Stranger Things Have Happened: Psychic Spies

In a previous series, I spoke in great depth about Nazi occultism. Among many in the Third Reich, their nationalist and racial ideology was founded on a view that Germans were the descendants of lost race, and that the power of this race survived in ancient Norse runes, Teutonic magics, and legendary artifacts scattered around the world. Heinrich Himmler was the most prominent and influential of these true believers, and he started Das Ahnenerbe, the Institute for the Research and Study of Heredity, to investigate and prove the veracity of his obsessions. The man he placed at the head of this organization was Karl Maria Wiligut, a medium who claimed to be in psychic contact with the lost Aryan race Himmler imagined were his forerunners. Wiligut had previously been certified insane, but Himmler believed in his abilities, and under Wiligut, Das Ahnenerbe delved into more and more arcane areas of study, beyond the archaeological expeditions to prove their theorized heritage or the pseudoscientific conjecture about weird cosmological views like the Hollow Earth Theory or the World Ice Doctrine. Through the “Survey of the So-Called Occult Sciences,” they investigated spirit channeling, divining, astrology, and other forms of extra-sensory perception, or ESP. However, Adolf Hitler called all of it “nonsense” and complained about Himmler wanting to bring back the mysticism they had left behind when he had suppressed the Catholic Church. Indeed, in 1941, Hitler launched Special Action Hess to suppress the occult, arresting all known practitioners of ESP or the divining arts, be they fortune-tellers, astrologers, healers, or just anyone who claimed to be clairvoyant, and he seized all their literature and the trappings of their arts as well, including crystal balls and tarot cards. But Hitler had good reason for this outside of his distaste for their supernatural claims. The Special Action was named after Rudolph Hess, his former deputy Führer, who in May of that year had secretly flown to Scotland on an unauthorized peace mission and been captured. Hitler believed Hess had been encouraged in his plans by false horoscopes manufactured by the UK as propaganda, and this, it seems, was the real reason for the suppression of the occult in Special Action Hess. While the Nazis were earnestly studying divination and anomalous mental phenomena, British intelligence was making use of such practices in more devious ways. It is unclear whether Hess really was influenced by fabricated horoscopes, but it is known that British intelligence, aware of how many Germans trusted in astrology, did forge horoscopes as propaganda. In fact, they engaged the services of a woman famous for claiming to be a “witch,” Sybil Leek, to write these bogus horoscopes. Likewise, the most famous astrologer in America, Louis de Wohl, whose popular syndicated column, called “Stars Foretell,” usually focused on the war in Europe, was unbeknownst to his U.S. readers actually a propagandist for British intelligence, fabricating reports for the sole purpose of convincing Americans that the U.S. should enter the war. In the aftermath of the war, as U.S. intelligence competed with the Soviets to seize Nazi science, it was discovered that Das Ahnenerbe was taking ESP seriously, and much as the race for mind control began, this marked the very start of what would become a Cold War psychic arms race. 

If you haven’t read part one of this series, check it out before reading on. It’s not a single story, and you can enjoy this installment alone, but you should know that this series is an exploration of the historical and pseudohistorical basis of the popular Netflix series Stranger Things. As you may or may not know, the premise of that show involves a psychic character whose powers were studied and cultivated by a secret U.S. government experimentation program. In part one of this series, I discussed the very real human experimentation programs conducted by the CIA under the cryptonym MK-Ultra in search of mind control technology, and in this episode, we will look at government sponsored programs studying extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis. These categories of phenomena cover most of the capabilities of the psychic character in Stranger Things, who demonstrates the ability to move objects with her mind, see others’ thoughts or memories, and even spy on someone over a great distance as though through out-of-body experience, a technique that has come to be called “remote viewing.” Just as all of the dastardly human experiments undertaken by MK-Ultra were absolutely true, so too are the U.S. government studies and experiments with ESP. However, whereas Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA eventually came to accept that the elusive mind control drugs or techniques they sought did not actually exist, many of the scientists involved with ESP programs were true believers. What we must consider in this installment of the series is not just what happened, but also whether what happened was genuine anomalous mental phenomena or can be more rationally explained. Among the first government-sponsored ESP experiments organized after World War II were those in 1952, when the Department of Defense tasked J.B. Rhine with studying the psychic powers of animals. Rhine had coined the term ESP back in the 1920s and conducted some of the first experiments to study it in his Parapsychology Lab at Duke University. For the DoD, he conducted tests to determine whether dogs could psychically discern the location of landmines, whether cats could telepathically follow instructions to choose one food dish over another, and how homing pigeons made their way home. His experiments with dogs and cats yielded no results that couldn’t be explained by chance, and as for the abilities of homing pigeons, those remain a mystery today. After these failed experiments, the U.S. government’s interest in ESP resumed, perhaps unsurprisingly, when it coincided with its search for a viable mind control drug.

J.B. Rhine, Father of Parapsychology, testing subjects’ ESP abilities with Zener cards. Via NCDR.gov

Under the umbrella of MK-Ultra, Subproject 58, headed by Morse Allen, involved the search for the legendary “magic mushroom,” a fabled Mexican drug that it was thought could be useful, if not as a mind control agent then perhaps as a poison. The problem was that the “magic mushroom,” or teonanáctl, the “god’s flesh” mushroom, had never been proven to really exist. In his search for it, Morse Allen had sent a chemist to masquerade as a botany professor and infiltrate various mycology enthusiast groups, with little luck. Eventually, a man who had reportedly traveled to Mexico and been in contact with shamans who used the mushroom in their rituals came to their attention. They learned of him through a third party, Andrija Puharich, a towering figure in the study of ESP. Puharich had been fascinated with the topic since he was a child and believed he had calmed an aggressive dog with only the power of his mind. After serving in the armed forces, he earned a medical degree and published numerous papers theorizing that some unknown energy force connected to the brain and nervous system might explain anomalous mental phenomena. Dashing and charismatic, Puharich seemed to attract wealthy benefactors who gladly bankrolled his research projects, allowing him to start the Round Table Foundation, dedicated to experimentation that might take the topic of ESP out of the realm of parapsychology and into the realm of science proper. Among the admirable work that Puharich undertook was the study of human hearing, which he suspected may overlap with or provide insight into ESP. During the course of his foundation’s study of the topic, a revolutionary surgery to restore hearing was discovered by one of the doctors on his staff. Furthermore, during his study of psych ward patients who hear voices, it was he who discovered that a man’s dental fillings can actually receive the broadcast of nearby radio stations and thereby saved some otherwise mentally healthy individuals from unnecessary institutionalization. Puharich left his Foundation for a time to work for the government. Having delivered a speech to the Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare, the Army thought ESP might just be a worthwhile field of inquiry and called him back into service, stationing him at the Army Chemical Center in Edgewood, Maryland, and tasking him with finding “a drug that might enhance ESP.”

It was, of course, during his search for ESP-enhancing drugs for the Army that Puharich first took interest in the “god’s flesh” mushroom, which legend had it provided divinatory powers to the shamans who consumed them during rituals. However, when Puharich tracked down the explorer who had found the Mexican mushroom-eating shamans and brought him to the CIA’s attention, hoping to get security clearance and join MK-Ultra Subproject 58, there was a problem. Puharich was viewed as something of a crank, and for good reason. He had a habit of giving in to his confirmation bias and falling for the acts of stage mystics and charlatans, becoming obsessed with each new psychic he studied. In fact, his interest in the “magic mushroom” had only been stirred because a spirit channeler named Harry Stump had claimed while in a trance that it “would stimulate one’s psychic faculties,” and Puharich took this as gospel truth. In the end, Morse Allen chose not to grant Puharich security clearance and instead circumvented him, approaching the explorer, a man named R. Gordon Wasson, who happened to also be the vice-president of J.P. Morgan bank, directly. Financing his further expeditions, the CIA was then in on the ground floor when Wasson became the first white man in history to partake of the drug and returned to America with enough of the mushroom that the CIA could grow more. Once again, as with LSD, the CIA was responsible for the entrance of psychedelic mushrooms into our culture, and though Puharich had been cut out entirely, Wasson still gifted him a supply of the drug. Leaving the Army, Puharich returned to his Foundation and began further experiments, locking up the supposed psychics who obsessed him, like Harry Stump, in Faraday cages as a laboratory control and feeding them mushrooms. Gradually, Puharich’s personal life and his experiments would drift out of control, until both his marriage and his Foundation failed, but he always found a way to stay afloat. He sold his services as an expert in mushroom toxicology to the Army and later won funding from various other government entities, like the Atomic Energy Commission and NASA, for further ESP experimentation programs throughout the 1960s, all the while investigating a variety of purported psychics. In the 1970s, his study of one such individual, Uri Geller, would eventually bring the CIA around to working with him after all. As the Cold War had dragged on, it was feared that the Soviets had themselves a psychic super soldier. Therefore, we would need one ourselves, or at least we would need to seem like we had one.

Andrija Puharich, perhaps the most prolific tester of psychic phenomena on behalf of the U.S. government.

The CIA had good reason to fear Soviet progress in psi research, but they also had good reason to doubt it. The reason for this dichotomy was that intelligence reports had revealed the ESP and psychokinesis studies the Soviets were conducting, but there was always the strong possibility, especially in so fantastical a field, that what they’d learned was actually disinformation intended to mislead the U.S. about their capabilities. Certainly it was true that the Soviets were conducting psi experiments, and they had taken care to do so under euphemistic names, trying to present such research as strictly scientific since any mysticism or religion was anathema to good Marxists. So their research facilities were given pseudoscientific names like the Special Laboratory for Biocommunications Phenomena, and the topics of their research were equally coded. Psychokinesis, or PK, what we might call telekinesis today, was referred to as “emissions from humans,” which if I were a little less mature I might make a crude joke about. Likewise, telepathy was called “long-distance biological signal transmission.” But what troubled U.S. intelligence more than these was what they called “psychotronic weapons.” Intelligence suggested that the Soviets’ investigations in the area of so-called biocommunications were two-pronged; they studied individuals who claimed to be capable of the phenomena, but they also developed weapons meant to neutralize the capabilities of such persons, which meant devices that generated “high-penetrating emission(s),” typically microwave or electromagnetic, intended to interfere with brain function. Indeed, it was discovered in 1962 that such emissions were being actively transmitted toward the upper floors of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, which realization sent U.S. intelligence scrambling to study the technology themselves. Though their research could not definitively prove that the emissions were having a harmful effect on embassy staff, certainly the presence of the microwave radiation disrupted U.S. intelligence operations and had them chasing their tails for a while, secretly testing the health of everyone in the building. There are other theories and considerations with the Moscow Signal, of which I’ll have more to say in a patron exclusive, but perhaps that was the point of it, just to mess with their heads in a psychological sense. Such an objective could also be ascribed to the most terrifying of supposed Soviet breakthroughs in psi: the experiments conducted on Ninel Kulagina. This woman, a former Soviet soldier, was purported to be gifted with astounding psychokinetic abilities. The West knew this because state-run Soviet television had produced a special documentary about her, showing her moving small items like matches and salt shakers with her mind. Think of the scenes in Stranger Things when the psychic character sits staring at a Coke can, trying to crush it with her thoughts. But U.S. intelligence had acquired supposedly classified footage of Kulagina supposedly stopping a frog’s heart with her mind, which raised the possibility of a psychic assassin being able to perpetrate untraceable murders. Of course the American intelligence community recognized that it might all be fake, that the feats shown in the footage were a clever fraud, and that the TV program as well as the classified film in their possession was just propaganda. Just the same, it seemed the U.S. was in the market for our own psychics capable of telekinesis, or at least some people we could suggest were capable of it to the world and specifically to our Communist rivals.

