since history is often viewed as static and unchanging, our evolving understanding of it often takes a long time to catch up. Textbooks continue to disseminate oversimplified narratives rife with myths and misconceptions. That, of course, is the bread and butter of this blog. Take, for example, Copernicus and Galileo, about whom there remain a wealth of myths that even scientists like Carl Sagan were known to repeat. The first is the Demotion Myth, the idea that the heliocentric model represented a demotion of the Earth’s place in the universe. Actually, according to medieval and early modern beliefs, in which the center was the worst place to be, like the center of Dante’s model of hell, moving Earth away from the center was in reality something of a promotion according to contemporary philosophy. Further myths claim that Copernicus waited until his deathbed to publish his heliocentric model, but that was more of a coincidence. Likewise, many myths surround Galileo, from apocryphal experiments atop the Leaning Tower of Pisa wrongfully attributed to him, to erroneously crediting him with the invention of the telescope, the thermometer, and the scientific method. Folklore tells us Galileo was excommunicated, convicted of heresy, and immured in a dungeon. In fact, he was put on trial, but in reality it was for breach of an agreement with the Holy Office. As the Pope had endorsed his work, Galileo had agreed not to present the Copernican model as proven fact, but rather to discuss the pros and cons of all cosmological models. Pope Urban VIII was actually sympathetic to the Copernican model, but when Galileo broke his agreement and presented it as fact, it put the Pope in an awkward situation. Far from being tossed in a dungeon, though, Galileo was sentenced to live in a 5-room suite in the Palace of the Holy Office, was able to receive guests and, records show, could come and go at great liberty, if not as he pleased. These myths make it clear that, while the science to which they contributed was built upon and furthered, the history of their lives was muddled and misrepresented. So let us retire, this once, from the benighted realm of Historical Blindness, and bask in the light of empirical science, specifically the luminous realm of astronomy, where wrong ideas have also abounded, but have almost universally been overcome by reason.

Saturn depicted by Galileo (top), Huygens (middle), and Cassini (bottom). Image credit: RM Chapple

One of Galileo’s wrong ideas had to do with Saturn. In 1610, he was the first to observe this planet using a telescope, and he saw what appeared to be a triple planet, or a large planet with two moons on either side. However, two years later, he observed that these moons had disappeared, and two years after that, seeing that they appeared to have returned, he speculated that they were some kind of arms. But the shape of Saturn would baffle astronomers for a long time, sometimes appearing as three bodies and sometimes as an egg on its side. Some fifty years after Galileo first spied it, Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch astronomer, discovered Saturn’s moon Titan using a telescope superior to Galileo’s and in the process, he observed these arms of Saturn, which appeared to pierce it through its center, making it look something like a spinning top, but then vanishing with time. It was Huygens who hypothesized that these arms were a ring around the planet that when viewed edge-on appeared to be arms, or moons with inferior optics, and became impossible to discern from other angles. Huygens’s ring theory was not widely accepted at first, but other astronomers came around to his way of thinking, coming to believe that Saturn had a ring around it… a solid ring, for if it were not entirely solid, how could it possibly hold together as the planet spun? A hint came 15 years later, when Giovanni Domenico Cassini observed a gap in the ring. This gap proved it was not some giant ring of stone, all of a piece, so the mystery deepened. How did the isolated masses within the ring remain in place? Perhaps it was gaseous or composed of fluid? Not until the mid-19th century did James Clerk Maxwell demonstrate through equations that none of these possibilities would have been stable. Thus it was discovered that Saturn’s ring was composed of small unconnected particles. Almost forty years later, in 1895, James Keeler would further our understanding, observing that there were actually multiple rings of Saturn, and the innermost did not move at the same speed as did the outermost. So the history of astronomical discovery shows us that even when we see something with our naked eye, what we are seeing may not be entirely apparent.

Such was the case with Mars when William Herschel studied it with one of his homemade telescopes during the late 18th century. He made some important discoveries during his study, having to do with the rotation and axial tilt of the red planet. He also observed that the white spots on Mars’s poles, observed by both Cassini and Huygens and hypothesized earlier that century to be polar ice caps, changed size according to the season. This confirmation that ice existed on Mars helped to fuel Herschel’s speculation that the planet was inhabited. Herschel tended to vocally believe that all planets were inhabited, envisioning the moon as being akin to the English countryside, and even suggesting that the Sun supported life… not on its scorching surface, of course, but in some cooler underground realm, like a reverse Hollow Earth theory in which it is somehow hotter on the surface and more temperate within. Thus it’s no surprise that when Herschel viewed and mapped Mars in 1783, he asserted that all the visibly darker areas were oceans and declared the planet capable of supporting life, encouraging the perennial belief in Martians. With the 19th century construction of more and more advanced observatories, further mapping of Mars was accomplished, starting in 1877 by Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli in Milan. It was he who named these supposed Martian continents and seas, giving them mythological names. Schiaparelli also observed something surprising. There appeared to be a network of pale lines in certain regions, which Schiaparelli called canali. When this news reached the English speaking world, his work was translated, and it was discovered that there were “canals” on Mars. At the time, canals were something of an engineering wonder, and the recent completion of the Suez Canal had been touted as a great accomplishment of mankind. So when the English speaking world heard “canal,” they thought massive artificial waterways, which would mean intelligent and industrious Martians. In reality, Schiaparelli’s word canali had been mistranslated. A more accurate translation would have been “channels,” a word less suggestive of engineering. But it was too late. The Martians were out of the bag. American astronomer Percival Lowell mapped what he saw as a network of canals with “oases” at certain intersections, speculating that the drying of the Martians’ planet had forced them to draw water from their polar ice caps. But again, what they had spied through their telescopes was not as clear as they believed. These features could be glimpsed only briefly and occasionally through Earth’s shimmering and shifting atmosphere, and as it turned out, they were an optical illusion. The lighter and darker regions were not oceans and continents, but rather what are called albedo features. Rather than bodies of water, or vegetation, as was an alternative theory, they didn’t correspond to topographical features at all and were likely just areas where wind had swept away the pale surface dust to reveal the darker ground beneath. As for the canali, they were an artifact of the human eye, creating phantom lines between briefly visible features, and the suggestion of infrastructure introduced by the English mistranslation added a psychological element, such that astronomers were looking for lines, expecting to find them, and staring until they saw them, making Mars something like the Magic Eye posters of the 1990s.

Martian canals depicted by Percival Lowell. Public Domain.

While sometimes astronomers were looking right at something and unable to discern what it was, or believed it was something it was not because of what others had told suggested, other times they searched and searched for something that wasn’t even there, again because some had insisted it would be there. The enduring search for a “phantom planet” is the perfect example of this. In the early 18th century, astronomers began to hypothesize about the regularity in distance between the planets in our solar system, concluding in 1772 with Bode’s Law, a formula for predicting the distance between planets that it was hoped would make the discovery of new planets possible. And indeed, it did. In 1781, William Herschel spotted Uranus, which he believed to be a comet, but of course it wasn’t. What it was was the 7th planet from the sun, right where Bode’s Law said it would be. After that, Johann Bode, one of the originators of the law, urged astronomers to search for another planet between Mars and Jupiter, as there was a gap there indicating the presence of another planet. This hypothetical planet was the subject of much interest at the turn of the century, and a group of astronomers who fancied themselves the Celestial Police devoted themselves to finding it. A discovery of a heavenly body in that slot between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter was made the next year, but not by one of the Celestial Police. One Giueseppe Piazzi discovered a heavenly body that he dubbed Ceres, and it was thought the predicted planet had been found. However, the next year, Heinrich Olbers discovered another body with about the same orbit: Pallas. After that came Juno and Vesta, and it became clear that numerous objects were in orbit there. Thus the asteroid belt was discovered, and a theory emerged that it represented the remains of a larger planet that had once orbited there where Bode’s Law had predicted a planet would be found. This “lost planet” was named Phaeton in an 1823 pamphlet by Johann Gottlieb Radlof, a German schoolteacher who took this theory and used it as a catastrophist explanation of certain myths and biblical incidents. In this way he was something of a predecessor of Immanuel Velikovsky, the catastrophist to whom I devoted an entire episode in my Chronological Revision Chronicles. But as usual, despite such pseudoscience, science marches on. Ceres and others of the largest asteroids in the belt are today considered dwarf planets at most, and the belt is believed to be material that simply never accreted into a planet because it was too perturbed by Jupiter’s gravitational influence.

Nearly a hundred years after the formation of the Celestial Police and the search for the lost planet, astronomers found themselves again all aflutter in search of a theorized planet, this one between Mercury and the Sun. It all started in 1810, when French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier constructed a model of Mercury’s orbit of the Sun according to Newtonian laws. When he had a chance to verify his model by observing Mercury’s transit, or its crossing of the disk of the Sun, however, it failed to confirm his model. It appeared there was some excess value observed in its perihelion precession for which Le Verrier simply could not account. Le Verrier’s solution was that there must be another small planet between Mercury and the Sun that was affecting Mercury’s orbit. He called this theoretical planet Vulcan, not in some prescient anticipation of Star Trek but, of course, after a Roman fire god, from whose name we also derive the word “volcano.” It wasn’t long before he received some confirmation of his theory in the form of an amateur astronomer’s claim to have spotted this previously unseen planet crossing the Sun. Despite the fact that another astronomer expressed doubt owing to the fact that he had been observing the sun at the same moment and had seen nothing of the sort, Le Verrier accepted the account as evidence in favor of his theory, and the amateur astronomer was lauded for his sighting. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that afterward, many amateur astronomers began to come forward claiming without any corroborative evidence that they too had observed Vulcan in years past. What Le Verrier needed, though, were sightings of the planet in transit that were confirmed by more than one astronomer. Since a solar eclipse would provide the best conditions for such a sighting, the total solar eclipse of 1878 served as their best opportunity to confirm the existence of Vulcan. Astronomers from all over converged by rail on the American West, gathering at the summit of Pike’s Peak in Colorado or overrunning the small town of Separation, Wyoming, places that just happened to lie on the eclipse’s path of totality, where the shadow of the moon would sweep over the country. Respected astronomers at these different locations did indeed sight something they believed to be an intra-mercurial planet, and not just one, but two! Excitement built that not only Vulcan but also another unknown planet had been discovered. Unfortunately, none of their coordinates matched, and the idea that four new planets had been discovered between Mercury and the Sun simply beggared belief. So the search continued, especially during eclipses, until, in 1915, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity satisfactorily explained the excess precession of Mercury, which meant there was no longer any reason to believe that Vulcan existed. Now, it is thought that many of the objects supposedly spied in transit were sunspots or perhaps artifacts of telescopic optics that had been damaged, like Icarus, when pointed too close to the Sun.

Astronomers gather in Separation, Wyoming, in 1878 to observe a solar eclipse in hopes of confirming the existence of the planet Vulcan. Image courtesy of the Carbon County Museum.

Despite this difficulty in sighting even our closest planetary neighbors, humanity has long held the conviction that the number of planets in the cosmos was innumerable. Greek Philosopher Epicurus told Herodotus that “the universe is boundless both in the number of the bodies and in the extent of the void” and that “there are infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours.” But for much of human history the only things that could be spied beyond our immediate solar system were luminous bodies: stars. The very fact that planets do not emit light made it essentially impossible to see any so-called exoplanets beyond our solar system. Planets, of course, only reflect light, but when searching for planets that orbit other stars, the great distance and the faintness of their reflected light in comparison to the brightness of their stars’ light make them hidden bodies out there in the void. In fact, hard as it may seem to believe, we did not have any evidence for the existence of planets outside of our own solar system until the 20th century. Astronomer Peter Van De Kamp had begun to hypothesize that planets outside our solar system could be detected by their gravitational effect on the movement of the stars they orbited. His first couple of identifications resulted in hypothetical planets that seemed far too large to be planets, but in 1963, he detected a wobble in the movement of Barnard’s Star, 36 trillion miles from us, and thus the belief in extrasolar planets, and possibly planets that can support life, was bolstered. Currently, the existence of more than 4,000 exoplanets has been confirmed, but surprisingly, Van De Kamp’s discoveries are not among them. As it turns out, all of the star wobbles that Van De Kamp took as evidence for the presence of a planet were actually caused by adjustments to the optics of his telescope. The first real evidence for the existence exoplanets didn’t actually arrive until the early 1990s, a fact which I find astonishing.

Despite the evidence for the corruption of Van De Kamp’s calculations favoring a planet orbiting Barnard’s Star having appeared decades earlier, as recently as 2013 astronomers were still seeking to definitively rule out their existence, which they appear to have finally done. This is the strength and power of science. It takes nothing for granted. Although the existence of oceans and canals on Mars has been ruled out, the existence of water on the red planet remains a topic of much study. In 2011, high resolution images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showed dark streaks on some slopes indicating seasonal water flow over the surface of the planet, and just last year, radar data from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft detected possible underground lakes. And while the Phaeton theory that the asteroid belt is the remains of a destroyed planet is only supported by fringe pseudoscientists like Zecharia Sitchin, ideas about phantom planet and other hidden bodies within our solar system continue to be entertained. The notion of a planet Vulcan is mostly extinct, but some astronomers still suggest that intramercurial objects, which they call vulcanoids, could still exist and help to explain the various mysterious sightings in the 19th century. There is even some support for an unseen “Planet X,” but since Pluto has been demoted to a mere dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune, it is typically referred to as Planet 9 these days. Indeed, the only credible theory for the existence of another planet within our solar system places it in the same neighborhood, for the unusual orbits of the objects in the Kuiper Belt have led astronomers to hypothesize that the presence of a large body hidden far beyond Pluto may account for it. So, in astronomy and science generally, as in history, it is unwise to suggest too soon that the truth has been entirely settled.

Further Reading

Bakker, Frederick A. “The End of Epicurean Infinity: Critical Reflections on the Epicurean Infinite Universe.” Space, Imagination and the Cosmos from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, edited by Bakker F., Bellis D., Palmerino C., Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 48, Springer, 2018, pp. 41-67. SpringerLink, link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-02765-0_3.

Baron, David. “The American Eclipse of 1878 and the Scientists Who Raced West to See It.” Mental Floss, 28 July 2017, www.mentalfloss.com/article/503114/american-eclipse-1878-and-scientists-who-raced-west-see-it.

Bartusiak, Marcia. Dispatches from Planet 3: Thirty-Two (Brief) Tales on the Solar System, the Milky Way, and Beyond. Yale University Press, 2018.

Basalla, George. Civilized Life in the Universe : Scientists on Intelligent Extraterrestrials. Oxford University Press, 2006. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/civilizedlifeinu0000basa/page/n3/mode/2up.

Choi, Jieun, et al. “Precise Doppler Monitoring of Barnard's Star.” The Astrophysical Journal, vol. 764, no. 2, 31 Jan. 2013, pp. 131-142. IOPScience, iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/764/2/131.