The candidate that Puharich brought to the CIA’s attention was an Israeli man named Uri Geller who had made quite a name for himself. He performed in theaters like a stage magician, but he claimed his powers were real, not illusion. Not only did he perform feats of supposed mental telepathy, but he also bent spoons with only the power of his mind, or so it seemed. Unsurprisingly, Puharich took an interest and brought him to America for testing, and when he called up the CIA to say he had a genuine telepath capable of psychokinesis, the agency was so pressured by rumors of Soviet psychic soldiers that they took Puharich up on his suggestion of funding his research with Geller. However, the CIA still thought Puharich a liability, and furthermore, there were rumors that Geller was with Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. If American and Soviet intelligence were in the business of finding or pretending to find psychic assets, then it followed that Mossad may have been following suit. Furthermore, the feat that brought Geller great international fame was when he appeared to predict that Gamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt, had been killed, information that might have been advanced to him by his handlers to bolster his claims. The CIA therefore insisted that an agent of their own, Kit Green, oversee the study of Geller, and to distance themselves from association with Puharich and his foundation, they directed their funds to the Mind Institute of Los Angeles, an organization created by Edgar Mitchell, a former astronaut interested in the research of psychic phenomena whom they insisted be involved. Despite what seem to have been precautions taken to avoid exposure in the press, Uri Geller’s celebrity in America and the UK continuously rose, such that it was compared to Beatlemania. Considering the kinds of mystifying feats he performed and how much of a household name he was, I would compare him more to David Blaine today. The height of his fame came when he went on BBC Radio and urged all of the UK to concentrate with him at the same time, willing a spoon to bend, and the BBC’s switchboard was inundated with calls from listeners claiming to have bent spoons and other items in their own homes. Of course, these reports were never confirmed, nor could they be, really. But aside from the obvious doubts about Uri Geller’s abilities, which we will discuss next, there is the burning question of why the CIA, who were conducting classified research into his abilities, would allow him to parade them around the world on a press tour. On paper, Puharich was blamed for this breach of secrecy, but one cannot help but wonder if this is exactly what the CIA wanted: well-publicized reports that they too had in their employ psychics whose powers might rival those of the mysterious Ninel Kulagina.

Ninel Kulagina, moving a compass in what is certainly a Soviet propaganda film probably faked using magnets under the table.

With Geller’s fame arrived accusations of fraud. But these were not lobbed just by sardonic journalists in the usual skeptical editorials. Geller’s outrageous claims of possessing supernatural powers and his unprecedented celebrity were enough to galvanize the scientific community. Astronomer Carl Sagan, mathematician Martin Gardner, and psychologist Ray Hyman came together with magician James Randi, who insisted Geller was an illusionist rather than a genuine psychic, and formed the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, a noted skeptic organization that is still active today, for the sole purpose of combatting the surge in irrational belief they were observing. Most criticism of Geller comes down to his act being a pretty typical stage magician’s act, using distraction to pre-bend spoons and then hold them in such a way as to dramatically reveal the bend, making it look as if it is only then being bent. Indeed, there have been times when Geller refused to even perform if magicians were present, likely because he knew they would see through his tricks. As for his telepathic demonstrations, he has even admitted that his manager, a young man named Shipi Shtrang, helped him to fake certain psychic feats like guessing audience members’ license plate numbers. As for secondary effects, such as the people who claimed Geller had somehow imparted to them the ability to bend spoons themselves, a simple explanation is that mass delusions can be encouraged by the power of suggestion, and that believing a thing to be true can have concrete effects that may seem to confirm its truth, a phenomenon related to the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy or the Tinkerbell effect, a sociological concept called the Thomas theorem, which states that “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” But regardless of skeptical opposition, the CIA continued their experiments with Geller. According to later declassified reports, Geller was the subject of experimentation by nuclear scientists working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who tested his ability to affect the computer program cards inside an ICBM, exploring the proposition that a person with psychokinetic abilities could feasibly deactivate nuclear missiles in flight. Strangely, after these experiments, the scientists involved experienced weird poltergeist activity at home, seeing unexplained phenomena like floating images and orbs. It was so bizarre that Kit Green, the CIA agent overseeing the experiments, reportedly came to believe that they had become the focus of a CIA psychological operation, using drones and holograms—the fact that a CIA man, and one who himself said he ran the ”weird desk,” would think this the likeliest explanation of such paranormal phenomena goes a long way toward supporting some of the theories about UFO disinformation programs that I discussed in previous episodes. Aside from this, though, it’s hard to know what to make of this bizarre report. What is more curious, to me, is the fact that the results of one of the Geller experiments was declassified in 1979, revealing that a magnetic program card had seemingly been erased when Geller was concentrating on it. If the result of this experiment is to be trusted, why would U.S. intelligence declassify it? It occurs to me that, if this were a genuine breakthrough in the use of psychic powers as nuclear self-defense, we would want to keep it secret at all costs. However, if it were not genuine, but we wanted our enemies to believe we were developing such capabilities, only then would we want it declassified. Framed in this manner, it makes one wonder how much of U.S. intelligence’s psychic experimentation programs that have remained classified were purposely falsified and leaked as disinformation, just as it was suspected that the footage of Ninel Kulagina had been.

Uri Geller was not the only psychic asset being studied by the CIA in the 1970s. Another man, studied at the same facility where Geller was often studied, the Stanford Research Institute, or SRI, was Ingo Swann, who formerly acted as a psychic test subject for the oldest psychic research organization in America, the American Society for Psychical Research. During his time with the ASPR, he began to undergo experiments involving the projection of his consciousness outside of his body, called travelling clairvoyance. These experiments involved suspending a tray in the air across the room and asking him what was on it. These experiments drew the interest of a physicist named Hal Puthoff, who invited Swann to SRI, a laboratory affiliated with the Defense Department, and reportedly tested him by directing him to agitate a magnetometer located several feet below him, encased in concrete. The story differs according to the telling, with Puthoff and Swann describing a perturbation of the device’s readings as having never been seen before or since, representing it as a successful demonstration of Swann’s psychokinesis, while other scientists have suggested it was a relatively common frequency variation for which Swann merely took credit, or that the machine had malfunctioned coincidentally and remained out of order afterward. One thing is certain, though; they never repeated the experiment, which any scientist worth his salt would have done before thinking to tout it as evidence of anything. During his time at SRI, Swann adapted his travelling clairvoyance routine and renamed the feat “remote viewing,” a name that Hal Puthoff and another physicist at SRI, Russel Targ, preferred because it sounded far more scientific. At first, their remote viewing experiments involved an individual going somewhere and concentrating on what they saw while Swann sat in a Faraday cage and tried to sketch what he thought the individual was looking at. However, since they were working for the CIA and clearly developing techniques for espionage, even if they weren’t openly acknowledging it, it became apparent that, even if this process produced results, it was pretty pointless, since if they were sending an operative into the field to infiltrate some site, they wouldn’t need the remote viewer at all. Rather, to be useful, Swann discerned that a psychic would need to be able to remote view any location, without a person present at the site sending back willful thoughts about the place. He came up with the idea that they would use coordinates. Kit Green asked an acquaintance for a set of coordinates, not knowing what was at the location, and Swann sketched the place. The results were rather vague, and at first didn’t seem to match the location Green’s acquaintance had provided: a family cabin. However, when another individual volunteered his remote viewing services, the details were far more precise, and it appeared the remote viewers were focused not on the cabin but rather on a top secret military facility called Sugar Grove just nearby the cabin.

Uri Geller, celebrity psychic, displaying a spoon he claims to have bent with his mind. Notice the film does not show the spoon bending. Gif uploaded by MindBob on Tenor.

This other, more accurate remote viewer was a Scientologist named Pat Price, and he presented himself to the researchers at SRI in a very strange way. He just approached them while they were out buying a Christmas tree for their lab and said he could help. Later, when Ingo Swann was in the process of attempting to remote view the coordinates provided by Kit Green, Price just called up Puthoff and offered his services. Curious, Puthoff gave him the coordinates, and a couple days later, Price called him back with an astonishingly detailed account. When it was discovered that the two men, Swann and Price, seemed to be viewing the Sugar Grove facility, Price’s reading raised alarms. Apparently, it was so precise that it described the color of filing cabinets and the names that appeared on the files therein. Even the rather credulous Hal Puthoff could hardly believe it and came to suspect Price was a CIA plant, ordered to approach them and test whether they could detect a fake who might have been feeding them sensitive intelligence as if it were psychic impressions. After all, Geller was still suspected of being Mossad, so the CIA had reason to fear they might be fooled. Very quickly, though, the interest of the agency shifted from Ingo Swann to Pat Price. Swann left SRI, perhaps a little resentful, and Price left to work directly for the CIA. This can’t necessarily be taken as evidence that he wasn’t working for them all along, however, as it’s quite possible that because of Price’s performance, the CIA decided the program at SRI was a liability, and Price left just to come back into the fold, his operation concluded. Certainly the CIA got out of the psychic research business after that, but not until after a very mysterious event. Pat Price was on a visit to Las Vegas in 1975 and met up with Kit Green and Hal Puthoff for dinner and reminiscence. At dinner, he left early, not feeling well. Afterward, he died of a heart attack in his room. An unidentified man arrived later with Price’s medical records and waived an autopsy. The researchers at SRI suspected murder, but who to suspect? The CIA themselves, or perhaps the KGB? Apparently, the Church of Scientology even came under suspicion. In the end, though, we don’t know what Price did for the CIA, or why he might have been killed, or whether he even was killed, for after all, he might have simply succumbed at 57 years old to a cardiac event.

After the CIA discontinued their funding of the psychic research at SRI, Uri Geller continued in his quasi-mystical, illusionist-esque career, fading slowly into relative obscurity and becoming something of a joke. Most recently, he threatened to telepathically prevent Brexit, and obviously failed to do so. While the CIA may have given up on remote viewing, though, the U.S. government in its entirety did not, and afterward, the Defense Intelligence Agency revived the endeavor under the codename Stargate Project. With a manual for training soldiers to remote view written by Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann, they kept psychics on the payroll, loaning them out to whatever agency or branch of the armed forces wanted to use them, until the project was declassified in 1995. At that point, as the DIA sought to transfer the project back to the CIA, two academics, statistician Jessica Utts and psychologist Ray Hyman, one a believer and one a skeptic, were engaged to evaluate the 20-year project. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they came to opposite conclusions, but Hyman’s reservations, published in Skeptical Inquirer, show that, even 20 years later, much of the same fundamental problems with psychic research remained. The problem of inadequate laboratory controls has always been an objection of skeptics. For example, the original remote viewing activities of Ingo Swann and Pat Price, in which they described the Sugar Grove facility, were completed at home, with no supervision.  They could have researched the coordinates or received outside information. Additionally, the problem of the bias of the researchers who undertake these studies, like Puharich and Puthoff, who were always entirely convinced of their subjects’ abilities, was always an issue. Just the same, in the 90’s, Hyman’s central objection was that all the remote viewing studies, which involved the evaluation of sketches to determine likenesses to the target supposedly being viewed, relied on a single judge, the person conducting the experiment, who was invariably a believer. He pointed out that even statistically significant results, which seemed to indicate something more than chance, were suspect until independent judges could reproduce the same results. And the repeatability and reproducibility of supposedly successful results in psychic research has also always been problematic, with researchers routinely claiming that results cannot be reproduced if observed by non-believers, a difficulty that should not be and is not an issue in science generally. In the years since its declassification, remote viewing became the stuff of satire, like the book and movie The Men Who Stare at Goats, and today these experiments are something of a laughing stock to many, despite the former participants in the program and practitioners publishing numerous books and speaking regularly on the paranormal circuit. But even as far-fetched as their claims are, they still pale in comparison to the final and perhaps biggest inspiration of the series Stranger Things, which was an outright hoax.

The Stanford Research Institute group, from left to right: Hal Puthoff, Russell Targ, Kit Green, and the mysterious Pat Price. Via Vice.

Until next time, remember, in science, experiments must devise positive tests to discern whether a phenomenon is present or absent, but no such tests have ever been devised for psychic powers, which are defined negatively: when normal explanations are eliminated, researchers claim that is evidence that psychic phenomena exist. But that’s not how science works. You can’t point to any fluctuation in the data of your study and claim it proves your pet paranormal phenomenon is real. 

Further Reading

Hyman, Ray. “Evaluation of the Military’s Twenty-Year Program on Psychic Spying.” Skeptical Inquirer, vol. 20, no. 2, March/April 1996, pp. 21-23. Center for Inquiry,  cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1996/03/22165045/p21.pdf.

Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations Into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Little Brown, 2017.

Stranger Things Have Happened: MK-Ultra and CIA Mind Control

In 1925, at the Geneva Conference for the Supervision of the International Traffic in Arms, world leaders took the initiative to renew the international prohibition on chemical warfare that had previously been affirmed in the Versailles Treaty, and to this prohibition was added a ban on what was then a new frontier in warfare, bacteriological weapons. Before World War II, every major world power had ratified the Geneva Protocols, except Japan and the United States, which actually would not ratify it until 1975. Before that time, though, the U.S. would undertake numerous secret experimentation projects that would violate these international standards as well as the forthcoming Nuremberg Code and many of our own laws, in order to keep up in an arms race that may have been, in large part, a paranoid fantasy. Intelligence reports in the early 1940s convinced the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, that the Japanese, that other holdout from the Geneva Protocols, was developing advanced germ weapons, and in response, President Franklin Roosevelt created the first American biological weapons research agency, the War Research Service. By 1943, upon the direct request of Winston Churchill, who feared Nazi Germany was preparing a biological attack on Britain, Roosevelt authorized the Chemical Corps to begin developing and stockpiling biological weapons at its newly designated Biological Warfare Laboratories at Camp Detrick, a training base under the command of the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA. At Churchill’s urging, the US began preparing 500,000 bombs full of anthrax spores, which were thankfully, never used. Throughout the war, administrators of the War Research Service were convinced that Nazis and the Japanese, who were engaged in experimentation on human subjects, were far more advanced in their biological weapons research, and when the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency was formed for the express purpose of recruiting Nazi scientists, those at Camp Detrick took interest. Typically any individual who had been an “ardent Nazi” or had been guilty of war crimes could not be recruited and would have to face a tribunal in Nuremberg, but Operation Paperclip, so called because of the use of paperclips to mark the files of “troublesome” cases, offered a way to bring even the worst Nazi offender into the fold of American scientific intelligence. They simply “bleached” their files, erasing their history of involvement with the SS or the Gestapo and expunging any record of human experimentation. Operation Paperclip is a mainstay in many a modern-day conspiracy theory about the clandestine activities of U.S. intelligence. Regardless of the lack of support for some conspiracy claims that revolve around Operation Paperclip, it is well established that the program existed, and that the U.S. government whitewashed the crimes of Nazi mad scientists so that we could put them to work for ourselves. After all, if we didn’t take them, the Soviets would, or so the justification went. Among the notorious figures who were shielded from international prosecution in exchange for their efforts to further American biological warfare research were Kurt Blome and Shiro Ishii, whose crimes were legendary. Blome murdered thousands of concentration camp prisoners by exposing them to nerve gas, infecting them with typhus, and experimenting with ways to give them cancer. Ishii, at his secretive Unit 731 labs in Manchuria, killed as many as 12,000 test subjects in some of the most horrific experiments ever conducted: exposing them to poison gas, electrocuting them, popping their eyes out in pressurized chambers, injecting subjects with air to cause embolisms, burning them alive with flamethrowers, and freezing them slowly to study hypothermia. He exposed his victims to countless diseases, including cholera, syphilis, bubonic plague, and anthrax. Frequently he concluded his experiments with vivisection, dissecting the subjects while they were still alive in order to better study their organs at the time of death. He was truly a monster, and rather than see him face justice, General Douglas MacArthur guaranteed him immunity in exchange for his expertise. This would prove to be the genesis of state-sponsored American mad science. We may never have committed atrocities at this level, but as you’ll see, we did not balk at secret human experimentation.

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Besides reading thoughtful blog posts, I’m unsure what your preferences are for entertainment. I enjoy a good book, and I stream probably too many movies and series. If you’re like me, you recently enjoyed or intend to soon binge the latest season of Stranger Things. Don’t worry if you haven’t seen the new season or even if you haven’t watched the show at all. I’ll reveal no spoilers here, beyond some vague references to its premise. This series will not be about the show, but rather about its historical and pseudohistorical basis. Recently I overheard someone talking about the program, telling someone else that it is based on real events. To clarify, the show prominently features a character who was the subject of human experimentation sponsored and overseen by the U.S. government. This person was referring to real CIA human experimentation programs and appeared to be suggesting that the American government really did conduct the kind of esoteric research and mad science portrayed in the show. But of course, this is only partially accurate. Clandestine intelligence programs did indeed engage in mind-bending experiments on human subjects, and these certainly did, in part, seem to serve as inspiration for what is portrayed in Stranger Things. You heard me refer to these programs before, in my series UFO Disinfo, which suggested that U.S. intelligence could feasibly be staging UFO sightings and encouraging UFO culture as part of a long-running psychological operation. That, of course, was, admittedly, a conspiracy theory, but it was supported by the fact that we know such psyops and programs that experimented on U.S. citizens definitely existed, having come to light despite being the subject of a massive government cover-up. This is no baseless conspiracy speculation. It happened. However, much of what is presented in Stranger Things, such as secret government development of psychic agents capable of remote viewing and telekinesis, derives from a combination of fact and fiction, and some of it, such as the idea of experimentation on abducted children and the opening of portals, entered the public consciousness through hoaxes and baseless conspiracy claims. In this series, I plan to reveal the astonishing truth of what U.S. government-sponsored mad scientists really did, after which I will descend into the realm of what is exaggerated or misrepresented and what is outright fabrication.

Kurt Blome and Shiro Ishii, two mad doctors guilty of crimes against humanity in WWII whose work was studied and furthered by U.S. scientific intelligence.

After the Second World War, President Harry Truman dissolved the secret intelligence agency the Office of Strategic Services, but in signing the National Security Act two years later, in 1947, he formed a new clandestine intelligence service, the Central Intelligence Agency, to address the threats of Soviet Russia and Red China. Two years into its operations, in 1949, a particular event drove the agency into the business of mad science. That year, the show trial of  Hungarian Catholic Cardinal József Mindszenty struck fear into the Western world. Mindszenty had resisted the Communist ruling party of Hungary, and after his arrest and confinement, he appeared befuddled during his show trial, speaking in an unconvincing monotone as he confessed to charges of conspiracy and treason. Senior CIA officials suspected that Mindszenty’s behavior proved that Communists had developed some revolutionary approach to interrogation or even some sort of mind control technique, accomplished with some drug or through hypnosis, or perhaps by a combination of the two. And the CIA were not alone. In response to the Mindszenty trial, the Chemical Corps formed a secret group at Camp Detrick to develop drugs specifically intended to be used for coercion. The next year, the CIA director approved a new project, called Bluebird, that authorized experimentation on prisoners, defectors, and refugees with the sole purpose of developing “Special Interrogation techniques” that could result in “control of an individual.” That year, as Project Bluebird got up and running, the CIA began to believe its own anti-Communist propaganda. An anti-Communist propagandist who formerly worked for the OSS created a media sensation with an article published in the Miami News alleging that Communist China had perfected a mind control technique the author dubbed “brain washing.” Believing this propaganda entirely, one CIA official who would later rise to become its director, Allen Dulles, focused much of the CIA’s resources on mind control projects. Project Bluebird established secret prisons and torture houses in Germany, and later in Japan, at which they employed former Nazi doctors whose records had been bleached by Operation Paperclip, at which they continued the legacy of Nazi human experimentation, studying all kinds of physical torture techniques and dosing prisoners with a variety of drugs, including amphetamines, heroin, and mescaline, all in an effort to see if these Special Interrogation techniques would make prisoners more cooperative, encourage them to reveal secrets, alter their personalities, or induce amnesia. These operations expressly violated the Nuremberg Code that such experiments be conducted only on witting and willing subjects, but those involved justified such violations through their belief that their enemies were doing the same, and such codes did not apply during conflicts with enemy states who themselves violated the codes. This rationalization was predicated on a fundamental error, though, as it would be revealed years later that Mindszenty and other prisoners who were believed to have been “brain washed” by Communists had not been the victims of some cutting edge drug-induced mind control, but rather had been worked over with rather mundane torture techniques and psychologically manipulated using the well-known, long-used approaches that interrogators had known for decades were effective at breaking spies and prisoners of war.