Matson, John. “50 Years Ago an Astronomer Discovered the First Unambiguous Exoplanet (or So He Thought).” Scientific American, 30 May 2013, blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/50-years-ago-an-astronomer-discovered-the-first-unambiguous-exoplanet-or-so-he-thought/.

O’Callaghan, Jonathan. “Water on Mars: Discovery of Three Buried Lakes Intrigues Scientists.” Nature, 28 Sep. 2020, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02751-1.

Sant, Joseph. “The Copernican Myths.” Scientus.org, 2019, www.scientus.org/Copernicus-Myths.html.

---. “The Galileo Myths.” Scientus.org, 2020. www.scientus.org/Galileo-Myths.html.

Anti-Vaccinationism, a Historical Hindrance to Herd Immunity

The Reverend Cotton Mather was an exceptionally influential minister among New England Puritans. I recently discussed his role in spreading the fame of the enigmatic Dighton Rock, and his influence on the witch-hunters of Salem is widely known. Few, however, are aware of his role in popularizing early smallpox immunization efforts in America. In 1706, Mather was gifted a slave named Onesimus. Upon receipt, he looked this gift man in the mouth, as it were, searching his body for the telltale scars of a former smallpox infection and asking Onesimus if he had already had the disease. Onesimus showed Mather a small scar where he had been inoculated against the disease in Libya, the country of his birth. Mather afterward questioned numerous slaves in the area and found that the practice, which had come to be called variolation after the Latin name of smallpox, variola, was quite common and appeared very successful. Indeed, there was a long history to the practice of variolation against smallpox, a rudimentary form of immunization that involved purposely introducing biological material from an infected person—preferably one with a mild case of the disease—into the system of an uninfected person. The method goes as far back as 1000 CE in China, where they ground up infected scabs and blew them up people’s noses like snuff. By Mather’s day, the practice typically consisted of extracting pus from a smallpox sore and placing it under an uninfected person’s skin through a small incision on the arm. A variolated patient did develop a case of smallpox, but a milder and less deadly form, afterward developing immunity against the brutal “Speckled Monster” that had ravaged mankind for thousands of years and had spread the world over through trade routes, exploratory contact, and war. The more Mather learned about it, the more he supported the practice in Boston, and during a terrible smallpox outbreak in the 1720s, he convinced a local physician in his congregation to inoculate almost 300 Bostonians. While about 14% of those who contracted smallpox during this outbreak died from it, only six people, or about 2%, of those variolated died. But nevertheless, some did die, and this resulted in one of the first major backlashes against immunization efforts. Some declared that it was bad medicine, as it purposely caused a wound and an infection, while others saw it as a “devilish invention,” suggesting that some contracted smallpox as a punishment from God, and protecting them from God’s wrath was wrong. The debate was so fiery that one anti-variolater lobbed an improvised bomb into Cotton Mather’s house through a window. On it was a note that read, “Mather, you dog, Damn you, I’ll inoculate you with this.” Ironically, the only reason Mather was even able to read the note was that the poorly-made bomb failed to detonate. This furor over smallpox variolation would last for some time, but it would eventually subside, and the practice of variolation would become widespread, even among the nation’s Founding Fathers, like Thomas Jefferson, who traveled from Virginia to Pennsylvania to be variolated; John Adams, whose whose wife and children were variolated; and George Washington, who made variolation a requirement for all American soldiers. But of course, this was by no means the end of resistance to immunization science. And today, as we try desperately to get the Covid-19 pandemic under control in order to preserve lives and salvage our economies, it’s more important than ever to understand the history of anti-immunization rhetoric in order to refute its current iterations and encourage widespread vaccination.

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As some of you may recall, I touched on historical anti-vaccination claims before, in an episode about Alfred Russel Wallace, whose contribution to anti-vaccinationist rhetoric will be discussed here again, but there is far more to the topic, and I’ve long wanted to talk about it. Now, with the push to vaccinate here in America and the corresponding push against vaccination by the practice’s critics, it seems like the best time to talk about this. When considering vaccination coverage generally, the fact that it remains very high in America, with about 95% of children receiving the doses of vaccines recommended, indicates that resistance to vaccination is not as widespread as one may think. Anti-vaxxers would like us to think that they are a massive movement, and with the amount of news coverage they get, one might assume they are. However, recent efforts by Facebook to curb anti-vaccination misinformation have uncovered that two thirds of all the anti-vax content on social media appears to come from only a dozen online sources, called the “Disinformation Dozen.” This does not mean that such misinformation should be allowed to spread unchecked, though, and when it comes to the Covid vaccine, this science denial becomes even more dangerous. Many adults, even those who are susceptible to anti-vaccine pseudoscience and conspiracy theory, still get their children vaccinated because of the vaccination requirements of schools, and beyond this, they only espouse anti-vaccination claims in an abstract way, the same way they’ll share conjecture that 9/11 was an inside job, or that JFK’s murder was actually the result of a shadowy government conspiracy. “You know what I heard…” they’ll tell friends over beers, but the idea never affects their behavior beyond their yearly decision of whether or not to get a flu shot, because they had all their vaccinations as a child. But the Covid vaccine is new, admittedly rushed, and must be administered to adults, who are far more susceptible to severe cases of Covid-19 than children, in order for us to reach herd immunity. So now these adults who fancy themselves “free-thinkers” and already have the seeds of anti-vax misinformation in their minds are making the decision not to be vaccinated. Even if they are not swayed by the absurd fringe claims that Bill Gates is putting microchips in us through the vaccine, or that, as Congress’s resident lunatic Marjorie Taylor Greene has asserted, Covid-19 vaccination records are the Mark of the Beast prophesied in Revelation, they remain hesitant due to distrust of the pharmaceutical industry or the government, or because of an imperfect understanding of the science behind this vaccine and vaccination in general. Before I was vaccinated, a family member told me that I didn’t need to get the shot because people were reaching herd immunity against Covid-19, which of course is false and fails to understand the basic fact that herd immunity to infectious diseases like Covid-19 is only achieved through widespread vaccination. So to start this history of anti-vaccinationism, we need to lay a foundation of basic understanding by discussing immunization science.

Rev. Cotton Mather’s house, scene of a failed bombing by someone who opposed Mather’s support of smallpox inoculation. Public Domain.

Most of the credit for the development of vaccination science goes to Edward Jenner, an English doctor who accepted the efficacy of inoculation, having been variolated himself as a child. In the 1790s, Jenner noticed that, in a given population suffering a smallpox outbreak, milkmaids seemed to rarely catch the disease. His hypothesis was that these milkmaids had developed immunity because of their exposure to cows that were infected with a similar disease, cowpox. More specifically, when these milkmaids came into physical contact with the cowpox pustules on udders, they were exposed to a pox that created only mild symptoms in humans and conferred immunity against the far more virulent and deadly smallpox. To understand how deadly and how virulent full-blown smallpox was, consider its symptoms. After a couple days of fever and body aches, a rash appeared inside the mouth and then spread over the entire body, becoming pustules, which might break, creating bloody sores. The most severe form had a fatality rate of up to 33%, with victims dying because of blood toxicity, infection, and blood loss. Those who survived typically suffered terrible scarring, sometimes over their entire body, and often blindness as well. In 18th century Europe, the death toll reached about 400,000 a year. After a year of Covid-19 that saw nearly 1 million deaths across Europe (and 1.3 million deaths across the Americas), this may seem tame, but with differences in population density, the comparison isn’t so simple. Suffice to say that the Speckled Monster was a violent, global scourge. Therefore, Jenner’s discovery was a medical miracle. He took pus from a cowpox pustule on the hand of a milkmaid and applied it to the arm of his gardener’s 9-year-old son using the variolation method, and months later, when he exposed the boy to smallpox several times, the boy never contracted the disease. Thus, the vaccine was born, named after the Latin word for cow, vaccus. Jenner wrote a book on the topic in 1798, and within five years, it had been translated into 5 languages and vaccination programs were underway in developed nations and colonies all over the world. There actually remains some mystery over whether early vaccinations were all derived from cowpox, as some early samples have been tested and shown to have been taken from a similar animal disease, horsepox. Regardless, the principle had been established, and through vaccination, the disease smallpox has been virtually eradicated. Because of this and how the science has been used to combat the spread of other diseases, the development of this immunization technique is considered the foremost medical breakthrough in the history of mankind.

At the time that Jenner developed the vaccine, the medical community’s understanding of how and why it worked was imperfect. After all, this was before the widespread acceptance of germ theory. Today, we know that vaccines work by activating the body’s immune system and relying on its memory. Amazingly, when it is exposed to the bacteria and viruses that cause disease, it is afterward able to remember certain features of them, like surface proteins, so that it will be better able to fight them off again in the future. This is called adaptive immunity. Vaccines have come a long way since the dangerous days of cutting open an arm and inserting infected pus into the wound, but the idea remains the same—the human body was better able to resist cowpox, and remembering features of that virus made it easier for the body to defeat the smallpox virus. Since then, vaccines became less dangerous, using weakened viruses or bacteria, or even rendering them incapable or replicating by killing them using formaldehyde or other chemicals. Some just introduced parts of a pathogen for the immune system to remember, or just toxins that a pathogen produces. Regardless, the central mechanism is the same. Think of antibody response as a bloodhound ready to track down and neutralize an intruder; the vaccine is just giving our bodies’ bloodhounds the scent to help them find and attack the invader. Now some of the Covid vaccines, the Pfizer and Moderna shots, use a brand-new method of exposing us to the viral proteins we want our immune system to remember: mRNA or messenger RNA. By injecting designer mRNA, our own body’s cells are directed to build the virus surface proteins that make Covid-19 so virulent. Therefore, no part of the virus is ever introduced into a vaccinated person’s system. Rather, cells are programmed to teach our immune systems how to battle the virus, should it ever enter our bodies. While this technology is new for vaccines against viruses, which may cause some vaccine-hesitance, it’s actually not as new as some believe. Scientists have been studying mRNA’s use in the creation of cells that mimic stem cells and in the development of a vaccine for cancer for more than 30 years, with hundreds of scientific papers published and dozens of longstanding clinical trials. So to suggest that this technology, which essentially programs the body’s immune response in the same way as traditional vaccines except through a different mechanism, was only developed in a rush during the last year, is inaccurate.

Dr. Jenner performing his first vaccination. Public Domain.

As the example of backlash against variolation efforts in colonial America shows, anti-vaccination sentiment is also not a new development and has been around since the dawn of immunization science. Many years after the development of Jenner’s smallpox vaccine, a variety of laws in 19th century England made vaccination compulsory. The Vaccination Act of 1840 outlawed the outmoded and far more dangerous technique of variolation and provided free vaccination to the poor, but by 1853, with vaccination rates not improving, a new act was passed making vaccination of infants required by law, with parents liable to be fined or imprisoned if they did not comply. This compulsory vaccination program was expanded by the Vaccination Act of 1867, which required all children under 14 to be vaccinated and began levying fines on doctors that failed to report families that resisted vaccination. In 1871, punitive measures against the poor who failed to comply included the confiscation of property and placement in a workhouse. It was in response to these draconian laws, which were actually pretty typical of laws governing the poor in the Victorian Age, that robust anti-vaccination activism emerged. As one might expect, a central complaint among these first organized anti-vaccinationists was the power of the state over personal liberty and its persecution of those who refused or were hesitant to be vaccinated. There were also, though, critics who complained that vaccination science was unproven, that it caused other diseases such as syphilis, or that disease actually emanated from decaying organic matter—the miasma theory of disease—and thus injecting oneself with what was essentially poison could not actually prevent disease. Rather, these “sanitarians” or “anti-contagionists” asserted that keeping city streets clean was the only way to prevent disease. Alternatively, there was again, as in Mather’s day, religious opposition on the grounds that immunization interfered in God’s plans, but with a new spin. 19th century critics like John Gibbs claimed that death by disease was foreordained. Therefore, if vaccination reduced death by smallpox, there would just be more death by consumption, whooping-cough, or measles, for divine providence could not be thwarted.

In 1867, John Gibbs’s cousin founded the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League, and throughout the 1870s, the cause became popular among the working class and the poor in provincial organizations. It was among these small northern town associations that the most extreme justifications for resistance were prominent, and it was among them that it became a movement of civil disobedience, with organized refusal to comply with the law resulting in some leaders of the movement being imprisoned for their beliefs. Meanwhile, among middle-class intellectuals in London, the London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination was organized. Among these was Lord Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer with Darwin of the scientific principle of Natural Selection, who like other vaccine critics took a more holistic view of health and likewise distrusted the growth of state power and medical authoritarianism. He also took a sanitarian view by attributing reductions in smallpox infection rates to general improvements in sanitation. Wallace further argued, much as some have about today’s Covid vaccines, that more study and experiment was necessary to prove the efficacy of the smallpox vaccine. At the time, Wallace was working with imperfect statistical evidence, and of course, the systematic tests he proposed have since been completed, and then some. Therefore, it’s hard to characterize Wallace, whose heroic refutation of flat-earthers I have previously discussed, as anti-scientific, even despite his obsession with seances and spiritualism. This demonstrates, though, that 19th century anti-vaccination rhetoric was not solely the domain of anti-intellectual denialists. Eventually, in 1896, all of these organizations combined into one National Anti-Vaccination League concentrated on parliamentary change. In 1898, they achieved victory when a new law was passed allowing abstention from vaccination on the grounds of “conscientious objection” (the first time the phrase was used before its later use in the context of the refusal of military service). However, by this time, vaccination had so reduced rates of smallpox infection that compulsion was no longer a necessity, making this victory more of a pacifying concession.

Wood engraving depicting fears over a compulsory vaccination act. By E.L. Sambourne, courtesy Wellcome Images (CC BY 4.0)

This would not be the end of anti-vaccination activism against compulsory smallpox vaccination, however. The formation of anti-vaccination leagues had spread to New England in the mid-1880s, and the compulsory vaccination of children being made a pre-requisite of enrollment in schools precipitated a surge of anti-vaccination rhetoric through the Progressive Era of the 20th century. Much of the resistance originated at first from farming families, who complained that the transient fevers that often resulted from vaccination kept their kids out of the fields and prevented them from bringing in the crop before the beginning of the school year. Some religious opposition was present here as well, though from a somewhat unorthodox source. I am referring to the Swedenborgian Church, which believes in the unusual mystical prophecies of Emanuel Swedenborg, who claimed to have had transportive visions that allowed him to talk with angels and demons. Swedenborg claimed the Last Judgment began in the mid-18th century, and that the Second Coming of Christ had actually happened, through the revelation of his own teachings. In 1906, the Swedenborgian Church in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, or the General Church of New Jerusalem, resisted vaccination against smallpox during an outbreak because of their devotion to homeopathic medicine, and from among the members of this church emerged John Pitcairn, anti-vaccination giant and founder of the Anti-Vaccination League of America. However, the majority of the opposition to compulsory vaccination in early 20th century America came from parents who believed their children had been injured by a vaccine. In 1914, a New York state Republican committee delegate named James Loyster lost his son to infantile paralysis. As it happened three weeks after a vaccination, he came to believe that it had been caused by the vaccination—the old post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy. This prompted him to undertake a crusade against vaccination. He surveyed many residents of upstate New York, and he believed that he had discovered some fifty cases of injury and death caused by vaccination, which he argued far outweighed the mere three deaths by smallpox during the same period, apparently never considering that the smallpox death rate had become so small precisely because of vaccination. Among the bereaved parents who lobbied against compulsory vaccination was one illustrator whose daughter, some time after vaccination, had become paralyzed and died due to a heart defect. The limp-limbed ragdoll this illustrator designed, Raggedy Ann, which he said reminded him of his late daughter, would many years later become something of a symbol for anti-vaccinationists. James Loyster took the anecdotes he had gathered from people like the Raggedy Ann doll creator, and he made pamphlets, which he distributed to New York legislators. Eventually, he succeeded in getting the state’s compulsory vaccination law altered. The Jones-Tallett amendment rescinded the requirement in rural areas and towns with populations of less than fifty thousand, except in cases of an outbreak, when compulsory vaccination could be enforced once again. However, Loyster rejected the law, seeing it as a defeat, since in cities of more than fifty thousand, the amendment actually expanded vaccination requirements.

As with anti-vaccinationism in 19th-century England, it’s clear that it would be unfair to characterize the philosophy of compulsory vaccination objectors as uniform. Beyond objections to the temporary loss of child labor or because of perceived dangers, there was objection to the laboratory experimentation on animals that took place to develop vaccines. These vaccine critics were early animal rights activists called anti-vivisectionists, who protested, as the name implies, surgical experimentation on live animals. Though they may seem like odd bedfellows with animal rights activists today, there was also a strain of libertarian ideology present among anti-vaccinationists. The two sons of John Pitcairn, the Swedenborgian founder of the Anti-Vaccination League of America, inherited the organization and likewise were leaders in the movement, and they also funded the Sentinels of the Republic, a conservative political organization that opposed federal overreach and socialism in any form, rejecting any social reforms of the day, including New Deal legislation, limitations on child labor, and even the establishment of the Department of Education. Among many anti-vaxxers of the Progressive Era, a government that compelled citizens to do anything, even for reasons of public health, looked a lot like Bolshevism. Then there were those who saw it as a matter of personal liberty, believing their control over the kind of medical care they received to be as sacrosanct as the freedom of religion. Among these were religious groups like the Swedenborgians, whose doctrines included a philosophy on health. Christian Scientists emerged as a similar group. They believed that illness was not actually physical and could best be overcome by appealing for recovery through prayer. The group was widely criticized around the turn of the century after some cases of children dying because they had only been “treated” by practitioners of Christian Science rather than by actual doctors. Charges were made that followers of Christian Science were unlawfully presenting themselves as medical practitioners, and this was another common thread among anti-vaccinationists. There were a variety of alternative medicine movements that positioned themselves in opposition to vaccination. Naturopathy was one, with its emphasis on natural therapeutics. Physical Culture was a movement emphasizing natural foods, exercise, and fresh air that also engaged in germ theory denialism, contending that disease resulted only from unclean living and poor fitness. Then there was chiropracty… that’s right, chiropractors. Now don’t get me wrong. I have benefitted from spinal adjustments myself, or at least I believe I have, but chiropracty started as a form of absolute quackery. True believer chiropractors claimed that people only became ill because of spinal misalignment, which disrupted the body’s flow of energy. One can almost hear a low voice out of the past moaning: woo… woooo….

Anti-compulsory vaccination rally, 1919. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons User Cavernia (CC BY 2.0)

In the 1930s, anti-vaccinationism in America declined. First, a series of Supreme Court decisions found that compulsory vaccination laws were perfectly constitutional, and then the figures who had spearheaded major anti-vaccinationist organizations passed away. By the end of the 1970s, smallpox had been eradicated because of vaccination, and numerous other diseases, including measles, diphtheria, pertussis, and polio are now kept under control, also through immunization. Modern anti-vaccinationism didn’t really show up until 1998, when a British physician named Andrew Wakefield published a paper in The Lancet in their Early Report feature titled “Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children.” The paper speculated that the vaccine for the measles, mumps, and rubella, or MMR, might cause gastrointestinal inflammation, which in turn could be the cause of autism, a development disorder diagnosis that had become and continues to be more and more common in children. When it came out that Wakefield had falsified data and acted unethically in subjecting children to unnecessary spinal taps, his paper was retracted, he was disgraced, and his license to practice medicine revoked. Nevertheless, it has become a common claim among anti-vaccinationists today that vaccines cause autism. Wakefield has since made a pseudoscience career for himself by further fanning the flames of this disinformation, claiming that children who receive too many vaccines too quickly or receive them while unwell or on other medication are susceptible to being turned autistic. Other claims have to do with the presence of thimerosal in vaccines, used as a preservative, because it contained mercury, which is a known neurotoxin. Everyone seems to know that mercury was used by milliners in hat making, and that it drove them insane, thus the term “mad as a hatter.” However, the thimerosal in vaccines used ethyl mercury, which does not cross the blood-brain barrier like its counterpart, methyl mercury does, so this concern was groundless, and regardless, the chemical was removed from vaccines by the CDC in 2001 simply to pacify anti-vaxxers. While it’s true that we don’t really know why autism incidence has risen so dramatically since the 1970s, the fact that we can now more clearly recognize and more accurately screen for signs of being on the autism spectrum might account for the much of the increase in diagnoses. The fact is that no vaccine-autism connection has ever been found despite numerous scientific studies being conducted specifically to determine whether one exists. Studies that found zero association between the MMR vaccine and autism have been published in the scholarly journal Pediatrics, the similarly titled Journal of Pedatrics, The Lancet, the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and the New England Journal of Medicine, to name a few. But anti-vaxxers don’t let a little thing like empirical evidence get in the way of their convictions.

Again, though, as in the past, modern anti-vaccinationists do not all approach the subject with the same philosophy and motivation. Objections predicated on religious doctrine remain, though with some variations. As with those who long ago objected to interfering with Providence, some anti-vaxxers, like Suzanne Humphries of the International Medical Council on Vaccination, will say that the pharmaceutical industry has set itself up to replace God, striking fear into humanity that they will be struck down by pestilence if they do not accept this peculiar communion in a syringe. Then there is the streak of environmentalism among anti-vaxxers, among hippies who object to the animal products in them or to what they deem to be toxic chemical ingredients, even though any chemical component that might be harmful in larger amounts exists in vaccines only in such a negligible quantity that the body can easily eliminate it. Environmentalist objection to vaccines sometimes blends with religious objection, arguing that the body’s natural defenses are better equipped to fight disease without technological aid because that is how God designed it in His infinite wisdom. The view that the fight against vaccination is a fight for personal liberty remains, but it has blended in an interesting way with feminism. Specifically, Second Wave Feminism introduced the idea that medical paternalism was a key element of the patriarchy, and that women must fight to reclaim control of their healthcare from the male-dominated medical industry. This view that women know their bodies best translated into anti-vaccination rhetoric in the form of mothers insisting that their maternal instincts were far more trustworthy than professional medical advice. This notion of the superiority of personal instincts over expert opinion would not be reserved only for women or mothers, though. Since the 1970s, while second-wave feminism was encouraging women to wrest away the reins of their healthcare from the patriarchy, the notion of respect for patient autonomy was spreading as a core principle of medical ethics. This was in response to some terrible ethical violations, some of which were indeed perpetrated by vaccine researchers who tested their vaccines on children with developmental disabilities. With the advent of the Internet, patient autonomy took on new meaning, for suddenly patients could easily self-diagnose, and doctors, who depended on positive online reviews and satisfaction scores to run a successful practice and maintain Medicare reimbursement, were under pressure to give patients what they wanted. Add to this the spread of misinformation online, and you have a recipe for quackery and anti-intellectualism. All of these undercurrents can be observed in the remarks of minor celebrity and prominent anti-vaccinationist Jenny McCarthy during her television appearance on Oprah. “The University of Google is where I got my degree,” she explained in defense of her claims that her son Evan became autistic because of a vaccine, adding, “my science is named Evan, and he’s at home. That’s my science.” When pushed to clarify how she could be so certain, she credited her own “mommy instinct” for letting her “know what’s going on in his body.”

Father of modern anti-vaccinationism Andrew Wakefield, doubling down. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Bladość (CC BY 4.0)

But clearly the most common thread in all anti-vaccination rhetoric is the belief that vaccines cause harm or injury, especially to children. The fact is, though the risk of harm from vaccines may be minimal today, there have historically been cases of serious damage done by vaccines. As mentioned, the early practice of variolation was almost barbarous by comparison with vaccination, involving crude purposeful infection that often still resulted in death. Then after Jenner’s breakthrough using material from people infected with cowpox, it turned out that the donors of infected material sometimes were also infected with other diseases that were then passed right along to the person being vaccinated. There were cases in which numerous children caught syphilis and died because of this cross contamination through vaccination. Even in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when vaccination had become more sterile, episodes still occurred with bacteria-contaminated needles or vaccination solutions that were contaminated with other diseases. In the 1950s, when Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine went to market through numerous pharmaceutical companies, one incident saw batches shipped with live instead of dead viruses, resulting in a manmade polio outbreak that saw 200 people paralyzed and ten killed, many of them children. But these were contained events, which were discovered and corrected. Much anti-vaccination rhetoric, as with most science denialism, relies on baseless conspiracy theory, claiming that the government and the pharmaceutical industry collude to cover up the harms of vaccines in order to make money. However, the simple fact that harms have been identified, admitted, and addressed disproves this. The fact that vaccine manufacturers are shielded from liability by legislation certainly contributes to this conspiracy theory. For example, in America, when Republican President Ronald Reagan signed a law creating the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, he set up a mechanism for reviewing claims of vaccine harm and compensating plaintiffs that demonstrate some probability that an injury was suffered due to vaccination. This program encourages manufacturers to continue making vaccines by removing the threat of lawsuits. Some might argue that this means manufacturers no longer need to worry about safety, but this is not accurate, as there is tremendous government oversight of vaccine safety. The CDC and FDA have their Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, to which anyone can contribute reports, and the CDC has their own separate program as well, the Vaccine Safety Datalink, which collects safety data directly from health care providers. As for the big government conspiracy theorists’ claims that all of these government agencies are in on it, the fact is that vaccination requirements are decided by local and state governments, not some shadowy federal monolith. While it’s true that vaccination recommendations are passed from these federal agencies, these recommendations are made by technical advisory groups that hold meetings that are open to the public. As usual, conspiracy theories like these break down under simple, clear logic.

The victory of immunization science over diseases has always been relative. While variolation against smallpox carried a 1-2% chance of death, this is vastly preferable to the 10-33% chance of death from smallpox. The idea has always been that the benefits justify the risks. The risks today are minimal, but they are still present. For example, the MMR vaccine comes with some small risk of febrile seizure, but then again, these convulsions also occur naturally in a small percentage of children, are typically short and mostly harmless, and vaccines can in some cases prevent febrile seizures by protecting against diseases that cause them. To be considered medically vital, we only need to determine that the potential benefits of vaccination outweigh the risk of side effects, and that can easily be demonstrated by the elimination of smallpox and polio by vaccination, as well as the initial elimination of measles before flagging vaccination rates allowed for its recent resurgence. This resurgence of measles also demonstrates that this decision of whether benefits outweigh risks is not a matter of individual preference. Vaccination against infectious disease is a matter of public health that requires collective action. This is the case for compulsory vaccination. Many today don’t understand the concept of herd immunity. It was touted last year as a kind of laissez-faire solution to the Covid-19 pandemic, as if it would be over with more quickly if we all ran out and purposely infected ourselves like one big chicken pox party. The fact is that herd immunity is only achieved through mass vaccination. The more people are immune to a disease, the less it will spread, which confers safety even on those who aren’t immune, but the rates of immunity required to achieve herd immunity vary depending on how contagious the disease might be. For the flu, a vaccination rate of 50-75% of the population confers herd immunity, but for measles, 83-94% immunity is needed, and for whooping-cough, 92-94% immunity must be achieved. Numbers like that don’t tend to occur without mass vaccination. We may not yet know what percentage of the populace that must be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity against Covid-19, but considering how contagious it is, we should assume that we will need something like 94% of the populace to be immunized. So if you are considering not getting vaccinated, or if you know someone who is hesitant, urge them, convince them, explain to them that we need to take action. If they are leery of the mRNA technology in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, encourage them to get the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which instead uses a disabled adenovirus that contains some genetic material from the novel coronavirus in order to instruct the immune system on how to combat it. If they are disappointed that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine only has a 66% efficacy, let them know that this is likely just an aberration based on the fact that the clinical trials were held during the pandemic’s surge, and remind them that many flu vaccines also have a 60% efficacy but remain effective. We have a chance to take some control over this virus and to seize some form of normalcy that may pave the way for an economic recovery, but we all have to trust science and do our part. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again.

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Until next time … remember… there’s denialism and then there’s post-denialism. True denialism disguises itself as logical and even scholarly, and because of that is very insidious. If it is not countered, it evolves to become post-denialism, the obtuse, purposeful opposition to reason that requires no evidence, just the desire to undermine. It’s the difference between a pseudo-academic denialist manifesto and a tweet that just says Covid-19 is a hoax. We must address the first to in order to prevent the second.

Further Reading

Colgrove, James. “‘Science in a Democracy’: The Contested Status of Vaccination in the Progressive Era and the 1920s.” Isis, vol. 96, no. 2, 2005, pp. 167–191. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/431531.

Garde, Damien. “The story of mRNA: How a once-dismissed idea became a leading technology in the Covid vaccine race.” STAT, 10 Nov. 2020, www.statnews.com/2020/11/10/the-story-of-mrna-how-a-once-dismissed-idea-became-a-leading-technology-in-the-covid-vaccine-race/.

"New clues on the historical origin of the vaccine used to eradicate smallpox." ScienceDaily, 11 October 2017, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171011180558.htm.

Porter, Dorothy, and Roy Porter. “The Politics of Prevention: Anti-Vaccinationism and Public Health in Nineteenth-Century England.” Medical History, vol. 32, no. 3, 1988, pp. 231-252. National Center for Biotechnology Information, doi: 10.1017/s0025727300048225.

Rothstein, Aaron. “Vaccines and Their Critics, Then and Now.” The New Atlantis, no. 44, 2015, pp. 3–27. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43551422.

Weston, Kathryn M. “Killing the Speckled Monster: Riots, Resistance, and Reward in the Story of Smallpox Vaccination.” Health and History, vol. 18, no. 2, 2016, pp. 138–144. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5401/healthhist.18.2.0138.