In 1951, amid the fearmongering of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was creating a paranoid panic by convincing many that Communists had infiltrated every level of American society, Allen Dulles put the CIA’s mind control program into high gear, hiring one Sidney Gottlieb to head the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff—in other words, Project Bluebird, or as they then renamed the expanded program, Project Artichoke. Gottlieb was an unusual fellow, a chemist with a club foot and a love of folk dancing who lived a strange double life, as a spiritual back-to-nature type at home and as a zealot devoted to perfecting mind control at all costs at work. Gottlieb would rise to become the CIA’s mind control czar, as well as its chief developer of poisons and poison delivery systems, and the programs he directed would be responsible for the destruction of countless lives. He is by far the most notorious of American mad scientists, our own Dr. Mengele. Under his auspices, and under the supervision of Morse Allen, the callous former director of Bluebird, the “Special Interrogations” evolved to become known as the “Artichoke Method” and to include far darker practices. Their torture techniques came to include ever more creative and cruel approaches, such as exposing subjects to radiation and extreme heat, and giving them electroshock treatments. Allen unsurprisingly found these practices less than effective, especially electroshock. While he could easily reduce his subjects to vegetative states using this tool, he could not use it to extract information from them, nor could it erase specific memories and leave them otherwise unaffected. It was simply a needlessly elaborate way to lobotomize. Their use of drugs on subjects evolved during these years as well. First they used tetrahydrocannabinol, or what cannabis users may better know as THC, which they referred to as TD, or “truth drug.” But finding that it mostly either relaxed the subject or induced fits of laughter, they moved on to cocaine, hoping that its tendency to induce talkativeness may be useful, but as that talkativeness seemed to derive from elation rather than relaxed inhibitions, it proved useless as well. From there, they tested heroin, but they found this only useful when withheld from addicts, who would be more likely to cooperate in exchange for a fix. Lastly, they turned to psychoactive drugs, more specifically mescaline, following once again in the footsteps of Nazi madmen who had experimented with the drug in Dachau. It is unclear how many of their test subjects at their secret torture houses in Germany may have died, or how comparable their death count may have been to those of their Nazi counterparts, but one document did indicate clearly that the disposal of corpses was “not a problem.”

One of the few extant images of Sidney Gottlieb, head of MK-Ultra, seen here preparing to testify in 1977 about his career with the CIA.

Although Artichoke men did not find mescaline to be useful as a truth drug or mind control agent, another more recently discovered psychoactive drug piqued their interests. Lysergic acid diethylamide-25, more commonly known as LSD or just acid today, was derived by accident from ergot fungus in a Swiss laboratory in 1943. Although very little was produced in Switzerland at first, it showed up on the CIA’s radar, and Artichoke men performed some dosing experiments with it, finding it just as ineffective as other drugs they administered without further, more brutal Artichoke methods applied. Sidney Gottlieb, however, took especial interest in the substance, which he felt bore further study. As has long been common practice among chemists experimenting with drugs, Gottlieb and other scientists used LSD themselves in order to evaluate its effects, and Gottlieb was enamored of it. He marveled at how powerful an effect even the tiniest dose seemed to have and wondered what could be accomplished with larger doses combined with other Artichoke methods, like torture and hypnosis, deciding that LSD would prove to be the key to his quest for mind control. He sent men to Sandoz labs in Switzerland, who had developed the drug, bought out the world’s supply of it, extracted a promise from the lab not to produce any of it for Communist regimes, and then tasked an American pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, with cracking its chemical composition and synthesizing massive amounts for the CIA’s use. Furthermore, believing that environment and personality played a major role in each subject’s reaction to the drug, he convinced his superiors that their experiments must be expanded beyond their current scope. There was only so much they could learn by dosing themselves or dosing prisoners. They needed a variety of people from different backgrounds, who might be experimented on without their knowledge, outside of the specific context of captivity, which did not provide an accurate sense of how the drug might be used in the field. This required a massive domestic program to illegally experiment on civilians, a program that would be “ultra-sensitive” and require the utmost secrecy, with many levels of insulation to prevent all but a few from knowing its extent. Allen Dulles, now director of the CIA, authorized this program with Gottlieb at its head. Gottlieb named it MK-Ultra, using a prefix common for Technical Services Staff projects, along with a cryptonym that indicated how ultra-secret the program must be.

Some of Gottlieb’s early experiments on civilians appear to have been conducted brazenly, in public. In 1952, some agents lured a young American artist named Stanley Glickman to a café in Paris popular among expatriates. There it is likely they dosed Glickman, who panicked when the drug hit him and fled. Seeking treatment at American Hospital, which had a secret relationship with the CIA, Glickman later claimed he was further dosed with hallucinogens and given electroshock. Glickman’s life was ruined. He never resumed his artistry and was transformed into a paranoid recluse for the rest of his years. Meanwhile, in America, he engaged Dr. Paul Hoch of New York Psychiatric Institute to secretly dose one of his patients, a tennis player who was being treated for depression after a divorce. This poor unsuspecting patient, Harold Blauer, was injected with psychoactive drugs 6 times over the course of a month, and when he requested the treatment be stopped, Dr. Hoch injected him with a dose 14 times greater than the previous doses. He died after about 2 hours of flailing. Conscious of the fact that he would need to exercise more discretion, Gottlieb hired George Hunter White, a corrupt narcotics officer and alcoholic who had developed a taste for the drugs he confiscated, to set up a safehouse in New York in which subjects could be unwittingly drugged in a safe and controlled environment completely wired with surveillance so that Gottlieb and others could later examine the resulting behavior. White posed as an artist or a sailor and prowled Greenwich Village, luring underworld types back to the safehouse where he dosed them, confident that their various illicit lifestyles would discourage them from going to the authorities following their experiences, not all of which were unpleasant. And even when a subject inevitably sought medical attention and declared they had been drugged, White’s law enforcement connections protected both him and MK-Ultra. As this safehouse operation continued, Gottlieb remained interested in mental health institutions as useful environments for more terminal experiments, which could be taken to further extremes. In 1953, he arranged with Dr. Harris Isbell of the Addiction Research Center in Kentucky to perform the most egregious LSD experiments ever undertaken. Using drug addicted patients as subjects, many of them African-Americans who technically agreed to the experiments in exchange for a fix of heroin, Isbell administered lysergic acid in exponentially larger doses over the course of 77 days. Even the most ardent enthusiast of the recreational use of LSD will shudder in horror at the thought of tripping every day for two and a half months. It would be mind-breaking.

A photo of the notorious George Hunter White, on file at Stanford Special Collections in Palo Alto, via SFWeekly.

Astonishingly, Gottlieb directed these human drug experiments with immunity until 1953, when finally a slipup of his own caused him some difficulties and threatened to expose MK-Ultra. In the fall of that year, Gottlieb invited several Camp Detrick men to a classified retreat at a cabin on Deep Creek Lake, in Maryland. Among the attendees was one Frank Olson, an expert in the aerosol delivery of chemicals. Olson was a man privy to many sensitive secrets. He had played a role in Operation Sea-Spray, in 1950, when the U.S. Navy attempted to simulate a biological weapons attack by releasing what it believed was a harmless bacteria on San Francisco and ended up making numerous San Franciscans ill with urinary tract infections, one of whom died, and possibly causing a mysterious pneumonia cluster. Recently, after visiting European black sites where Artichoke work continued, he became disillusioned with his work. He confided to a friend that he was troubled by the CIA’s use of drugs and torture on prisoners, and their collaboration with Nazi scientists. Before attending the Deep Creek retreat, he had spoken of resigning. While at the retreat, he and several other Camp Detrick men were unknowingly dosed with LSD by Gottlieb himself, who only informed them after the drug had taken effect. Later reports indicate that, while he was under the influence of the drug, some of his colleagues may have confronted him about his decision to leave the CIA. Afterward, Olson became depressed and preoccupied. His family worried about him. The CIA assigned a psychiatrist to speak with him. He became increasingly agitated over the next several days, and paranoid about being dosed again or being arrested. Just before Thanksgiving, he was taken by his colleagues to New York, where he slipped away and wandered around the city in something like a fugue state. On November 28th, he plunged to his death from the window of a hotel room he shared with Gottlieb’s chief lieutenant, Robert Lashbrook. According to Lashbrook, Olson, in a state of undress, had run across the room and leapt at the window with such force that he crashed through the drawn curtains and the glass to fall to his death. Outside of the exact dimensions and extent of the crimes against humanity committed during the course of the program, Olson’s death is perhaps the central enduring mystery related to MK-Ultra. Was Olson dosed more than once during the days after Deep Creek, thus explaining his increasingly aberrant behavior? Was he targeted by his colleagues as a subject for testing because of his recent reservations about their work? Did he commit suicide, or was he murdered to cover up MK-Ultra? One thing is certain, as evidence would later show: a cover-up did occur. Police were told the death must be kept quiet as a matter of national security, Lashbrook’s background was falsified to investigators, and Olson’s family was handled by convincing them their patriarch had died from a “classified illness” and paying them off with survivor’s benefits. In the end, there were a few investigations, but it resulted, at the time, in nothing more than a memo stating Gottlieb had shown “poor judgement.” It was less of a genuine slap on the wrist and more a pantomime of one.