The Story of Chevalier d'Eon and the Inadequacy of the Historical Analysis of Transgender Identity

In the 1890s, German medical doctor Magnus Hirschfield noticed a disturbing trend among his homosexual patients. Many of them attempted suicide, and many more bore scars from suicide attempts. When one young military man left behind a suicide note urging Dr. Hirschfield to “contribute a future when the German fatherland will think of us in more just terms,” Hirschfield embarked upon his life’s work of advancing sexual science and devoting himself to sexual rights activism. He founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in 1897 to defend gay rights and work against societal hostility toward homosexuals. Around 1904, Hirschfield was called to consult on the case of a suicidal man who had been hospitalized after an electrical accident. This turned out to be one Martha Baer, who had been raised as a woman but had chosen to express himself as a man and go by the name Karl. Karl Baer was not a female-to-male transgender person as we would recognize one today. In fact, he had been born biologically male, but due to the relatively common birth defect known as hypospadias, in which the urethral opening forms somewhere other than the tip of the penis, his sex was misidentified. Raised as a girl, this erroneous gender assignment caused him especially great distress after puberty, when he began to grow body and facial hair. His sexual attraction toward women led him to identify as a lesbian, and eventually to identify as a man. Dr. Hirschfield diagnosed Karl Baer’s gender misidentification based on biology, performed corrective surgery, and helped Baer obtain official gender reassignment in the eyes of the law. While this surgery was essentially a hypospadias repair, it is viewed by many as the first gender reassignment surgery, and certainly Dr. Hirschfield went on to advance social and medical knowledge of intersex individuals as well as cases of what he would call transvestism and transsexuality. At his Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin, Hirschfield provided counseling and treatment for a wide variety of people struggling with their sexualities and gender identities. While he still often viewed transgender individuals as suffering from a physical or psychological disorder, he pushed for reform and understanding and was in many ways ahead of his time. Unsurprisingly, his work was not popular with the Nazis, who shut down his institute in 1933. While in exile in Paris, at a cinema, Magnus Hirschfield had the distinct displeasure of watching a newsreel in which fascists plundered his institute and burned his life’s work. Today, many conservative and religious ideologues justify their intolerance of and opposition to transgender rights by claiming that it is a modern phenomenon, a symptom of liberal decadence, but in truth there is nothing new about transgender identity, just as there is nothing new about blaming changing gender notions on societal decadence. But in many cases, as in the case of Hirschfield’s institute, this history has been erased by the intolerant.

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This post started out as another survey, this time listing and discussing all the transgender figures in history in an effort to demonstrate the ubiquity of the phenomenon throughout history. I envisioned it as a refutation of the critics who try to assert that this is a new phenomenon. However, what I found is that this is a difficult task. No doubt, it is an easy thing to turn up lists of historical figures who have been embraced as forerunners by the transgender community. But I feel compelled to dig deeper and consider some further points. First, we would today recognize an entire spectrum of subsets within the term “transgender.” Dr. Hirschfield rightly recognized transvestites, or “cross-dressers” –people who were comfortable with their biological sex but enjoyed dressing in clothes typically reserved for the opposite sex—as separate from transexuals, or those who longed to live entirely as a member of the sex they were not assigned at birth, or even to surgically alter their biological sex in order to more fully realize this desire. Our modern terminology did not arrive until the 1960s, when psychiatrist Robert Stoller began using terms like “gender identity” and “gender assignment.” The term “transgender” wasn’t coined until 1970 by activist Virginia Prince and was originally used to denote heterosexual transvestites. Today, the term is used more generally as an umbrella term, including those who identify genderfluid and non-binary or genderqueer. We now recognize sex assigned at birth and gender identity as just two elements in a larger spectrum of personal identity, which also includes gender expression, and sexual orientation, which itself can be further broken down into physical attraction versus emotional attraction. This evolution of our terminology and understanding of personal identity is what complicates our ability to identify trans figures in history. If we use it as an umbrella term, then it’s more simple. Any persons in history whose outward gender expression is recorded as being at variance with their birth-assigned sex can comfortably be labeled transgender. However, the critics of trans rights typically aren’t denying the presence in history of figures known to have dressed in the clothing their society reserved for the opposite sex. So it would seem some further differentiation and categorization is needed to refute those who desire to erase trans people from history. For example, everyone is familiar with the legends of Joan of Arc and Mulan, women who dressed as men in order to fight as soldiers. Few would argue that they are transgender figures, a fact that clearly indicates how important motivation is to making such an identification. The fact is that it is very difficult to discern what motivated gender transgressive behavior by historical figures, especially past a certain point in time, when polite society dictated that people should not speak or write about such matters. Thus we are left with only inferences and educated guesses. For example, there were many women who dressed as men in order to fight in the American Civil War, but one in particular, Albert Cashier, might be differentiated from the others and from figures like Mulan and Joan of Arc as well, for he chose to live as a man for more than fifty years, long after the conclusion of the war.

19th century depiction of Elagabalus in priestly vestments. Public Domain.

So to discern whether a given figure may reasonably be raised as an example of a transgender individual, we must scour the historical record for evidence of their motivations for gender transgressive behaviors like transvestism or for some indications of their feelings about their gender identities. Another problem that a historian faces in attempting this is the reliability of the primary sources that may give us such evidence. A perfect example of this difficulty is Varius Avitus Bassianus, who in 218 CE, amid a rebellion against Roman Emperor Macrinus, was raised up as a figurehead emperor at just 14 years old, taking the name Elagabalus. As the story is told, this emperor, assigned male at birth, alienated the aristocracy by dressing in clothing considered suitable only for women, by painting his face and wearing jewelry in an effeminate manner. It is even asserted that he wanted to be addressed as a woman, stating, “Call me not Lord, for I am a Lady,” and promised generous rewards for any physician who could surgically alter his genitals to be like those of a woman. This certainly sounds like a clear example of not just an ancient historical figure who identified as being of a gender opposite to the one assigned him at birth, but also of a trans person seeking gender reassignment surgery long before any such procedures had ever been invented. In my view, this is a strong argument for the presence of trans people throughout human history. The problem for the conscientious historian, however, is that the three primary sources from which all of this information about Elagabalus is gleaned, the works of Cassius Dio, Herodian, and his biography in the Roman collection of biographies, Historia Augusta, are all manifestly hostile toward Elagabalus, written by contemporaries who had been alienated, like so many others in his realm, by Elagabalus’s religious practices. So unhappy were the Roman elite with young Elagabalus as a figurehead that they ended up having him murdered within a few years of installing him, and his biographers in some passages include manifestly fictitious accounts of his outrages. As such, the accounts of this Roman Emperor’s gender transgressions may or may not be true.

Long before the terms “transexual” or “transgender,” the Age of Enlightenment gave the western world the term “Eonism” to describe such transgression of gender norms. The origin of this term, a remarkable person named Chevalier d’Eon, serves as the perfect example of both the presence of transgender figures in our historical past as well as the inadequacy of the historical record in helping us determine with any certainty the true feelings of historical trans figures regarding their gender identities. As such, the remainder of this episode will be devoted to this unusual and fascinating individual. Born Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d'Éon de Beaumont to a noble but not a wealthy family in 1728, he lived his life as a young man, and thus I will refer to him using the masculine pronoun for now, for clarity’s sake. A gifted scholar, he graduated as a student of civil and canon law at 21 years old, in 1749, and embarked on a political career as a secretary to a series of administrators before being appointed a royal censor. In this role, he read literature and history extensively, but rather than working to ban books, he appears to have spent his time acquainting himself with the most current Enlightenment thinkers. He began to develop political philosophies of his own, which tended toward the idea of benevolent despotism, that absolute monarchs were the ideal agents of progressive reform, taking power away from the aristocracy and the church and imposing policies inspired by Enlightenment principles. With such an ideology, it’s no surprise that he sought to serve the purposes of King Louis XV by entering the diplomatic corps and working with the French Ambassador to Russia for a few years. Despite being of slight build and a “pretty boy,” as some described him, he thereafter entered military service during the Seven Years’ War between Britain and France, serving as dragoon and sustaining an injury. He was afterward sent to London, appointed secretary to the ambassador negotiating the Treaty of Paris that would end the Seven Years’ War. For his service in drafting this treaty, he would be awarded a knighthood, earning the title Chevalier. Throughout his military career and during his years living in London, despite his slender frame and somewhat effeminate beauty, d’Eon earned himself a reputation as a manly fellow. He always went about in his dragoon’s uniform, always proudly defended his own reputation and honor, and eagerly escalated personal conflicts by frequently challenging other men to duels, as though to prove his own manhood. This aspect of his character is especially interesting considering what would later be revealed.

Chevalier D'Éon, as a younger man. Mezzotint by Vispré. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Outwardly, Chevalier d’Eon was a rousing success in London. After the signing of the Treaty of Paris, d’Eon returned to London to take charge of diplomatic affairs between the two nations, being promoted to the position of plenipotentiary minister during an interim period when the previous ambassador had returned to Paris and a replacement had yet to be appointed. Chevalier d’Eon was a fixture of King George III’s court and made numerous social connections among the English nobility. He was living a life of luxury, rubbing elbows with the wealthy and powerful. But then the rug was pulled out from under him. A new ambassador arrived, the Comte de Guerchy, whom d’Eon thought of as inferior in intellect. D’Eon was knocked back down to the role of secretary, a regression that caused d’Eon keen humiliation. Brazenly, d’Eon refused to step down from his post, and the newspaper coverage of d’Eon’s defiance was widely read because of just how entertaining it was. When pestered by an agent of Geurchy, the newly appointed ambassador, d’Eon refused to grant him an audience because he was not highborn and challenged him to a duel when the agent persisted. This set off a pamphlet war, with Guerchy denouncing d’Eon’s refusal to step down and d’Eon, explosively, claiming that Guerchy had tried to drug him, kidnap him, and have him murdered. Indeed, d’Eon even pressed charges against Guerchy for attempting to have him assassinated, a legal action which Guerchy tried unsuccessfully to have nullified. Amid this feud, Chevalier d’Eon published Guerchy’s private correspondence, seemingly to embarrass him. In retaliation, Guerchy had d’Eon charged with libel in France, where of course d’Eon refused to return, thereby making d’Eon an outlaw in his home country. In England, however, d’Eon still enjoyed wide support. King George III refused his extradition, and the public, reading about d’Eon’s stand against his king in newspapers that portrayed his struggle sympathetically, began to view him as a hero of the people, pushing back against royal abuses of power. He was compared with Britain’s own John Wilkes, a radical journalist who around the same time had made enemies of king and prime minister alike and had likewise been transformed into an outlaw who enjoyed popular support. But there was more to all of this than the public was aware. Chevalier d’Eon’s publication of private papers was, unbeknownst to all, a powerful message to King Louis XV. It was, in fact, an overt threat, for Chevalier d’Eon kept a volatile secret that the King of France could not afford to see revealed.

We know now that, even before his work as a secretary to the Ambassador to St. Petersburg, a young Chevalier d’Eon had been enlisted into King Louis XV’s espionage service, “Le Secret du Roi,” or the King’s Secret. In general, this spy organization within the diplomatic corps was tasked with gathering foreign intelligence and working for the king’s purposes even when they were at cross-purposes with the goals his diplomats were publicly trying to reach. For example, while in Russia, d’Eon had been working on some schemes in Poland. Outwardly, Louis supported Polish independence, but through his agents in the King’s Secret, he was endeavoring to install his cousin on the Polish throne. In England, Louis’s secret agenda was even more devious. While Chevalier d’Eon and the Ambassador drafted the Treaty of Paris to end hostilities between France and Britain, King Louis had his agents making inroads with and bribing politicians, with the end goal of launching an invasion. Chevalier d’Eon had actually been placed into an even better position to work toward Louis’s goals when he had been made plenipotentiary minister, and as such had been spending a great deal of money in his efforts to forge relationships that he could leverage. It has been suggested that one reason d’Eon was replaced was that he was spending too much money, and likewise that this was the reason he refused to step down, because he had become too accustomed to his lifestyle. Whatever the case, when he defied King Louis, he knew that his knowledge of the King’s machinations might work to his benefit, and his publication of private correspondence was a shot across the bow, warning that he was all too willing to betray confidences. King Louis could not afford for his plan to invade Britain to be revealed, as it would precipitate war before the French were prepared to renew hostilities. However, as time went on and d’Eon failed to preserve his title, his pension, and his reputation through implied threat and negotiation, his leverage began to lose its power. During the early 1770s, the rumblings of colonial rebellion in America weakened d’Eon’s position, for Britain already began to suspect that France might use the opportunity, while Britain was embroiled in a war with her own colonies, to break the treaty and make war on them again. However, by that point in d’Eon’s years long negotiation with Louis XV, there was another secret of d’Eon’s in play, one that had been revealed and would have far greater consequences for his reputation.

Chevalier d’Eon as an older man. Public Domain.

In 1770, rumors began to circulate among the British that, despite his masculine comportment, the slight and comely Chevalier d’Eon was actually a woman. Some began to portray him a heroine who became a man solely to serve her country, first in the military and thereafter in politics, like a modern Joan of Arc, or to use a more recent and British example, like Hannah Snell, who had donned men’s clothing to travel in search of the husband who had abandoned her and ended up serving as a foot soldier fighting against the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. Most, though, doubted the rumor entirely, and the matter became the subject of much wagering in London, resulting in a pool being started at the actual London Stock Exchange. Interestingly, Chevalier d’Eon refused to confirm or deny the rumor and would not submit to a physical examination that would put the matter to rest, stating that it would be a great dishonor. When King Louis XV died in 1774. D’Eon renewed his negotiations with Louis XVI, seeking to maintain his title and pension and finally return to France. Due to the shrewd negotiations of playwright Pierre de Beaumarchais, who was working on the King’s behalf, the question of Chevalier d’Eon’s sex was made central to the matter. In a courtroom setting, witnesses swore that they had seen d’Eon in the nude, affirming that he was in fact biologically a woman. Using these testimonies to convince Louis XVI that d’Eon was a woman, Beaumarchais hammered out a deal. If d’Eon wanted to resolve the matter and return to France, he must adopt female dress and habits and agree to live the rest of his days as the woman he was. If he did so, he could keep his pension, but he would be stripped of his title of plenipotentiary minister because a woman could not hold such a position. To the surprise of many, d’Eon accepted, returned to France and lived as a woman the rest of her days, some 33 years. She was legally recognized as a biological woman, and she lived for many of those years as a sort of celebrity. She participated in fencing tournaments and was thought of as a kind of warrior lady, like the legendary Amazons. Thus it was a great shock when, after her death in 1810, a post-mortem examination revealed that she possessed “male organs in every respect perfectly formed.”

It is unsurprising that Chevalier—or as she would be known by the feminine form of her title, Chevalière—d’Eon is featured prominently on most online lists of historical trans figures. She is remembered by many as a male-to-female transgender person who had the audacity and genius to come out in the 18th century by convincing the world that she had actually been a woman cross-dressing as a man and was now just discontinuing her transvestism to live as the sex assigned her at birth. In her 1779 ghostwritten memoir, The Military, Political, and Private Life of Mademoiselle d’Eon, it was explained as such: she had been raised as a boy by her father because he required a son in order to ensure an inheritance from his in-laws. However, d’Eon’s post-mortem proved that this was just a cover story, and some other observations of the physician who examined the Chevalière’s body, specifically that she was round of limb and curvaceous, with “breasts remarkably full,” have led some to suggest that she was in some way biologically intersex. However, historians typically take an opposing view that is equally understandable. They might suggest that whatever feminine aspects her body showed were a result of weight gain and the shaping that occurs from wearing women’s clothing, such as corsets. These academics use the male pronoun and look at the circumstances surrounding d’Eon’s transition to argue he was a hoaxer, asserting that his adoption of women’s garments was simply a means to resolve his conflict with the French crown and negotiate his return home, or that it was not even his idea and he was forced by the playwright and negotiator for the crown, Beaucharnais, to humiliate himself by adopting women’s attire in order to return from exile. They will point to the fact that he never showed a desire to dress as a woman before the conclusion of his negotiation, that he in fact preferred his military uniform, and that he even resisted the stipulation to dress as a woman for two years. In fact, d’Eon even challenged Beaucharnais’s partner, who claimed d’Eon had confided to him that he was a woman, to a duel, a challenge easily avoided by saying it was dishonorable to fight a woman. Then there are further reports from during the remainder d’Eon’s life that, although he dressed as a woman to comply with the terms of his repatriation, he refused to behave as one would expect a lady to behave, climbing into and out of carriages without aid, and remaining after dinner parties to socialize with the men when the women retired.

Portrait of Chevalier d’Eon in women’s clothing. Public Domain.

Nearly every academic point raised to claim Chevalière d’Eon was a mere impostor can be refuted pretty easily and logically, starting with the claim that she never wore women’s clothing before 1777. According to her own memoir, while traveling to Russia on a diplomatic mission he had dressed as a woman in order to evade the British, and while at the court of Empress Elizabeth of Russia, would have taken part in that monarch’s unusual weekly masquerades, which forced everyone to cross-dress and weren’t exactly masquerades in that no masks were to be worn. The notion that she did not wish to dress as a woman receives a further blow by evidence that d’Eon promptly purchased an entire set of lady’s garments as soon as it became clear that dressing as a woman would be a stipulation of the repatriation agreement. Furthermore, d’Eon’s early resistance to dressing as a woman after the agreement was signed, as well as the challenging of Beaumarchais’s partner to a duel, likewise have an alternative explanation. It turned out that, in making d’Eon’s gender identity a part of the negotiations, Beaucharnais and his partner were motivated by greed. Recall that the rumors of Chevalier d’Eon’s womanhood had sparked a great deal of wagering in London. It turns out that the odds favored d’Eon being a man, so Beaumarchais and his partner stood to win a lot of money if they bet d’Eon was a woman and then were able to legally prove it. And this is exactly what they did, producing witnesses willing to perjure themselves by stating they had seen or touched Chevalier d’Eon’s female genitals. So d’Eon’s early refusal to comply with the order to dress as a woman, as well as her anger and attempt to duel these men, was prompted by the fact that she discovered they had used her gender identity in a scheme to make money. However, there is every reason to suspect that the original rumor about d’Eon being a woman was started by d’Eon herself, and that it was she who suggested using the repatriation negotiation to make this gender identity official. Remember that at any time, d’Eon could have disabused everyone of this notion. And she had good reason to, as well, for maintaining her female gender identity ensured that she could not retain her plenipotentiary minister title. This was something that she had previously made central to her demands, so it stands to reason that living as a woman was worth more to her than maintaining her status. When Beaumarchais’s partner afterward tried to sue the bettors who refused to pay on their wagers and was obliged produce evidence of d’Eon’s womanhood in a court of law, he did so counting on the fact that d’Eon would not show up to present evidence to the contrary, which she did not. And finally, following the French Revolution and Louis XVI’s execution in 1793, d’Eon returned to London, and thus was no longer subject to the terms of her repatriation agreement, yet she continued to live as a woman until her death in 1810. Some will argue that she enjoyed her reputation as a heroic woman too much to give it up, and others suggest that reversing the transition would have been too great a dishonor, but the simplest explanation, which accords with all the events of her life previous to that, is that Chevalière d’Eon had always secretly wanted to live as a woman and had schemed in the 1770s to find a brilliant way to do so despite the gender norms of her society.

Even when the academic literature about Chevalière d’Eon concedes that she may have wanted her gender transition, it tends to search for some further explanation, as though unwilling to accept the simple and clear idea that she had always identified as a woman, even throughout her military career and her constant belligerent dueling. They point to d’Eon’s sexual orientation to suggest a homosexual lifestyle may have led to the gender transition. As evidence, they observe that there is no record of his being engaged in heterosexual affairs. In fact, he lived for years in London apparently having an affair with his married landlady, who during the repatriation negotiations swore that she regularly slept with d’Eon, had seen d’Eon naked, and knew d’Eon to be a woman, which was at least in part, or in some sense, a lie. Likewise during several of her later years, d’Eon lived with a widow. But regardless of these relationships, the fact is that Chevalière d’Eon’s sexual orientation proves nothing about her gender identity, a fact that seems to escape some historians. Still other academics look to gender norms and evolving notions of masculinity in Enlightenment Europe in an effort to “explain” her gender transition. They point to the “effeminacy” that had become more and more common among the upper-class male, especially courtiers like Chevalière d’Eon. This was, after all, the age of fops and Macaronis, who preferred dainty and embroidered hose and garter belts, and wore their wigs high with dangling curls in a style previously popular only among women. However, to suggest that d’Eon’s gender transition was a result of the 18th century feminization of men would be to ignore the fact that in most circles, even those in which d’Eon moved, “effeminate” was still considered an extremely offensive descriptor for men, an insult over which duels were commonly fought, and the “effeminacy” of courtiers was one of the greatest criticisms of decadent court life. But again, regardless of the accuracy of this argument, it misses the mark on an even more fundamental level. Searching for a cultural “cause” of d’Eon’s gender transition is a tacit denial that she might have identified as a woman her entire life, regardless of her social environment.

A sketch of Chevalière d’Eon as an older woman. Public Domain.

Another academic view of Chevalière d’Eon’s gender transition is that it was more of a philosophical or theological statement. Once again, these academics look to notions about gender roles that were then prominent in the zeitgeist for an “explanation” of her transition, and also to evidence of the literature that d’Eon kept in her library. They make much of the fact that Chevalière d’Eon owned one of the largest collections of querelle des femmes literature in the world. This proto-feminist literary genre attempted to refute the notion, common in that era, that women were a corrupting influence in royal courts and society in general, arguing instead that women were actually morally superior to men, and that men should imitate their virtuous ways. But again, with the knowledge of gender identity we have today, Chevalière d’Eon’s transition does not require some further explanation. Furthermore, it’s backward to suggest d’Eon’s feminist views caused her transition, when it seems far more likely that her feelings about her gender led her to seek out and collect literature that complemented her deepest convictions about herself. Academics who suggest her transition was a result of her theological principles make this same mistake, but at least they rely on her own words, from an unfinished autobiography. Later in life, Chevalière d’Eon found religion, specifically leaning toward Jansenist Christianity, about which I spoke a great deal in my series on miracles in Enlightenment France. In her autobiography, though, she revealed a theological reason for disregarding her gender entirely. According to her, the bodies God gives us are absolutely corrupt, a tenet with which many devout Christians would agree wholeheartedly. Chevalière d’Eon’s point is that sexuality and gender variance is meaningless to God and irrelevant to whether or not one achieves salvation. In the end, all physical differences, whether they be that of biological sex, or infirmity, or race, will vanish when in paradise we are reborn in glory. When historians look at this and suggest these beliefs might “explain” her gender transition, it boggles the mind. If anything, these views, which she seems to have developed long after her transition, served to comfort and reassure her that there was nothing morally wrong with the acceptance of her gender identity. In fact, rather than picking this theology of gender apart for some better understanding of a gender transition that should be simple to understand, I think it should be viewed as a remarkable interpretation of Christian doctrine that promotes tolerance—something that many Christians today should consider adopting.

Recently, the opponents of trans rights—or should I more accurately say the oppressors of trans people?—shifted the focus of their arguments. In the recent past, they have focused on transgender women posing a threat to cisgender women, portraying them as public restroom prowlers. More recently, Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling suggested that recognizing the rights of trans women somehow negates the rights of cisgender women. You may notice that much of this opposition is focused on male-to-female trans people, as it seems the gender identity of these individuals in particular upsets patriarchal notions of masculinity. But another thread in recent arguments against recognizing the struggles of trans people as legitimate focuses instead on the science of human biology. Nothing can be more ironic than Qanon conspiracy enthusiast congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene posting a sign outside her office that states “There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE. ‘Trust the Science!’” Of course, I recognize that the irony of her saying “trust the science” may not actually be lost on her, since she put the phrase in scare quotes, but I don’t trust that she has really worked out the problem with mockingly repeating a phrase while seemingly trying to be earnest with its use. Regardless, let’s close our discussion by talking a bit about science and transgender issues. Actually, science has come a long way since the days of Dr. Hirschfield’s institute. The fact is, science no longer tells us there are only 2 genders. One example is the 2018 article “Only Two Sex Forms but Multiple Gender Variants: How to Explain?” in the academic journal Communicative & Integrative Biology, in which the author concludes that “there are probably as many different gender variants as there are sexually reproducing individuals.” The error of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s argument, of course, comes from the erroneous conflation of sex and gender, but science no longer recognizes only two sexes either. This can be clearly discerned in the 2015 Nature article “Sex Redefined” which states that “[t]he idea of two sexes is simplistic. Biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that.”

But if we look at the history of scientific examination, and specifically psychological studies, of gender transitions that were conducted throughout the 1990s, we see some of the same problems that are present in the academic exploration of transgender history. One tested hypothesis was that boys who were “pretty” or deemed beautiful were treated more like girls and because of this treatment became transgender. Findings seemed to support this hypothesis, but the whole notion could be inverted, such that these “pretty boys” had actually changed their appearance to fit their gender identity, rather than changing their identity to match how others viewed them. Likewise, a similar study’s findings suggested girls who were seen as “ugly” were treated like boys and then identified as male, even though it appears those who later identified as male may have originally not been seen as pretty because they had cut their hair short to complement their burgeoning transgender identities. Researchers also tested the hypothesis that parents with depression or borderline personality disorder somehow turned their children trans, but again, the notion could be flipped to suggest that these parents actually suffered depression and BPD because of the mistreatment and struggles their transgender children were enduring. Then there was a study that sought to confirm that parents who allowed their kids to play with the wrong toys were somehow responsible for their children becoming transgender, when obviously the child’s desire to play with the toys deemed inappropriate to his or her gender was already present. What all these studies had in common was that psychologists and researchers viewed transgender identity as a mental illness, “gender identity disorder.” Because of this, they invariably approached their studies as experiments to determine the “problem.” This is exactly how historians often approach the study of transgender figures in history. If they are not trying to disprove entirely the notion that a historical person was transgender, as we understand it today, they seek to determine what might have “caused” the person to dress or act as a member of the opposite gender. They try to explain away their gender transgressions because historians are trained look more deeply, to avoid supposition, and to doubt the obvious. However, the story of Chevalière d’Eon shows us that, just as scientists struggled to measure and test transgender identity, so too historians often dismiss the apparent in their efforts to analyze it. It seems that academics would do well to remember that practicing critical thinking does not mean rejecting what is clear and evident.

A portrait capturing Chevalière d’Eon’s beauty. Public Domain.

Further Reading

Ainsworth, Claire. “Sex Redefined.” Nature, 18 Feb. 2015, www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943.

Clark, Anna. “The Chevalier D'Eon and Wilkes: Masculinity and Politics in the Eighteenth Century.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 32, no. 1, 1998, pp. 19–48. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30054266.

De Loof, Arnold. “Only Two Sex Forms but Multiple Gender Variants: How to Explain?” Communicative & Integrative Biology, vol. 11, no. 1, 2018. NCBI, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5824932/.

“The first Institute for Sexual Science (1919-1933).” Magnus-hirchfield.de, magnus-hirschfeld.de/ausstellungen/institute/.

Icks, Martijn. The Crimes of Elagabalus. I.B. Tauris, 2011.

Kates, Gary. “The Transgendered World of the Chevalier/Chevalière D'Eon.” The Journal of Modern History, vol. 67, no. 3, 1995, pp. 558–594. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2124220.

Lander, James. “A Tale of Two Hoaxes in Britain and France in 1775.” The Historical Journal, vol. 49, no. 4, 2006, pp. 995–1024. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4140148. Accessed 12 Mar. 2021.

Stevens, Heidi. “Marjorie Taylor Greene wants us to ‘trust the science’ on transgender rights. Here’s the science.” Chicago Tribune, 26 Feb. 2021, www.chicagotribune.com/columns/heidi-stevens/ct-heidi-stevens-marjorie-taylor-greene-transphobia-trust-science-0226-20210226-atqjgfqht5hzjl54qjbeu4hk24-story.html.

Turban, Jack. “The Disturbing History of Research into Transgender Identity.” Scientific American, 23 Oct. 2020, www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-disturbing-history-of-research-into-transgender-identity/.

Written in Stone: The Archaeological Frauds of Pre-Columbian Trans-Oceanic Contact Theories

One day in 1680, The Reverend John Danforth, a recent graduate of Harvard, was walking along the shoreline of Assonet Neck, just across the Taunton river from the town of Dighton, Massachusetts. The high tide had swelled the river, swallowing some rocks that stood sentry beside the waters, but one great reddish-brown sandstone boulder drew his eye, only half submerged in the tide. Upon closer inspection, Danforth saw strange markings on this rock. Were they letters? Glyphs of some sort? Fascinated, he made a drawing of what he saw. His was to be the first of many sketches, rubbings, and photographs of Dighton Rock, or as it would become known, the “Writing Rock,” and Danforth’s drawing only showed the uppermost of the markings. There were more beneath the rising waters. Ten years later, Cotton Mather, the Puritan minister who exerted such a strong influence on the Salem Witchcraft Trials, made the rock famous in his book, The Wonderful Works of God Commemorated. The natural assumption was that Native Americans, specifically the local Wampanoag, had inscribed the stone, but years later, after much staring at the strange markings, some began to suggest they were the product of other cultures and to argue that the “Writing Rock” stood as evidence of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact, and more specifically, in some theories, Semitic contact. The theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans had been around among the Spanish for more than a hundred years when the Dighton “Writing Rock” became famous, but as I discussed in the second part of my series on the Lost Tribes myth, it didn’t reach its height in the English-speaking world until about a hundred years after Mather wrote about the rock. It was then, in the 1760s, that we see Ezra Stiles, who would later become the President of Yale College, and Count  Antoine Court de Gebelin of the French Academy both expressing a view that the rock was inscribed with ancient Phoenician characters, suggesting that it was left by explorers from Carthage. From there, it was only a short leap to suggest it was actually written in Hebrew, since both Phoenician and paleo-Hebrew developed after the Bronze Age collapse to represent formerly indistinguishable languages, and thus bear marked similarities. In fact, Harvard scholar Samuel Harris Jr. asserted in 1807 that he had been able to translate specific Hebrew words on the Dighton Rock: “idol,” “king,” and “priest.” And this would not be the last inscribed stone found in the U.S. that supposedly bore Hebrew writing. You may be guessing already, though, based on what I said in the previous edition and just from knowing how this usually goes, that there is strong reason to consider nearly all of them to be frauds.