Afterward, MK-Ultra continued its work in renewed secrecy. George Hunter White moved to San Francisco and opened new safehouses wired for surveillance, this time staffed with prostitutes whom he trained to dose johns, engage in less than typical sex acts with them, and afterward to get their sex partners talking. It was part of a new initiative to study sex in conjunction with drugs as a means of eliciting sensitive information, an initiative White called Operation Midnight Climax. In practice, however, these brothels became dens of debauchery. George White spent most of his time sitting on a portable toilet behind a one-way mirror, watching sex acts and drinking martinis by the pitcher. MK-Ultra contractors and CIA agents, including Sidney Gottlieb, would visit regularly not on business, but rather for pleasure, seeking the free services of sex workers employed by the agency. Meanwhile, MK-Ultra’s engagement of medical professionals to perform horrific human experiments only increased, insulated through an academic organization, The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, which they used as a front to dispense “grant money.” One contractor, who like others was unaware that he actually worked for the CIA, was Donald Ewen Cameron, president of both the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations. At facilities in Canada, Cameron conducted experiments that on their surface seem very similar to those depicted in the fictional program Stranger Things, as they involved sensory deprivation, a procedure that is shown numerous times on the show. But Cameron’s work is far more horrific than it appears in Stranger Things. Believing that he needed to “depattern” the minds of his subjects before they’d be susceptible to the “psychic driving” he attempted in his mind control experiments, Cameron’s subjects were first sedated and then subjected to extreme periods of sensory deprivation. These were not a matter of hours but rather of weeks, and sometimes months, locked in dark water tanks. It resulted in patients forgetting how to walk. Afterward, he administered electroshocks far stronger than any other psychiatrists dared. Finally, the patients were fed LSD and fitted with helmets that played recorded phrases like “My mother hates me” on repeat. These horrifying experiments typically resulted in complete mental breakdown, with subjects reverting to infantile development stages. These were otherwise normal individuals who had come to him for help with issues like anxiety and post-partum depression. The destruction of their minds was nothing less than a state sponsored crime against humanity.

Donald Ewen Cameron, prominent psychologist and conductor of horrific torturous medical experiments funded by the CIA.

There is no telling how many lives were destroyed by the MK-Ultra program over the course of its existence, as after it was finally shut down, having failed to produce any working technological or pharmacological mind control techniques, the CIA had all records relating to the project destroyed during the panic caused by Watergate. What we know only emerged later in the 1970s, when the Presidential Rockefeller Commission, the Congressional Church Committee, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were formally tasked with investigating CIA crimes and abuses. By that time, Gottlieb had retired, and when questioned, he claimed to have little recall of the project’s activities. In 1976, journalist John Marks obtained boxes of redacted files under the Freedom of Information Act and wrote the first definitive exposé of MK-Ultra, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. By that time, the wider effects of Gottlieb’s experiments had been felt by everyone in America, if not the world, as it became clear that his encouragement of experimentation with hallucinogens extended to universities, where major counter-culture figures like Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey helped to spread its use as a recreational drug and means of enlightenment among the general populace. And as the years have passed, more and more people have come forward to sue the CIA for being the unwitting subjects of their experiments, including Frank Olson’s family, who went on a crusade against the agency. We have further learned that their psychological experiments may have unexpectedly resulted in mass murders. It was in later years revealed that mafia figure Frank “Whitey” Bulger had been extensively experimented on early in his prolific criminal career, during which he murdered 19 or more. The Unabomber, Ted Kaszynski, was also part of an abusive, CIA sponsored psychological experiment during his time at Harvard, long before his reign of terror. And there is even a conspiracy theory that Charles Manson was the subject of CIA experiments, although I am not prepared right now to evaluate those claims, which smack a bit of unsupported conspiracy speculation. Suffice it to say that the extent of the terrible effects of these Nazi-esque crimes committed by U.S. intelligence can only be speculated on. And at the end of John Marks’ revelatory book, he speculates about the different directions that MK-Ultra mind control research may have taken afterward, under some other classified cryptonym. He mentions genetic engineering, a science that we know has grown by leaps and bounds, as well as brain stimulation, the domination of subjects by surgically inserting electrodes to remotely stimulate specific areas of the brain, a deeply unsettling prospect. Lastly, he suggests that they may have directed their funding toward secret research with a more fantastical focus, such as extra-sensory perception or other psychic abilities. This notion is certainly reflected in fiction like Stranger Things, which promotes the idea of secret government research in this area, and in Part Two, we’ll see to what extent this is, surprisingly, quite true.

Further Reading

Kinzer, Stephen. Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. Henry Holt and Company, 2019.

Marks, John. The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control; The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences. W. W. Norton & Company, 1991.

Gun Violence in America

In Manhattan, in January of 1911, satirical novelist and muckraking journalist David Graham Phillips took his usual route from his Gramercy Park apartment to the Princeton Club, a private club for the Ivy League university’s alumni. Phillips cut a tall, impressive figure, wearing light summer suits in winter, handsome with striking pale eyes. When he arrived at the club, a man he did not know approached him, lifted a handgun, and fired several bullets into Phillips, crying out “Here you go!” before shooting himself in the head. As Phillips slowly died from his gunshot wounds, he expressed confusion about who his murderer had been, but police had little trouble determining the motive, remembering that Phillips had not long ago come to them about a series of threatening letters he’d received. His killer was Fitzhugh Goldsborough, the deranged son of a wealthy family whom he believed Phillips was lampooning his fiction, some of which satirized rich, entitled youth. The coroner who examined their corpses, who regularly corresponded with the press to offer them grisly statistics on New York deaths, afterward spearheaded a campaign against the easy acquisition and public carrying of concealable handguns, a campaign that was met with much public support. Just five months before the murder/suicide outside the Princeton Club, a dockworker had shot popular New York Mayor William Gaynor in the neck. Gaynor had survived, but the incident had touched off a robust debate about whether mental illness, or the media, or our national culture had contributed to the crime. After the Phillips murder, the debate shifted to focus on the fact that a disgruntled and violent individual had been so easily able to acquire a gun and carry it to the marina where the mayor was waiting to board a steamship. The push for gun legislation in 1911 was further championed by a State Senator named Timothy Sullivan, who framed the campaign as a solution to gang violence. The reign of terror of certain street gangs was very real to New Yorkers. Less than ten years earlier, the Jewish-American-dominated Eastman Gang of the Lower East Side had clashed with the Italian-American dominated Five Points Gang in a bloody shootout on Rivington and Allen Streets. When police arrived, the two gangs turned their guns on the officers. The streets had been transformed into a warzone, and in the intervening years, the gang wars had continued. Senator Sullivan introduced gun control legislation in 1911 that instituted licensing for the possession of any firearm and left the decision of whether to issue a carry license up to the licensing authority, the police, who rarely granted the privilege of carrying firearms in public. This gun control law has been criticized as a way for Tammany Hall politician Timothy Sullivan, portrayed by his rivals and critics as a crime lord himself, to have his adversaries arrested by having firearms planted on them. Indeed, it’s been said that some street toughs took to sewing their pockets shut so that police could not plant handguns on them. It has also been argued that police racially-profiled members of immigrant communities when enforcing the law, which certainly seems to be the case. The first man imprisoned under the law was an Italian, and in an editorial after his conviction, the New York Times praised the judge for the 1-year sentencing, saying that it “suitably impressed the minds of aliens in New York that the Sullivan law forbids their bearing arms of any kind,” while also, to their credit, asking, “would it not be well to ‘get after’ the notorious characters who are not aliens?” and conceding that “’frisking’ such persons is less common, perhaps, than it ought to be.” Regardless of such ulterior motives or corrupt enforcement policies, though, the Sullivan Law shows us that there was a time, before the rise of the powerful gun lobby, that gun violence could be responded to with reasonable gun control legislation. While there is evidence that this law greatly reduced suicide rates, there is no evidence that it reduced New York homicides, and certainly it did not prevent Payton Gendron from legally buying a Bushmaster XM-15 assault rifle at a gun shop in Endicott, New York, and opening fire on the patrons of a Buffalo supermarket in the recent racially-motivated massacre. I would argue, though, that it is difficult to quantify what heinous crimes by mentally ill individuals might have been prevented just because they were discouraged by the licensing process. But regardless, what the law shows us is that, a hundred years ago, it was not portrayed as un-American to consider gun control legislation in order to reduce gun violence. But as I sat down to write this, it was in the news that the conservative activist justices packed onto our Supreme Court, who also just overturned established precedent in order to reduce civil liberties and rescind reproductive rights, have also ruled this New York gun control legislation unconstitutional. And they have done this in the wake of the most heinous school shooting since the Sandy Hook Massacre, just one month after nineteen children and two teachers were shot dead at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. To put a little perspective on this, the same gun rights activists who protest the push for sane gun control measures in the wake of every mass shooting, arguing that it’s more appropriate to mourn quietly than to demand real social change after such a tragedy, are simultaneously applauding the erosion of established firearms legislation during a mass shooting’s aftermath. This is Historical Blindness. I’m Nathaniel Lloyd. And I don’t want to hear that “Now is not the time” evasion. It is long past time to talk about Gun Violence in America.

Welcome to Historical Blindness. Whenever a gun rights proponent tells you that it’s not appropriate to discuss change or legislation in the wake of some gun violence, they are displaying a clear blindness to history. In modern America, that is the only time when significant gun control legislation has ever been passed, and it used to be that the Nation Rifle Association supported such legislation and even helped draft it. Among these reactive gun control measures were the 1934 National Firearms Act and the Federal Firearms Act of 1938. These measures were enacted in direct response to the gangland gun violence of the Prohibition Era and mass murders such as the St. Valentines Day Massacre of 1929, when seven Irish gangsters were stood against a garage wall and gunned down. The more direct impetus, though, was the attempt of a lone gunman on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s life in Miami in 1933, when he was President Elect. The attempt failed, though the Mayor of Chicago was killed in the hail of bullets fired by the assassin. Recently, a conspiracy theory emerged that the assassin was working for the mafia and that the mayor was his true target, but at the time, the fact that a lone fanatic with a revolver bought from a pawn shop could come so close to ending his life put a fire under Roosevelt to push for gun control legislation. At first, the National Firearms Act was intended to require the registration and prohibitive taxation of all firearms, including handguns like the one that had nearly killed Roosevelt, but in the end, it ended up only focusing on “gangster weapons,” including machine guns and short-barreled shotguns and rifles. The later firearms act of 1938 made licensing a further requirement of gun sellers, and prohibited the sale of firearms to certain persons, such as felons. The NRA again supported these measures. They were, after all, founded as a sporting and marksmanship club focused on promoting gun safety. In fact, the year after the 1938 legislation was passed, the President of the NRA, Karl Frederick, stated “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” 30 years later, in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, after learning that Lee Harvey Oswald had acquired the murder weapon through the mail on the cheap with an NRA coupon, the NRA agreed that the mail-order sale of guns must be prohibited. And again, after the further assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the NRA was very involved with the drafting of the Gun Control Act of 1968, which replaced and updated the two existing firearms acts, introducing serial numbers, a minimum age for gun ownership, a restriction on sales across state lines, and the prohibition of sales to known drug addicts and the mentally ill. What those without historical blindness must see is that there is a long history of passing gun control measures in response to acts of gun violence, and that the NRA used to champion the gun control legislation that today they call unconstitutional.