As Dighton Rock shows us, not all of the inscribed rocks used to support pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact theories can be dismissed as modern hoaxes. The Dighton Writing Rock was present in Massachusetts a little less than a hundred years after the beginning of English colonial settlement in America at Roanoke Island, and even then it appeared ancient to those who studied it. Dighton Rock also demonstrates that there were myriad other theories of pre-Columbian contact besides the theory of the Lost Tribes of Israel in America. In fact, not even all the theories of Semitic contact with the New World were the same. Some believed Native Americans were descended from Noah’s son Japheth rather than Shem, making them not “Semitic” as such, and not necessarily descended from the Lost Tribes. A Maryland schoolteacher names Ira Hill would suggest in 1831 that the writing on Dighton Rock had been left by an expedition of Jews from the time of King Solomon’s reign, making it again not a theory of Native American shared ancestry with the Lost Tribes. In 1837, Carl Christian Rafn, a Danish scholar, became convinced that the markings on Dighton Rock depicted the well-known story of Norse contact with the New World. This translation seems to have been disproven in 1916 by Brown University professor Edmund Dellabarre, who demonstrated that Rafn had doctored depictions of the markings to better support his view. Then Dellabarre himself declared that he could discern Latin on the rock, finding a year, 1511, and a name, Miguel Cortereal. This developed into the theory that a lost Portueguese expedition had left the markings. Today, Dighton Rock has been removed from the tidal waters and placed in a museum, where all the theories of its script are explained and accompanied by pictures showing how different elements of its inscriptions are emphasized by each. Is it Phoenician, Norse, Portuguese, or is it, simply Native American? When shown drawings of its markings, it’s said that George Washington laughed and said they were certainly just doodles made by American Indians, and that he had seen similar markings frequently on trees and believed them to be largely meaningless. Indeed, before hi Portuguese theory, Professor Edmund Dellabarre seems to have shared the opinion that they were meaningless, for after staring at it a long time, he declared, “After prolonged and close searching, I got so that I could find any given figure almost anywhere.” Thus he dismissed all the different interpretations of the markings as “psychic projection”… and ironically went on to insist he could read Latin on the stone clear as day. But perhaps that’s one of the reasons inscribed stones like these have exerted such an influence on the minds of so many, because we can see what we want to see in their vague markings. In the case of Dighton Rock, it certainly doesn’t help that some inscriptions on the stone appear to have been made at different times, engraved over existing markings, making it a kind of palimpsest of indecipherable figures and shapes… much like history itself after a great deal of study.

Dighton Rock, displayed with pictures emphasizing elements of its inscription interpreted to support different theories of its origin. Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0)

There was nothing quite so mysterious about the artifact found in the summer of 1815 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, only about 117 miles west-northwest of Dighton Rock. Innkeeper Joseph Merrick had purchased land that many years earlier had been a settlement of the Mohegan tribe, and that summer, he had hired a farmhand to clear the yard near his house. The plough the boy used to clear the debris turned up a black leather strap attached to a leather box, which  Merrick cut open. Inside, he found four pieces of yellowed parchment, which had been written on in a script he did not recognize. Thinking it of such an age as to possibly be worth something, Merrick says he invited people to see it, including some neighbors, who in their clamor to examine the items, “tore one of the pieces to atoms.” After that, he was more careful with them, showing them only to local ministers and men of high character, who almost all agreed that it was a phylactery, an object housing Hebrew texts traditionally strapped onto the arm or head by Jews during prayer. Most of these local clergymen agreed that it was of great antiquity and must certainly prove that the natives of the region were descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel. In order to obtain some support for this thesis, the phylactery was thereafter sent to a former student of the aforementioned Ezra Stiles in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and thereafter to the American Antiquarian society. However, nothing came of it, perhaps because it was not taken seriously. After all, even among the locals, there had been some doubt.

It seems the most knowledgeable of the local ministers who first examined the Pittsfield phylactery did not believe it was ancient. Congregational minister William Allen, who could read Hebrew and therefore translated the texts within the phylactery, identified them as verses from Deuteronomy and Exodus. He pointed out that the phylactery had been discovered among dirt and chips of wood on the surface, and was not excavated from any great depth. Moreover, he observed that it was well-preserved, and thus he proposed that it had been dropped on that land in recent years by some wandering Jew, as it were. Or, some years earlier, as Allen recalled, Merrick had employed some British and German prisoners of the War of 1812 to work on his property. Perhaps one of these had secretly been a Jew and had lost the item during his labors. What Allen did not realize, however, was that the mere fact he was able to decipher the text would seem to indicate that it was not written in the paleo-Hebrew that the Lost Tribes would have used, as knowledge of that script did not develop until the 1850s. When the Antiquarian Society appeared to have no interest in the phylactery, those from Pittsfield who believed it proved the Hebraic origins of Native Americans reacquired it and sent it instead to Elias Boudinot, the Cherokee writer who would go on to compose A Star in the West, arguing that North American native peoples were descended from the Lost Tribes. However, the book does not mention the Pittsfield phylactery. It is unknown if the artifact made its way into Boudinot’s possession, and if so, what became of it afterward. It simply disappeared. But it was not forgotten. In 1823, a Vermont minister named Ethan Smith described it in his book with the self-explanatory title View of the Hebrews: The Lost Tribes of Israel in America. Ten years later, Josiah Priest cited the Pittsfield phylactery as evidence in his book American Antiquities, which argued that Native American earthworks in Ohio and New York, so-called “mounds,” were actually created by some lost race, likely the Lost Tribes. And about ten years after that, in his newspaper the Times and Seasons, Joseph Smith, the prophet of Mormonism, was telling the story again as support for the Book of Mormon’s version of American prehistory and quoting from both Ethan Smith and Josiah Priest.

The Mormons would soon be given good reason not to trust in such dubious archaeological finds to support their beliefs. A year after Smith’s newspaper published an article about the Pittsfield Phylactery, a man named Robert Wiley, living near the Mormon city of Nauvoo, Illinois, said that he had been having recurring dreams of a treasure hidden in an Indian mound in Kinderhook. In April of 1843, acting on those premonitions, he gathered a group to excavate, including one Wilbur Fugate and a couple of Mormons they knew. Sure enough, they discovered some bones and some ancient-looking brass plates, cut in the shape of a bell and bound together by a rusted iron ring. These plates bore strange markings, and the Mormons among them immediately rejoiced and insisted that the plates be taken to Joseph Smith, who they were sure could translate them. Now, even if Smith really was a fanatic who truly believed his own claims about angelic visitation and inscribed golden plates, and not merely a hoaxer and cult leader, he seemed to show some restraint when it came to the Kinderhook plates, preparing facsimiles and not immediately declaring that he had translated them by revelation, as he supposedly had the gold plates from which he derived the Book of Mormon. The obvious explanation for this, assuming reason and cunning on the part of Joseph Smith, was that others had seen the Kinderhook Plates, unlike his gold plates, which he said he was forbidden to display, and since these brass, bell-shaped plates might have been genuine, or might even have been a trap, he had to tread carefully. An inaccurate translation or a revelation declaring the plates authentic when they were actually a hoax would have revealed Smith to be a fraud. Nevertheless, he did declare that the writing on them was similar to the “reformed Egyptian” of the gold plates. Within a year, Joseph Smith was dead, and his followers soon after removed to Utah, where in a Church history of Smith it was revealed that Smith had indeed been translating the Kinderhook Plates, revealing that they told the story of a descendant of Ham in America. At around the same time, though, the plates discoverers, Robert Wiley and Wilbur Fugate, were swearing out affidavits that the Kinderhook Plates had been a prank on the Mormons after all. Mormons, meanwhile, did not want to hear it, insisting the plates were real. Only in the later 20th century did testing reveal that they had been etched with acid, a modern technique, and that within the inscription was a hidden message: “Fugate Fakes,” the deciphered inscription reads, “April Fools Day 1843 for Joseph Smith.”

Facsimiles of the Kinderhook Plates. Public Domain.

Just as it was very convenient that some Mormons were present for the unearthing of the planted Kinderhook Plates in 1843, so it also appears quite convenient, perhaps even planned, that in Newark, Ohio, in 1860, when local surveyor David Wyrick went running through the town to announce his discovery of an unusual artifact at the local Indian earthworks, he just happened to run into Colonel Charles Whittlesey, the foremost authority on the Mound Builders of Ohio, who happened to be in town on unrelated business. Wyrick must have presented a pathetic figure lurching through town that day, for it was said he was so afflicted with rheumatism that his hands and feet were swollen to grotesque proportions. He was a sympathetic character in Newark. Having failed as a newspaperman, he had devoted himself to surveying the earthworks of Newark, fantasizing that he might one day be able to prove his theories about the Mound Builders. These were much the same as Colonel Whittlesey’s own theories, and Josiah Priest’s aforementioned claims in the book American Antiquities, a notion today called the “mound builder myth,” the overtly racist view that Native Americans could not possibly be responsible for the construction of the impressive earthen mounds found in the New World, and thus there must have been some precursor race, such as the Lost Tribes of Israel. And it certainly seemed like David Wyrick had discovered proof of this when he unearthed the “Holy Stone,” an arrowhead-shaped stone inscribed with Hebrew phrases on each side. This artifact would come to be known as the Keystone when, later that year, his excavation uncovered another “Holy Stone,” a limestone carving of a robed figure with a Hebrew inscription of the Ten Commandments that would be named the Decalogue Stone. Wyrick finally died in 1864, but the story did not end with him. A year later, from a mound east of Newark, two far more strange stones were discovered, an inscribed sculpture of a head and another inscribed sculpture that resembled an animal on one side and faces on other sides. And finally, three years after that, another stone, this one shaped more like the Keystone and inscribed with the Ten Commandments like the Decalogue Stone, was found nearer the original mound of one of Wyrick’s discoveries. Was Wyrick’s discovery too good to be true? And what of the others that followed?

One of the earliest theories about the first Newark Holy Stone, the Keystone, put forth by a local Masonic expert, was that it was an artifact of ancient Freemasonry, originating some time after the building of the Second Temple in the 6th century BCE. This led to speculation that the ancient Jews who had come to America were Masons, and in their famous earthworks could be discerned geometric Masonic symbolism. This theory shows the bias of its proponents, though, for only a Freemason would believe in the Judaic origin of Freemasonry, going all the way back to Solomon’s Temple, or as Masonic lore likes to claim, back to the Tower of Babel, or even to Enoch preserving sacred geometrical knowledge from the deluge. In that way, the pseudohistory of Freemasons has a lot in common with the legend of Hermes Trismegistus and the preservation of alchemical knowledge. But in reality, this fraternal order can only trace its origins back to 14th century stonemason trade guilds. So that would seem to put the Masonic theory in the ground, as it were. What remains is the more common notion that the Keystone proves the Lost Tribes theory of Native American origins. But this too was quashed at the time, very shortly after the story became national, when a series of attack pieces against the Keystone’s discoverer, David Wyrick, appeared in Ohio newspapers, and then in the New York Times and Harper’s Weekly. First, it was suggested that Wyrick was profiting from the display of the Keystone, giving him a pecuniary motive for producing such a find beyond the academic motive of promoting the Lost Tribes theory. Then the stone’s authenticity was challenged. It was too polished and showed none of the signs of weathering to be expected from an artifact of great antiquity. And it had been discovered too near the surface to be considered very ancient. Moreover, experts in Hebrew recognized that the characters on the Keystone were modern Hebrew, an alphabet that appeared in contemporary Hebrew Bibles and had only been in use a few hundred years, and they were inexpertly chiseled at that. Thus, Wyrick became a laughingstock to those who didn’t know him, and even those who sympathized with him reserved their judgement about his finds. When later that year he excavated in another nearby mound where some bones had been discovered and turned up a wooden platform of seeming antiquity, he was mocked for having dug up an old horse trough. Undeterred, though, he continued digging, and beneath that platform, he discovered the Decalogue Stone. But this was too great a coincidence for most to believe. The inscription on the Decalogue Stone appeared to be in a far more ancient form of Hebrew, so it seemed Wyrick was simply trying to address the objections his critics had to the Keystone, and closer examination showed that this was still not the paleo-Hebrew of the Lost Tribes but rather a post-Exilic script, and that it still showed similarities with the modern Hebrew form of characters, as if the engraver had first learned the modern script and then afterward taught himself the more ancient version.

Photos of David Wyrick’s “Holy Stones,” Image courtesy of the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum

While at the time, all signs seemed to point to Wyrick being a hoaxer, those who knew him best refused to believe it. And with further hindsight, it appears he may have been unfairly maligned. Only a few short years after his discoveries, he had fallen into financial ruin, so if he had perpetrated a hoax to make money, it did not work, and still he remained devoted to his efforts, trying for years to organize further excavations. In 1864, in penury and probably still suffering from his rheumatism, he committed suicide. Some newspapers, still intent on sullying his name, reported that an old Hebrew Bible and other evidence of his manufacture of the items was found in his residence, but these claims were unsupported. Only a year after he was gone would his name be cleared in the eyes of many, after the inscribed head and three-sided carving were discovered at a farm east of Newark, each with Hebrew lettering. But these finds did not prove Wyrick right in the way you may think. Instead, they seemed to prove that someone else was responsible for the frauds. One of his former collaborators, an area dentist named John. H. Nicol, who had been with Wyrick at the excavation of the Decalogue Stone and afterward had declared the find a fraud, was also present at the discovery of the inscribed head, and afterward declared that he had inscribed these latest finds himself, buried them, and arranged for their discovery. Afterwards, decipherment of the Hebrew on the inscribed head showed that it was actually the letters J, H, N, C, and L—a signature of the forger, John H. Nicol. It seems Nicol was asserting that he had faked these two later stones for the sole purpose of proving that Wyrick’s Holy Stones were also fakes, but since he had been present at the Decalogue’s unearthing, many then and today presume that he had actually forged all of the stones. Then there are alternative suspects, such as a local Episcopalian minister who perhaps too easily was able to decipher the peculiar variation of poorly engraved Hebrew on the Holy Stones, or a local stonecutter whose work on gravestones bore some superficial similarities to the finds. However, the discovery of yet another stone three years later further confuses the matter. The so-called Johnson Stone bore the same general tapering shape as the Keystone but was inscribed with the same style of Hebrew lettering as the Decalogue Stone. It was dug up in the same group of mounds where Wyrick and Nicol had unearthed the Decalogue Stone but by reputable individuals, with apparently none of our suspects involved. How to explain this? If Nicol or Wyrick or whoever had made the Holy Stones had buried yet another fraud, why hadn’t they “arranged” for its discovery? Had they lost track of where they’d buried it? Or had they actually just buried it hoping that it would eventually be turned up independently and thus corroborate their frauds? We may never know, for further study of the Johnson stone is impossible. Like the hoaxes claimed by John Nicol, and like the Pittsfield phylactery before them, the Johnson Stone has been lost.

A major argument against all of these Hebrew-inscribed artifacts being genuine was the general lack of Hebraic artifacts to be found at Native American sites across the country. This argument received a blow a few decades after the affair of the Newark Holy Stones when another rash of artifact discoveries occurred, this time all over Michigan, and instead of just a few inscribed stones, thousands were unearthed over the course of 30 years. The first, an earthenware vessel or clay cup, was discovered by James Scotford, a local sign maker, in October of 1890 while he was digging a posthole. Over the next year, Scotford discovered numerous artifacts, all with similar markings, and as people who heard of his discoveries showed up, he started a kind of guided expedition business, leading his clients out among the deforested timberland of the area and digging up small mounds that he said were manmade, though others claim they were natural hummocks or tumuli that had resulted from the uprooting trees. Typically, Scotford dug to a certain depth, never deeper than two feet, and then invited his clients to dig further, at which point, invariably, an artifact was unearthed, and his clients would then sign affidavits swearing to the fact that they had discovered it themselves. Scotford convinced his supporters that these objects were the remnants of a major ancient civilization, though no evidence of any actual dwelling structures have ever been uncovered. He claimed that the large swathes of hummocks he was excavating represented a vast necropolis of burial mounds, though no human remains were ever discovered within them. Believers in the authenticity of the Michigan relics, including some Mormons who hoped that they could corroborate the Latter Day Saint claims about American prehistory, pointed out that the sheer number of finds proved they couldn’t be frauds. However, absolutely no Michigan Relics were ever found except in the presence of James Scotford, or, later, in the presence of the partner he took on, Daniel Soper, the former Secretary of State of Michigan, whose political career had ended in scandal with accusations of embezzlement.

A photo of some of the Scotford-Soper forgeries, from Francis Kelsey’s “Some Archeological Forgeries from Michigan,” American Anthropologist , New Series, Vol. 10, No. 1, Jan. - Mar., 1908, pp. 48-59.

Already the fraud in the Michigan Relics appears clear. However, physical evidence that the artifacts were modern forgeries was also abundant. Firstly, the script and markings that appeared on all the items was unconvincing. It was a mishmash of cuneiform interspersed with Egyptian-esque hieroglyphs, all of them stamped on rather than engraved. The confusion of languages was explained by Scotford and Soper with claims that the civilization must have been polyglot mix of different cultures that had all somehow made their way into the Americas, but this failed to explain their laziness. Some characters were stamped on and then simply reversed and stamped again to appear like a different symbol, and entire rows were comprised of one symbol stamped over and over. Then there were the materials themselves, which showed every sign of modern origin. The symbols were stamped onto commercially smelted copper, onto slate that been freshly machine-cut, and onto unbaked clay that actually disintegrated in water, leaving no doubt that it would not have survived intact underground for very long. In fact, on the reverse side of some clay pieces, the impression of a machine sawed piece of wood can clearly be discerned, where the piece had obviously been set to dry. Then there is the fact that every single one of them bore the same prominent mark, what looked like an I, an H, and a forward slash. Scotford and Soper suggested this was a “tribal mark,” but most view it to be the signature of the forgers. All of this is unaccountable and damning. No further evidence is needed to cement the Michigan Relics as outright counterfeits, but one more is worth noting insofar as it shows a parallel with previous inscribed stone frauds. There appears to have been correction on the part of the forgers to answer certain criticisms, just as the first Newark Holy Stone was criticized for being in modern Hebrew, and then the next one displayed a more ancient script. Some early Michigan artifacts had a lion with no tail stamped onto them, and after some experts suggested that a primitive artist would not omit the tail, other artifacts appeared on which the lions’ tails could more clearly be seen.

This survey of archaeological frauds perpetrated to convince the public of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact could go on and on. I have skipped, for example, the Grave Creek Stone, the Davenport Tablets, and the Bat Creek Stone, about which I may have more to say in upcoming patron exclusive readings of some historical fiction I wrote about these incidents. I’ve also omitted Minnesota’s Kensington Runestone and the Heavener Runestone of Oklahoma, which are held up as proof of a pre-Columbian Norse presence in North America. Don’t get me wrong.  Pre-Columbian Norse exploration of North America at Newfoundland has been proven, but not as far inland as Minnesota and Oklahoma. And the parade of pseudoarcheology would continue during the 20th century to tantalize the Church of Latter-Day Saints and other proponents of the theory of ancient Semitic contact in American prehistory. There were the Tucson Artifacts of Arizona in 1924—a cache of inscribed crosses and swords—and then there was the Los Lunas Decalogue Stone, a boulder in New Mexico inscribed with the Ten Commandments that was first recorded by a professor in 1933, who said the local guide who led him to it claimed to have seen it as far back as the 1880s. The thing with these inscribed stones is that they cannot be dated using radiocarbon analysis, which requires organic material. The leather of the Pittsfield phylactery might have been, if it hadn’t been lost, or maybe not, as the oils and preservatives applied to leather over time have been known to interfere with Carbon-14 dating. Neither can stratigraphic dating typically be relied on, as these are freestanding boulders, or if buried, they were excavated without proper field notes being taken. Anyway, the surviving descriptions tend to suggest that they weren’t found at a depth that would indicate antiquity. Moreover, with the knowledge of contact and commerce between indigenous tribes, it is illogical that items such as the Newark Holy Stones or the Michigan Relics would be found only in one discrete geographical region, and not popping up at other sites farther away. And every time, when there is no clear evidence of skulduggery, there is still some explanation, such as that a travelling Jew in more modern times had accidentally let an artifact or an heirloom fall or even buried it for some purpose we cannot know. And in many of these cases, those who peer at the scratchings on these stones tend to see what they want to see. As Professor Edmund Dellabarre said of Dighton Rock before succumbing himself to the same phenomenon: “Whenever we can, we tend to find something definite in the faint and orderly in the confused and to trust what we find.… There is a pleasure in seeing uncertainties and irregularities resolve themselves into definite form, and the forms take on connected and acceptable meaning.”

Until next time … remember… the longer you stare at anything, clouds, wallpaper patterns, wood grains, marble veins… you will eventually believe you see something hidden there.

Further Reading

Brecher, Edward. “The Enigma of Dighton Rock.” American Heritage, vol. 9, no. 4, June 1958, www.americanheritage.com/enigma-dighton-rock.

Friedman, Lee M. “THE PHYLACTERIES FOUND AT PITTSFIELD, MASS.” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, no. 25, 1917, pp. 81–85. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43058052.

Hunter, J. Michael. “The Kinderhook Plates, the Tucson Artifacts, and Mormon Archeological Zeal.” Journal of Mormon History, vol. 31, no. 1, 2005, pp. 31–70. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23289247.

Kelsey, Francis W. “Some Archeological Forgeries from Michigan.” American Anthropologist, vol. 10, no. 1, 1908, pp. 48–59. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/659777.

Lutz, Cora E. “Ezra Stiles and the Challenge of the Dighton ‘Writing Rock.’” The Yale University Library Gazette, vol. 55, no. 1, 1980, pp. 14–21. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40858740.

Stamps, Richard B. “Tools Leave Marks: Material Analysis of the Scotford-Soper-Savage Michigan Relics.” Brigham Young University Studies, vol. 40, no. 3, 2001, pp. 210–238. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43044267.

The Abode of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Part Two: Diaspora

Spanish colonialism in the New World began with Christopher Columbus’s establishment of settlement on Hispaniola in 1493. Spurred by the discovery of gold, Spain pressed its claim and spread quickly, to Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Cuba. By 1508, they were establishing themselves on mainland South and Central America, and 15 years later, Franciscan friars arrived to build missions across New Spain. Spanish colonial missions served more than one purpose: to convert the native peoples to Christianity while also pacifying them and acculturating them to Spanish society while the natural resources of their land were extracted. As the work of these monks among the natives of various regions continued, many ecclesiastics observed that these indigenous groups, far removed from each other by both distance and culture, seemed to keep Hebrew customs and resemble the Jews in some regards. Bartholeme de Las Casas went so far as to declare that they were “of the Lost Tribes,” an assertion that encouraged even further the efforts to convert them to Christianity, for the conversion of the Jews, as discussed in the previous episode, was seen as an important milestone on the road to the eschaton, or the conclusion of God’s divine plan for our world. Another view, however, suggested that Satan had led these fallen people into counterfeit Hebrew customs in order to make them resistant to Christian conversion, as were the Jews themselves, an argument that history has shown to be both anti-Semitic and inaccurate. These early, contradictory views of Spanish ecclesiastics regarding the Israelitish origin of the Native Americans can be observed clearly in the 1607 work Origin of the Indians of the New World and West Indies by missionary and chronicler Gregorio Garcia. He cites numerous perceived similarities between native peoples’ and Hebrew physical attributes, customs, dress, and religion, suggesting that the miraculous river crossing described in 2 Esdras actually represented the passage of the Lost Tribes across the Bering Strait. Many are the inconsistencies in his argument, such as that both the Jews and the Native Americans lacked cleanliness and that they both tended to bathe frequently. And if the bigotry against the Jews and the indigenous people wasn’t clear enough there, then consider his argument that both the Jews and Native Americans were ungrateful, the Native Americans to their Spanish colonial masters, and the Jews to the God that favored them, whose Son they had rejected. Perhaps most inconsistent was Garcia’s answer for why the natives of the Americas no longer spoke Hebrew when all the legends said that the Lost Tribes would only speak Hebrew. Well, clearly, he argued, their language had changed over time, but actually, he insisted, there are still traces of Hebrew in their various languages. Then again, he suggested, their language was entirely different only because the Devil had led them to take a new language so that they could not easily be converted to Christianity. Here, at the beginning of a new era in the search for the Lost Tribes, we see many of the same specious arguments, logical flaws, and racist themes that would come to characterize the more recent theories of what became of the northern tribes of the Kingdom of Israel after their deportation by the Assyrians.

With the regions previously believed to be the abode of the Lost Tribes having been explored more and more, the New World naturally became the next place where people believed the ten northern tribes of the Kingdom of Israel may have ended up. While the Spanish missionaries who first raised the notion gradually seem to have stopped believing it after decades of actually living among these indigenous peoples, the theory would emerge again in the 17th century, after a Portuguese man named Antonio de Montezinos, who had converted to Judaism and went by the name Aaron Levy, returned from some travels in South America during the early 1640s with the tale that he had discovered a tribe in the jungles of Ecuador that he was certain represented the remnants of the Lost Tribe of Reuben. He swore to the truth of this (as much as one can swear to the truth of a conjecture) in an affidavit, and in 1644 he told his story to Menasseh Ben Israel, a rabbi and diplomat, who believed him and took this as a sign that the Messianic age would soon dawn, when it was prophesied that Jews would be scattered over all the world. This spurred his composition of a book, The Hope of Israel, about which more will be said shortly. His book sparked interest and garnered support for the “Hebraic Indian” theory among Jews, who had previously dismissed the idea. And at the same time, Montezino’s affidavit was used as a central piece of evidence by a Puritan minister, Thomas Thorowgood, who spread the same theory among the English in his book, Jews in America, or Probabilities that Americans are of that Race. Support for the theory would continue, sporadically, through the 19th century and even in some circles up to modern day. Perhaps the best example of this theory’s mad proliferation of supposed evidence can be illustrated by the composition of the book Antiquities of Mexico, by Irish antiquarian Edward King, Viscount Kingsborough. So convinced was Kingsborough by the idea that pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations were actually the settlements of the Lost Tribes that he spent years and a fortune bankrolling the absurdly massive book, which reproduce ancient codices on huge pages that measured two feet by one foot. With more than five hundred of these gigantic pages in each volume and more than 9 volumes, one can reasonably assert that it became something of an obsession for him, and in the end, it consumed him, as the debt he incurred in printing the book put him in prison, where he contracted the typhus that would kill him shortly after his release. While unreadable, his work did end up furthering the theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans because one Barbara Allan Simon wrote a book called The Ten Tribes of Israel Historically Identified with the Aborigines of the Western Hemisphere, which appears to have essentially been a summary of Kingsborough’s work. And so the theory was dispersed, through the years and across the world, despite the quality of its evidence.

An image of Spanish colonial abuse of American aborigines featured in the massive “Codex Kingsborough.” Public Domain.

Not all versions of this theory were the same. As indicated above, Franciscan missionaries saw the Lost Tribes in Caribbean island natives as well as mainland peoples, while the Viscount Kingsborough focused more on lost Mesoamerican civilizations. In his effort to negotiate the return of European Jewry to England, from whence they had been expelled by King Edward I in 1290, Menasseh ben Israel appealed to Christians there that wanted to see the end times begin by suggesting that, if Jews were already in every land but England, they only had to be let back in to England for prophecy to be fulfilled and the eschaton to unfold. But his theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans was also rather different. He argued that the Ten Tribes has crossed the Bering Strait into the Americas, but that the Tartars followed them, made war on them, and drove them down through Central and South America. He cited tenuous similarities of place names as evidence: the Yucatan being named after Joktan, a great-great-grandson of Noah’s son Shem, and Peru being a transposition of the name Ophir, one of Joktan’s sons. Much of the evidence for the theory that Native Americans were the Lost Tribes also relies on the perceived similarity of words, such as Antonio Montezinos’s claims, which came from the fact that he heard this Ecuadorian tribe chant something that sounded vaguely similar to the Jewish Shema prayer. The most cited piece of “evidence” is that certain tribes seemed to call their god by a name similar to the Hebrew name Yahweh, such as the Taíno name for their great creator spirit, Yaya. Customs between the two cultures were likewise linked according to perceived similarity, like measuring their time by nights, and washing their newborns. Some even suggested that prophecy foretelling the Lost Tribes would resort to cannibalism was fulfilled by these indigenous peoples that they suspected of cannibalism, and that the prophecies of plagues that would descend on the Jews were fulfilled by the many epidemics that Old World colonists introduced. It wasn’t long before counterarguments appeared, most notably in Hamon l’Estrange’s Americans no Iewes, or improbabilities that the Americans are of that race. L’Estrange correctly points out that, if you look close enough at any languages, you will start to see words that sound alike, and that there is no uniformity of religion among the many native peoples of the New World, not to mention the fact that many tribes were pantheistic rather than monotheistic. As for the customs, he rightly observes that computation of time by nights and washing of newborns and other parallel customs are common in a myriad of cultures. Nevertheless, even L’Estrange argued for a biblical origin of the Native American peoples, suggesting that, rather than the Lost Tribes, they were descended from Noah’s other sons, Japheth and Ham.