The aftermath of the attempted assassination of Roosevelt in Miami, when Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak was shot.

Although the NRA supported and helped craft the Gun Control Act of 1968, we see the beginning of their transformation about this time, as they used their influence to block the most sweeping of the bill’s measures, including the licensing of all gun carriers and a national registry of all firearms. President Lyndon B. Johnson called them out for this in a speech, saying “The voices that blocked these safeguards were not the voices of an aroused nation. They were the voices of a powerful lobby, a gun lobby,” and within a couple years, the entire platform of the NRA would change after an ill-fated raid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, during which an NRA member who was believed to be stockpiling weapons illegally, was shot and paralyzed. After that, the NRA began to oppose any federal enforcement of gun control legislation, and began to tout the Second Amendment as a protection of an individual’s right to keep and bear arms, which it was never intended to be. I’ll explain and support this further later in the episode, but suffice it to say that the argument of individual gun rights being protected by the Constitution never even came up in the debate over the sweeping gun control legislation of the 1930s, and such rhetoric had previously been the domain of militant groups like the Black Panthers, whom the NRA had vehemently opposed and whose supposed right to publicly carry firearms they refused to recognize when just a couple years earlier, in 1967, they had supported the Mulford Act in California, a bill to prohibit the carrying of loaded firearms publicly without a permit. Ever since this turn to the right in the 1970s, when new leadership set out to become the obstructive political force they remain today, the NRA defined and constructed gun ownership as a social identity, and for many gun owners, including some close family members of mine, it is one of the major pillars of their personal identity. They cultivated this notion of gun ownership as a social identity principally through their longstanding publication, American Rifleman, and thereafter politicized this social identity, such that support for gun rights has become a conservative Republican litmus test. Because of the NRA’s influence on their constituency, as well as because of their large campaign contributions, the major political figures and media apparatus of the right have further encouraged the notion of gun ownership as a distinct and legitimate social identity, one that Republicans claim as their own. Like the modern Republican Party generally, seemingly devastating scandals have arisen that should have caused the NRA’s dissolution entirely. After the 2016 election, it was revealed in a U.S. Senate Committee on Finance Minority Staff report that the NRA had become a Russian asset in its election meddling campaign, demonstrating that NRA officials sought out Russian money and facilitated the political access of known Kremlin agents, including Maria Butina. Republican apologists for the NRA argue that they were acting as individuals rather than on behalf of the NRA, but subsequent investigations by the New York Attorney General have revealed widespread fraud and cronyism in their organization. But the NRA simply left New York for Texas, declaring bankruptcy, and appears to be no less influential after these scandals. As one President who took money from them to further their agenda once said of himself, they could probably shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose supporters.

Despite the growing power of the NRA to kibosh any gun control legislation, they have been unable to stop certain major gun control legislation, especially when it is enacted on a wave of outrage after an infamous act of gun violence. Early on they even found themselves at odds with their Republican allies. After he was shot by John Hinckley, Jr., in 1981, Ronald Reagan supported the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, more commonly known as the Brady Bill, which mandated background checks and a waiting period. By the time the act was passed, the NRA was able to get the five-day waiting period replaced by an instant computer background check, and until such a system could be put in place, they sought to fight the mandate. They financed a series of lawsuits in an effort to take the bill to the Supreme Court, which they succeeded in doing in 1997, winning an opinion that compelling law enforcement to run background checks was unconstitutional. The decision had little effect, though, since state and local law enforcement mostly chose to continue running the background checks of their own accord, and soon the background check database was in place. By this time, though, there was a much broader piece of gun control legislation for the NRA to fight, this one too passed in the wake of an act of gun violence that could not be ignored. On January 17th, 1989, a station wagon full of fireworks that had been parked behind Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California, not far from my own home town, was set on fire, creating something of a distraction as a deranged and suicidal drifter in a flak jacket named Patrick Purdy set foot on the school’s playground, took position behind a portable building with an AK-47 that he had acquired quite easily at a gun shop in Oregon, and started firing. He wounded more than thirty that day, and he murdered five children before taking his own life. The unthinkably heinous act resulted in numerous pieces of gun control legislation. In California, the Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989 prohibited the transfer and ownership of more than 50 different semi-automatic assault weapons, the George H. W. Bush administration banned the importation of assault weapons that the ATF determined had no “sporting purpose,” and in 1994, a Federal Assault Weapons Ban was passed along with the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of that year. The Assault Weapons Ban prohibited large capacity magazines and, much like the California law, banned the manufacture of specific semi-automatic assault weapons for use by civilians. Rather than restrictions on handguns, it is measures like these, meant specifically to fight mass public shootings, that gun control advocates have been urging after every mass shooting for the last 20 years. We have had them in place before, and it did not result in tyranny. The only reason we must advocate for these restrictions again is that the Assault Weapons Ban had an expiration date, and in 2004, it was not renewed.

Portraits of the children murdered by Patrick Purdy, from clevelandschoolremembers.org

Let us look further at the ten years 1994 to 2004, when the Federal Assault Weapons Ban was in place. Perhaps this seems rather a recent time period for a history podcast to be discussing, but since gun rights proponents act like banning assault weapons would spell out certain doom for our democracy, it seems memories are so short that we must remind many that less than 20 years ago we had such a federal law and it wasn’t the end of the world. In fact, it appears to have had a measurable effect on gun violence. The entire rationale behind the ban was that violent incidents involving assault weapons and high-capacity magazines typically involve more shots, more victims, and more wounds, and statistics support this assertion. Rather ridiculously, assault weapon apologists argue that the recoil of these weapons means worse aim and thus we cannot assume assault weapons are better able to strike more people. If that were the case, of course, it just makes them even more useless for sport or home defense, rendering them suitable only for spraying rounds into crowds. In other words, it just proves they are unsuitable for civilian use and especially dangerous in the hands of a mass murderer. Critics of the Assault Weapons Ban also claim it had little to no effect on crime, but the hard data disputes this. According to a 2001 study of the impacts of the ban in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, not only did criminal use of assault weapons decline in the years after the passage of the Assault Weapons Ban, but gun murders generally declined around 10%. Critics contend there is no proof of causation, that this reduction in gun homicides may have been due to other factors or the cyclical nature of crime stats, but since the ban’s expiration, the share of crimes involving high-capacity semiautomatics has increased from 33% to 112%, according to a 2018 study in the Journal of Urban Health. Still, mass shootings continued to occur during the years of the ban, including one of the worst school shootings in our history, the Columbine High School Massacre of 1999, whose perpetrators used weapons that remained unbanned, including a variant of the banned semiautomatic TEC-9 pistol that because of its slightly different name, the TEC-DC9, remained legal. Rather than proving that the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban was pointless, though, this instead proves that it was, if flawed, still working, and rather than abandoning it, such a ban should be improved, and such loopholes closed. Looking closely at data on mass shootings collected by Mother Jones, we can see that 18 mass public shootings occurred during the decade before the ban, while 15 mass shootings occurred during the ban. The difference between these decades may not appear striking, but let’s look at the decades since the ban’s expiration. During the ten years after its expiration, mass public shootings more than doubled, to 36, including the devastating Viginia Tech and Sandy Hook Massacres. And in the following 8 years, up to today, 61 mass shootings have occurred, and actually more, since Mother Jones’s data ceases in mid-June and these horrific crimes seem to be perpetrated weekly at this point. (In fact, as I was editing this podcast episode, I was compelled to record this insert to acknowledge that on Independence Day, a shooter in Highland Park, IL, injured 47 and killed 7 by firing at parade-goers with a high-powered rifle from a nearby rooftop. During the aftermath, a Republican state senator urged everyone to “move on.”) It is certainly true that not all of these mass shootings were committed using assault weapons, but almost all are committed using semiautomatic weapons with removable high-capacity magazines. As of 2017, according to the aforementioned study published by the Journal of Urban Health, “Assault weapons and other high-capacity semiautomatics appear to be used in a higher share of firearm mass murders (up to 57% in total).” Furthermore, a 2019 comparative study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery found that during the decade of the federal ban on assault weapons, mass shootings were 70% less likely to occur. But even if we were to discover that banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines did not reduce the growing number of these mass shooting incidents, perhaps it would at least make a difference in the average number of victims, making such incidents far less deadly. There is no logical reason that I can see not to update, improve, and renew the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. Only conservative ideology and an entrenched, uniquely American gun culture stand in the way.

What makes America different from other Western democracies, and other nations generally, that we have developed this deep-rooted gun culture? Make no mistake, we are different. Among the top 10 countries that tolerate civilian gun ownership, we simply own more, at an estimated 120 guns per 100 residents, more than twice that of the next highest country in gun ownership, Yemen, according to the 2018 Small Arms Survey. When we look at gun murders as a percentage of all homicides in 2020, as reported by the BBC, it appears one is far more likely to be shot to death in America than in any other democracy of comparable size. In the UK, gun homicides made up only 4% of gun-related killings, unsurprisingly, considering the UK’s ban on military style weapons and handguns. In Australia, which passed sweeping gun control legislation after a series of mass shootings in the ’80s and ’90s, gun murders stood at only 13% of 2020 murders. In Canada, which generally ensures gun accessibility but maintains stricter controls of the same kind as the US, 2020 saw gun murders comprise 37% of the total. But here in the good ol’ U.S. of A., a whopping 79% of murders were gun-related. And probably because of our spotty and lax laws and the sheer number of guns in hands here, 73% of all mass shootings worldwide between 1998 and 2019 occurred here in America, as determined by a study in the International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice. Our reluctance to address this problem with strong legislation is also pretty unique. Take New Zealand’s response to the 2019 mosque shootings in Christchurch as an example. Within a month, the government had passed legislation banning semiautomatics and magazines, and within a few more months, they created a national firearms register and tightened restrictions on gun licensing. Their quick action to address the problem should make Americans feel ashamed of our own government response. We may be tempted to blame the NRA for this gun culture entirely, but that would be inaccurate. The connection between Americans and guns stretches back a long time before the NRA was ever formed in 1871 as a marksmanship club. Some have suggested that gun culture originated in the Wild West, when it is thought that every man must go about armed, and good guys with guns stood down bad guys with guns on a daily basis, but much of the tales of the American West are exaggerated. In fact, an opposing argument could be made that the Wild West was actually the origin place of American gun control laws, as Western towns nearly universally decreed that no one within town could carry a firearm, according to gun policy scholar Adam Winkler, and these “blanket ordinances” resulted in actually very low crime rates in such notorious towns as Deadwood, Dodge City, and Tombstone. Others might see the origin of American gun culture being related to the carrying of pistols by gentlemen, replacing the rapier around 1750 as the symbols of their masculinity, which they wielded in duels over perceived slights, but this fashion originated in Europe rather than the Americas. Certainly guns remain the phallic symbol of many an American male’s sense of manhood today, but in France and Britain, for example, where the most recognizable pistol dueling methods were established, the masculinity of men is no longer dependent on their gun ownership. So what makes American gun culture different?

Image of al old frontier town with the gun control ordinance clearly posted: “The Carrying of Fire Arms Strictly Prohibited.” Courtesy Saint Joseph’s University

Americans’ love affair with deadly weapons can be traced all the way back to our independence, and even earlier. Much can be attributed to the fact that early Americans were colonizers and frontiersmen. By frontiersmen, I don’t mean gunslingers. I mean settlers—farmers, hunters, trappers. Those who sought to tame the wilderness relied on firearms for survival and subsistence. Wild game was a major part of their diet, and occasionally they had need of a firearm for defense against not only some human aggressor, but a dangerous wild predator. Farmers too relied on varmint guns to dispatch vermin that threatened their crops and predators that threatened their livestock. During the many conflicts and skirmishes that can loosely be called part of the American Indian Wars, the average settler’s firearms were used to maintain possession of land they had taken in their encroachments on Native American territories, viewing themselves as acting in self-defense against marauding savages. Therefore, it was not uncommon for young boys to be given rifles as a symbol of their passage into manhood. The frontier and its dangers are long gone now, though, and have been for more than a hundred years, and other nations that began in recent history as a colonial settlement of wilderness, such as Australia, have proven better able to put down the wild gun culture that helped them tame their frontiers. No, America remains different, and this difference can be attributed to our Founding Fathers’ insistence that a right to bear arms is a God-given, inalienable human right—a right not recognized by any other Western democracy. How did gun ownership come to be viewed as a human right here and nowhere else? It all boils down to the politics of the American Revolution. In colonial America, English Whiggery was a popular political force, and the radical Whigs’ distaste for militarism contributed to revolutionary sentiment in America. According to this political position, “standing armies” represented the greatest threat and evil to man’s liberties. To American Whigs, George III’s stationing of troops in the American Colonies was an act of tyranny. After the Boston Massacre, when British soldiers shot five Americans in a crowd that was hurling insults, snowballs, and stones at them, John Adams called it “the strongest proof of the danger of standing armies.” This Whiggish aversion to standing armies, or to George III’s army in particular, is further reflected in the Declaration of Independence, which bemoans the fact that the King “has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures,” and can be seen to have still been on the minds of legislators years after the ratification of our Constitution, when they amended the Constitution to prohibit the quartering of soldiers in civilian houses. To radical English Whigs and American Whigs, or Patriots as they’re sometimes called, the solution to the evils of standing armies was a well-armed citizen militia, members of which could be trusted to act according to civic virtue. George Washington himself saw the folly of this early on, as he found the citizen militiamen under his command “incapable of making or sustaining a serious attack.” A historical myth has been perpetuated that America’s independence was won by the heroism of armed civilians, but in truth, militia troops performed quite poorly compared to Washington’s Continental Army. And after the Revolution, in their effort to bolster their citizen militia, our Founding Fathers endorsed gun laws that today would probably chafe even the most dyed-in-wool gun rights advocates: a 1792 law required all eligible men to buy a gun, report for muster, and register their weapons with the federal government.

It would not be long before the inadequacy of militia forces became apparent to all. In the War of 1812, when undisciplined militiamen embarrassed the country in failed stands against British troops, it became clear we needed to expand our own standing armies and could not rely on a militia. But by that time, the Constitution had already been amended with the Second Amendment, which states, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” I think most people know the argument in favor of gun control pointing out that this amendment only protects the rights of “the people,” meaning the country generally, to bear arms as part of “a well-regulated militia.” That much is apparent in the text. This “right” appears intended only to ensure the existence of a militia, not a well-armed general populace. What I don’t think many citizens realize is that this amendment, like the third amendment about quartering troops, is an artifact of an obsolete political view that America should rely more on militia forces than on a standing army. The fact that the U.S. promptly course-corrected after the War of 1812 and now has one of the largest militaries, and arguably the best equipped military, in the world, means this amendment is logically obsolete and should be subject to repeal and replacement. But even if one refuses to acknowledge that this amendment is only focused on strengthening and safeguarding militia forces, it actually explicitly urges regulation and in no way suggests that such regulation would infringe on the right being described. And it should be emphasized that this is not only the interpretation of modern gun control advocates. Until the latter half of the 20th century, it was the interpretation of legislators and the Supreme Court. In 1886, in their landmark decision on Presser v. Illinois, the Supreme Court held that “state legislatures may enact statutes to control and regulate all organizations, drilling, and parading of military bodies and associations except those which are authorized by the militia laws of the United States [emphasis mine],” clearly finding that the Second Amendment only applied to official national militias. In 1934, when Congress worked to restrict gangster weapons, the Second Amendment was not raised once during congressional testimony, clearly indicating that it wasn’t seen as relevant to such legislation intended to restrict individual access to firearms, and in 1939, when the law was finally challenged under the Second Amendment in the case of the United States v. Miller, the Supreme Court again ruled that the Firearms Act’s restriction of certain guns was entirely Constitutional, in that its provisions did not have any “reasonable relationship to the prevention, preservation, or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.” So there was strong judicial precedent here for the interpretation that the Second Amendment is not even about the individual rights of gunowners and therefore has no bearing on either state or federal gun control legislation. But just as today’s Supreme Court is bent on overturning established precedent based on ideology, conservative justices recently managed to overturn this decision as well. In the 2008 case of District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court decided in favor of the interpretation that the amendment protects an individual’s gun ownership rights, independent of militia affiliation—but even that ideologically split opinion, misguided as it may have been, confirms that “the Second Amendment right is not unlimited” and specifically seeks to preserve longstanding prohibitions on gun possession by felons and the mentally ill, and even suggests that the only firearms protected at those that were in common use at the time of the amendment’s ratification, leaving the door open for the banning of “dangerous and unusual weapons.”

The focus of the Second Amendment on a “well regulated militia” specifically reflects Whig politics at the time and the distrust of “standing armies,” much of which goes back to the Boston Massacre, pictured.

Rather than really contend with this argument about the true intention and purpose of the Second Amendment, though, gun rights activists employ fallacious arguments to present gun control as itself an evil. They will claim, rather absurdly, that the problems of gun violence can only be resolved with more guns, using the “Good Guy with a Gun” argument that if only more people were packing in any given gun crime situation, then criminals could be better stopped before they commit their acts of violence. According to this logic, an increase in unregulated exchanges of gunfire between civilians is viewed as a best case scenario and a solution to violent crime, and a society in which firearms have become as common as cell phones is dreamed of as the safest of societies, despite the obvious additional increase in suicides and lethal gun accidents that such a society would inevitably see. Really clever sophists will even twist history to make gun control laws look evil. These “twistorians,” if you will, point out that the first gun control laws were racist, disarming slaves and free Blacks in order to enforce White Supremacy. There is truth to this argument, which makes it rather insidious. Think of my episodes on the Wilmington Insurrection, when White Supremacists acted to prevent Black citizens from arming themselves against the violence that they were openly planning. The South, and even some Northern states, had always disallowed gun ownership among slaves and free Blacks, for the obvious reason that they feared rebellion, and following the Civil War, many Southern states adopted Black Codes that continued denying firearms to Black citizens. Enforcing this disarmament were armed white posses, called Regulators, who ran roughshod through Black communities. Some of these went about their marauding masked and called themselves the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, in the 1860s, legislation like the Freedmen’s Bureau Act and the first Civil Rights Acts, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment, were indeed intended, at least in part, to guarantee freedmen the same rights to bear arms in self-defense that their white oppressors enjoyed. Yet still, Southern states remained intent on disarming Black communities under Jim Crow. In the 1880s, faced with the growing scourge of lynching, Southern Blacks armed themselves and in several cases fought off bands of murderers. Through the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century, Black communities continued their tradition of arming themselves to fight back during race massacres, like those in Colfax, Louisiana; Wilmington, North Carolina; and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Even during the Civil Rights Movement, passive resisters were aided by armed community defense organizations. And the Black Panthers, as previously mentioned, were the OG gun rights absolutists. All of this is absolutely true, and yet entirely irrelevant to the self-evident fact that stronger background checks and laws prohibiting the ownership of high-capacity assault weapons are necessary to reduce mass public shootings.

While statistics on gun ownership are lacking without instituting a comprehensive national system of gun registration, according to Pew Research Center, as of 2017, white men are twice as likely to report owning a gun as non-white men. And I’m willing to go out on a limb and predict, in the absence of firm data on the subject, that it’s white men by far who possess high capacity assault rifles of the sort that most gun control advocates today want to ban in order to reduce mass public shootings. However, Black Americans far more commonly report having been shot or threatened with a gun compared to white Americans. The simple fact that, today, gun violence disproportionately affects Black Americans, making them 10 times more likely to die by gun homicide, and making their children 14 times more likely to be shot and killed according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, certainly highlights the fact that any reduction in gun violence achieved through stronger gun control legislation will logically save Black American lives. Let us not forget that many recent mass shootings, like the recent massacre in Buffalo, the 2021 shooting in Winthrop, MA, the 2019 shooting at a Walmart in El Paso as well as the Dayton, Ohio, Entertainment District shooting literally hours later, the 2015 shooting at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, and the 1999 Independence Day weekend spree killings across the Midwest, were committed by white supremacists as hate crimes against one race group or another. Times change. Gun rights used to be a racial justice issue, but now gun control is. Gun rights proponents who raise the issue of the racist origins of gun control either haven’t thought out their argument or are deflecting with a bad faith argument. No legislation to disarm some races and not others is proposed by advocates of stricter gun control, nor would any such legislation ever be passed as long as the 14th Amendment remains in place. So if these gun rights advocates are worried about inequality before the law and selective enforcement, about gun laws disarming minorities unfairly because of discriminatory implementation by authorities, then they are essentially acknowledging the existence of systemic racism, which, at the risk of stereotyping, a lot of these guys don’t really want to do, as fixing that would mean restructuring society, especially when it comes to the justice system and urban planning. We don’t fight systemic racism by refusing to pass necessary laws for fear they will be inequitably imposed; rather, we fight it by exposing and correcting the inequities themselves.