More scientific arguments as to the true origins and dispersion of indigenous Americans would eventually appear, with the prevailing theory being that Native Americans are descended from Siberian and South East Asian peoples who crossed the land bridge that formerly existed in the Bering Sea more than 10,000 years before the Israelites were deported by the Assyrians, and DNA evidence appears to support this. But long before such empirical resolutions to this mystery appeared, a variety of pseudo-archaeological hoaxes helped to forever cement the theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans in the popular imagination. The first was in the early 19th century, when a man who claimed to be able to find buried treasure by scrying with a seer stone, an occupation that had landed him in court more than once as a disorderly person, turned his talents instead to founding a religion. With his head in a hat, staring at his seer stone, this man, Joseph Smith, dictated the Book of Mormon, supposedly divinely translating the “reformed Egyptian” of some engraved gold plates that he claimed an angel had led him to find, plates that he could not show to anyone. In the resulting book, it was “revealed,” among many other things, that Native Americans were descended not from the lost northern tribes exactly, but rather from Israelite refugees who lived in the time of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, who had crossed the ocean to settle in the Americas, along with one group from the time of the Tower of Babel and the confusion of languages who crossed to America on covered boats that are described like submarines. Much of the Book of Mormon is clearly inspired by ideas that were then in the zeitgeist, like the theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans and contemporary views against secret societies, which serves as proof enough that it was the work of Smith and not an ancient text. If you’d like to learn more about this, there is a wealth of further information in my historical novel, Manuscript Found!, which can be found on Amazon.

A depiction of Joseph Smith’s claims that an angel led him to the golden plates and gave him the magic spectacles he used to translate them. Public Domain.

Smith was not the last to make claims about discovering an artifact that indicated Israelite settlement in ancient America. Nor even was he the first. In 1815, while ploughing his field, a hosteler named Joseph Merrick found a phylactery, or a box containing Hebrew texts that is traditionally worn during prayer. In 1860, David Wyrick discovered more than one stone inscribed with Hebrew in a Native American burial mound. Starting in 1890, James Scotford and Daniel Soper “discovered” thousands of objects in Michigan that seemed to support the theory. And in the 1930s, an archaeologist discovered a decalogue stone, inscribed in Paleo-Hebrew with the Ten Commandments, in New Mexico. All of these finds and their implications of pre-Columbian Semitic contact with the Americas have either been logically explained or debunked, and since discussing each would be a significant digression here, I’ll be devoting another post to them. To conclude, though, I would reiterate that modern science and scholarship have relegated this theory to the fringe, even though it is still believed by the Church of Latter-Day Saints and even by certain Native American groups who have embraced the idea of descent from Israel. Today, though, it should be clear to every sensitive and conscious person that the theory of the Hebraic origins of Native Americans was very much anti-Semitic and represented yet another shameful aspect of colonialism. Identifying the Jews with a native population that was widely viewed as barbaric and primitive and in need of Christian salvation reveals a great deal about the global prejudice against the Jews, and the denial of Native American peoples’ own various histories and distinct cultures was just another form of indigenous erasure.

While this Lost Tribes theory was developing, another was growing back in England suggesting that the British themselves were descended from the Lost Tribes, rather ironic since Jews had been expelled from the country centuries earlier. British Israelism, or perhaps more accurately, Anglo-Israelism, began in 1649 with the publication of The Rights of the Kingdom by John Sadler, a friend and secretary of Oliver Cromwell’s. Also a millenarian and an acquaintance of Menasseh ben Israel, Sadler seems to have hoped that suggesting the British were of the Lost Tribes would further encourage the readmission of the Jews to his country and thereafter bring on the Millennium. His idea was seized and enlarged by one Richard Brothers in the 1790s, who turned it into more of a cult than an academic theory. He was not satisfied with identifying the British as the Lost Tribes. He further claimed that he was himself descended from the House of David and therefore destined to rule the “hidden Israelites” until the return of Christ. In fact, he went so far as to insist that he should reign as the king of England and to share with his followers prophecies that the king would die, leading to his arrest for treason and his imprisonment in an asylum for the criminally insane. Despite the fact that Brothers died a solitary and defeated man, halfway through the next century, Anglo-Israelism saw a resurgence, first in a popular tract published in 1840 which spread and gained traction among Bible study groups. The theory would further gain support in America in the 1930s among evangelicals struggling to reconcile their prejudice against Jews and their affection for the Hebrew scriptures.

The Coronation Chair at Westminster Abbey, said to contain the stolen Stone of Scone, which in turn is said to be one and the same as Ireland’s Lia Fail, or The Stone of Destiny. Public Domain.

In short, Anglo Israelism developed to argue that not just the British but other European nations as well were of the Lost Tribes, and then the U.S., Australia, and South Africa as well through migration. It claims that the Lost Tribes found their way to northern Europe and settled in England, Ireland, Scotland, Norway, Holland, Denmark, Luxembourg, Belgium, northern France, Sweden, Switzerland, and parts of Germany.  Like the theory of the Hebraic origin of Native Americans, this belief relies a great deal on fast and loose and questionable etymology. For example, the Danish are said to be the Danites, and the word “British” is claimed to be derived from the Hebrew b’rith, which means “covenant,” and ish, for “man,” making British mean “man of the covenant.” Likewise, the word Saxon is said by the believers of Anglo-Israelism to be from “Isaac’s sons,” or the “sons of Isaac.” The fact is etymologists who are educated experts derive the word Saxon from a Teutonic word that means “dagger,” which Anglo-Israelists account for by claiming without evidence that there were two different peoples called Saxons. A great deal of the Anglo-Israel theory also relies on a legend surrounding the so-called Stone of Destiny. Supposedly, this was a stone consecrated to God by Jacob and carried in solemn processions during the time of David, the stone believed to have been referred to in the psalm that speaks of “the stone which the builders rejected.” Many Christians view this line as a prophetic reference to Christ, but here it is seen as a physical object, perhaps also the stone on which Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac. According to the Anglo-Israelist version of history, this stone was a cornerstone in Solomon’s temple until the Babylonians destroyed it. After that, it came into the possession of the Danites, who were said to be a seafaring people, and they sailed with it until they wrecked on the shores of Ireland. Now, perceptive readers may realize here that the timeline is fouled up. The Danites and the other Lost Tribes supposedly disappeared during the Assyrian conquest, long before the Babylonian destruction of the temple, but let’s not get caught up in minutia. They certainly don’t. So there in Ireland, the Danites established a nation, and the sacred cornerstone was revered as the Lia Fail, the Holy Stone of Ireland. The Irish claim that the Holy Stone remains there, at the Hill of Tara, an ancient ceremonial place, but the Scottish claim that the Lia Fail eventually came into their possession, becoming the coronation stone that they called the Stone of Scone. I spoke about this artifact briefly in a previous episode. King Edward I seized the Stone of Scone and turned it into the Coronation Chair at Westminster Abbey, although there is further conjecture that the stone Edward Longshanks took was also not the real Stone of Destiny. Most late 19th century Anglo-Israelists seem to have believed the Stone of Destiny, Jacob’s Pillow, was still buried in Ireland in the Hill of Tara, the name of which they suggested was connected to the Torah. Others among them thought it was not the stone in the hill, but rather the Ark of the Covenant. Long story short, at the turn of the century, adherents of Anglo-Israelism dug up the Hill of Tara in several places, seriously damaging this historical site and, of course, failing to turn up the Ark or the Stone of Destiny, or any evidence to support their claim of descent from the Lost Tribes.

A manifestly anti-Semitic pamphlet written by Christian Identity founder Wesley Swift, which, disturbingly, is sold on Amazon even today.

Now, British Israelism may seem like a silly belief, or in light of the damage they did in Ireland, a harmful falsehood, but as it spread in the U.S., it transformed into an even more overtly racist ideology that provided pseudohistorical and theological rationale for domestic terrorism. It began in the 1950s, among fundamentalist evangelical Christian figures who were also involved with the Ku Klux Klan. To be precise, a Methodist minister and Klansman named Wesley Swift, a right-wing California politician named William Porter Gale, and a militant Klansman named Richard Butler adopted Anglo-Israelism and adapted it into a full-fledged racialist theology called the Christian Identity movement. These men took the idea of the Israeli origins of white Europeans in a more extremist direction, taking it all the way back to creation to assert that there were two creations, one of Adam and Eve, and one of the “mud people” who proliferated beyond the Garden of Eden. Their evidence is the separate mentions of the creation of mankind in Genesis 1 and 2, although scholars see these as two accounts of the same Creation, taken from two different sources but collected together in scripture. According to Identity adherents, though, the two separate creations were of white people and people of color. Then Eve’s original sin is believed by them to have been sexual in nature, that she engaged in intercourse with an outsider—the Serpent in their view being a “mud person” who had managed to enter Eden. So by their reckoning, the only unforgivable sin is miscegenation. The product of this miscegenation was Cain, the murderous brother, who was banished to live among the “mud people” for the murder of his brother Abel, a product of the union between Adam and Eve, and therefore a white person. According to their abhorrent beliefs, there are two lines of descent from Eve: through Cain, who would go on to manipulate and rule the “mud people” because he was in some part still superior to them, and then the line of Adam through his surviving son Seth. Therefore, rather than descendants of the Lost Tribes, per se, white people are the supposedly pure race descended from Adam, while all people of color are descended from the “mud people,” and the Jews, excepting Christ of course whom they count as being of their white race, are descended from Cain, corrupted by the blood of the “mud people” and still secretly manipulating and ruling over them through their conspiratorial machinations.

Although it may at first seem counter-intuitive for anti-Semites to identify themselves as the true Israelites, this explicitly racist evolution of the Lost Tribes theory must be seen in the context of white supremacists’ notion of so-called Aryan people as superior. By co-opting the place of the Jews as God’s Chosen People, these white supremacists were able to use existing belief structures to both exalt their own race and denigrate the Jews. According to the despicable claims of Christian Identity leaders, America is a Zion or New Jerusalem meant only for themselves, the supposed true Chosen People: whites, but it is overrun by “mud people,” and the government, which they believe the Jews control, will never help them drive out all non-whites. So they have created a religious belief system that demands armed resistance to the government. Christian Identity proponents have been instrumental in founding numerous paramilitary militia groups, some of whom openly admit that they refuse to acknowledge the authority of the federal government, groups such as the California Rangers, a paramilitary arm of the Christian Defense League founded by William Porter Gale in 1960, and the Posse Comitatus, the anti-Semitic survivalist militia movement that Gale later formed, members of which have engaged in tax evasion and counterfeiting and then killed federal marshals who attempted to arrest them. The Christian Identity theology spreads openly as a rationale among many armed citizen militias. In the 1970s and ‘80s, it drove the Silent Brotherhood, a so-called  "Aryan Resistance Movement," to engage in counterfeiting and armed robbery in order to fund their plans for murder campaigns and the overthrow of the government. Thankfully, this neo-fascist terrorist organization was stopped, and most of its agents arrested, but it would be naïve to think that there does not remain a clear and present threat from similar cells of Christian Identity adherents. For example, Timothy McVeigh, the 1995 Oklahoma City bomber, was credibly tied to an anti-government, Christian Identity group, and even today, Thom Robb, the current leader of the Ku Klux Klan, preaches Identity Christianity to members who are regularly implicated in hate crimes and racially motivated violence.

These are not the only theories about what peoples may be descended from the Israelites. There have been claims that the Lemba, an ethnic group in Zimbabwe, are descended from Jews who left Judea, and that the Bnei Menashe group in northeastern India, who have adopted Judaism in more modern times, really are the descendants of the Lost Tribe of Menasseh as they claim to be. In Ethiopia, the narrative that the tribe of Dan settled there, in accordance with the tale of Eldad the Danite that I spoke about in a recent patron exclusive, remains persistent. A community of Jews in Ethiopia that calls itself Beta Israel embraces this narrative, tracing their presence there all the way back to the 4th century CE, though only unconfirmed rumors like Eldad’s story and rumors attributable to the Prester John legend place any Jewish presence there before the 14th century. Back here in the U.S., another group latched onto the Lost Tribes myth as a racial origin story, but rather than white supremacists, these were black religious communities. In the late 19th century, more than one black preacher, William Crowdy in Oklahoma and Frank Cherry in Tennessee, claimed through divine revelation to have discovered that black people were descended from the Lost Tribes. The idea spread during the 20th century, combining with black nationalist movements and resulting in a migration of these “Black Hebrew Israelites” to Liberia, and thereafter, to Israel, where they overstayed their visas and established a community under Israel’s Law of Return, despite the Israeli government not recognizing them as Jews. Meanwhile, some groups of Black Hebrew Israelites in America, much like their Christian Identity counterparts, developed an ideology of hate that encouraged violence. To these militant Black Hebrew Israelites, while they were descended from the Lost Tribes of the Chosen People, white Europeans were descended from Jacob’s brother Esau, or Edom, who was described as ruddy and hirsute. As Edomites were said in Obadiah to have done evil things to the Israelites, and were prophesied to have the same evil things done to them in return, proponents of this violent faction of the Black Hebrew Israelites have engaged in racially motivated violence against white people and against Jews, whom they call “fake Jews” and whom they blame for slavery. So, as we have seen, the legend of the Lost Tribes has been taken up in many cultures and nations, raised whenever confronted with an alien “other” and used again and again to justify fear of and violence against Jews and also other feared or resented races. Its history is as long and violent and misunderstood as history itself.

Further Reading

Callahan, Tim. “The ‘Lost’ Tribes of Israel.” Skeptic, vol. 24, no. 3, July 2019, pp. 8–13. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=138836779&site=ehost-live.

Hyamson, Albert M. “The Lost Tribes and the Return of The Jews To England.” Transactions (Jewish Historical Society of England), vol. 5, 1902, pp. 115–147. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/29777629.

Jackson, John L. “Black Israelites: DNA and Then Some.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 28, no. 3, 2013, pp. 537–539. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43898489.

Lyman, Stanford M. “The Lost Tribes of Israel as a Problem in History and Sociology.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 12, no. 1, 1998, pp. 7–42. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20019954.

Markowitz, Fran. “Israel as Africa, Africa as Israel: ‘Divine Geography’ in the Personal Narratives and Community Identity of the Black Hebrew Israelites.” Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 4, 1996, pp. 193–205. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3317528.

May, H. G. “Archaeological News and Views: The Ten Lost Tribes.” The Biblical Archaeologist, vol. 6, no. 3, 1943, pp. 55–60. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3209244.

McFarland, Michael, and Glenn Gottfried. “The Chosen Ones: A Mythic Analysis of the Theological and Political Self-Justification of Christian Identity.” Journal for the Study of Religion, vol. 15, no. 1, 2002, pp. 125–145. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24764349.

Sharpe, Tanya Telfair. “The Identity Christian Movement: Ideology of Domestic Terrorism.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 30, no. 4, 2000, pp. 604–623. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2645906.