Howard Unruh, whose “Walk of Death” is widely regarded as the first mass public shooting of the modern sort.

The bare fact that mass public shootings have evolved since the time of our Founding Fathers, in ways they likely did not imagine, to become a unique societal evil today, stands as evidence that something must be done, and especially here, where it may not have begun, but where it is by far at its worst. The first mass shooting as we might define it today occurred in Hyderabad, in what is now Pakistan, in 1878, when an Iranian infantryman murdered his lover for her infidelity and then went on a shooting spree. However, the United States, shamefully, may be the origin of the mass school shooting. Some point to a massacre at a school during Pontiac’s War in 1764 as the first, but I would count that as a raid perpetrated by a band of Delaware during a time of war. Rather, the first genuine school shootings in U.S. history, according to our more modern understanding of such acts, occurred back to back in 1891, when one man attended a school exhibition in Liberty, Mississippi, and fired his shotgun into a crowd of students and teachers, and another man, only twelve days later, entered a parochial school in Newburgh, New York, and fired his shotgun at students on a playground. But it was not until the mid-20th century, 150 years after the ratification of the Bill of Rights, that the true horror of mass public shootings began to reveal itself, when Howard Unruh, a disturbed veteran, took his “Walk of Death” in 1949, strolling through his neighborhood and shooting thirteen men, women, and children dead. The 1960s saw mass shootings evolve to sniper attacks, when a California teen injured ten and killed three by taking potshots at vehicles on the highway with his father’s rifle before killing himself, and when a Marine sharpshooter perched in the University of Texas clock tower managed to murder fifteen people and wound thirty-one others before being killed by authorities. After a spate of mass shootings by deranged postal workers in the 1980s and ’90s, as well as since, the narrative around mass shootings was focused for a time on workplace shootings, and the term “going postal” was coined, referring to being driven to violence by anger and frustration related to one’s occupation. But today, mass public shootings have become so common, and have evolved with the weapons being used to become so much deadlier, that the old terms spree killing, postal killing, workplace shooting, sniper attack, and even mass murder, seem inadequate, either too narrow or too vague to really describe the problem. Mass public shootings are a national dilemma that the Founding Fathers just could not have anticipated. To use a frequently raised but I think apt analogy, the problem can be likened to automobile deaths. Because of the unsafe and sometimes reckless use of a technology that was not around at the framing of our Constitution or the ratification of our Bill of Rights, annual deaths in motor vehicle accidents were exceedingly high for a long time. Just as the gun lobby today resists regulation, automobile manufacturers then resisted vehicle safety legislation, but it was passed regardless, increasing safety standards for automobile manufacturers and requiring the installation of seat belts. Legislators recognized a uniquely modern public safety hazard and took legislative action to remedy it, resulting in a significant reduction of road fatalities. I guess we are just fortunate that, in that case, there was not some outmoded constitutional amendment about the freedom of saddle makers to decide on what safety straps to manufacture, or the rights of stagecoach drivers and carriage passengers to sit on their benches unencumbered by restraints.

To clarify my position, I am not urging total civilian disarmament. I firmly believe that the populace should have access to well-regulated firearms for home protection and sport. And I even have some sympathy for the central conviction of most gun rights advocates that the right to bear arms is an important safeguard against tyranny. But the threat of tyranny was far more imminent in the wake of American Independence, whereas today it only seems to fuel the baseless conspiracy fantasies of paramilitary militia men and seditionists. These gun rights advocates have feared an oppressive government declaring martial law for decades, imagining that every mass shooting is actually a staged “false flag” operation to be used as justification for a clampdown and a total disarmament of the populace that never actually occurs. For 8 years, the gun-toting right was certain that Obama intended to disarm the populace so he could establish some kind of socialist dictatorship. What really happened was that he urged the passage of sane gun legislation, which was killed by the Republican Senate minority through the abuse of the filibuster. In fact, the closest we’ve come to a President actually declaring martial law was when Obama’s successor, a gun rights advocate who took a lot of money from the NRA, looked into imposing martial law, not to take guns but rather to overturn lawful election results in a coup d’état. The hypocrisy of gun rights advocates who fear an oppressive government turning around and supporting a literal attempt to overthrow our government is profound. As is the hypocrisy of our conservative-packed activist Supreme Court bench, who defend the authority of state governments to interfere with women’s bodily autonomy but deny the authority of a state government to regulate firearms. The fact is, gun control must be viewed as a pro-life issue, as the Catholic Church has long argued. Those who believe themselves the moral champions of life need to start advocating for the protection of it after birth. The fact that we, as a country, did not come together to protect our children from mass shootings after Sandy Hook, and that now, after the recurrent horror that occurred at Uvalde many continue to resist, is a national shame. And it will only get worse if we don’t wake up and smell the blood of our children.

Further Reading

“America’s Gun Culture – in Seven Charts.” BBC, 25 May 2022, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41488081.

Briggs, William. How America Got Its Guns : A History of the Gun Violence Crisis. University of New Mexico Press, 2017. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com.libdbmjc.yosemite.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1423319&site=ehost-live.

Christopher S. Koper, and Jeffrey A. Roth. “The Impact of the 1994 Federal Assault Weapon Ban on Gun Violence Outcomes: An Assessment of Multiple Outcome Measures and Some Lessons for Policy Evaluation.” Journal of Quantitative Criminology, vol. 17, no. 1, 2001, pp. 33–74, https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007522431219.

Clarke, Kevin, and James Martin. “A History of Violence: Gun Control in America.(VANTAGES Ql NT: 1967-2013).” America (New York, N.Y. : 1909), vol. 215, no. 2, 2016, p. 31–.

Coleman, Arica L. “When the NRA Supported Gun Control.” TIME, 29 July 2016, time.com/4431356/nra-gun-control-history/.

Depew, Briggs. “The Effect of Concealed-Carry and Handgun Restrictions on Gun-Related Deaths: Evidence from the Sullivan Act of 1911.” The Economic Journal, vol. 132, no. 646, August 2022, pp. 2118–2140, doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueac004.

DiMaggio, Charles et al. “Changes in US mass shooting deaths associated with the 1994-2004 federal assault weapons ban: Analysis of open-source data.” The journal of trauma and acute care surgery vol. 86,1 (2019): 11-19. doi:10.1097/TA.0000000000002060.
Duwe, Grant, et al. “Forecasting the Severity of Mass Public Shootings in the United States.” Journal of Quantitative Criminology, vol. 38, no. 2, 2021, pp. 385–423, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-021-09499-5.
Eddlem, Thomas R. “The Racist Origin of America’s Gun Control Laws.” The New American (Belmont, Mass.), vol. 30, no. 18, 2014, p. 35–.

Fortgang, Erika. “How They Got the Guns: A Look at How School Shooters Are Getting Weapons So Easily.” Rolling Stone, 10 June 1999, www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/how-they-got-the-guns-175676/.

“Gun Violence Is a Racial Justice Issue.” Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, 2019, www.bradyunited.org/issue/gun-violence-is-a-racial-justice-issue.

Hofstadter, Richard. “America as a Gun Culture.” American Heritage, vol. 21, no. 6, October 1970, www.americanheritage.com/america-gun-culture.  

Kopel, David, and Joseph Greenlee. “The Racist Origin of Gun Control Laws.” The Hill, 22 Aug. 2017, thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/civil-rights/347324-the-racist-origin-of-gun-control-laws/.

Krajicek, David J. “How Author's Death Over 100 Years Ago Helped Shape New York's Gun Laws.” New York Daily News, 19 Jan. 2013, www.nydailynews.com/news/justice-story/1911-shooting-led-ny-gun-law-article-1.1240721.

Lopez, German. “How Gun Control Works in America, Compared with 4 Other Rich Countries.” Vox, 14 March 2018, www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/12/4/9850572/gun-control-us-japan-switzerland-uk-canada.

Lacombe, Matthew J. “The Political Weaponization of Gun Owners: The National Rifle Association’s Cultivation, Dissemination, and Use of a Group Social Identity.” The Journal of Politics, vol. 81, no. 4, 2019, pp. 1342–56, https://doi.org/10.1086/704329.

Platt, Daniel. “New York Banned Handguns 100 Years Ago ... Will We Ever See that Kind of Gun Control Again?” History News Network, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/141708.

Silva, Jason R. “Global Mass Shootings: Comparing the United States Against Developed and Developing Countries.” International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, 21 March 2022. Taylor & Francis Online, doi.org/10.1080/01924036.2022.2052126.

Spitzer, Robert. “How the NRA Evolved from Backing a 1934 Ban on Machine Guns to Blocking Nearly All Firearm Restrictions Today.” The Conversation, 25 May 2022, theconversation.com/how-the-nra-evolved-from-backing-a-1934-ban-on-machine-guns-to-blocking-nearly-all-firearm-restrictions-today-183880.

Winkler, Adam. “The Secret History of Guns.” The Atlantic, Sep. 2011, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608/.

The Deluge and the Ark Seekers

The literal interpretation of the Bible has throughout history resulted in conflicts with and repudiations of science. The view of the Earth as round or of the Sun being the center of the solar system, for example, were strongly contested by biblical literalists who believed that, if the revelations of their ancient scriptures appeared to contradict a scientific revelation, then science must be wrong. Perhaps no field of science has come into greater conflict with religion than that of geology. According to Judeo-Christian tradition, God created all things over the course of six days at the beginning of time, which was almost universally placed by theologians around 4000 BCE. Thus, the discovery of fossil remains became problematic. As early as the 6th century BCE, philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon recognized that fossils were the remains of living creatures, and the great age of these remains was apparent. The presence of lifeforms that may have preceded Adam challenged two biblical notions: that no life existed prior to Adam’s creation, and that death did not exist until after the Fall of Man. Early attempts by Christian theologians to address these problems tended to the absurd. They claimed that fossils represented the early models of abandoned creations, a notion that conceives of God as a kind of tinkerer in a workshop and would seem to undercut the claim of God’s omniscience and infallibility. Otherwise, fossils were thought of by churchmen as “sports of nature,” or “capricious fabrications of God,” hidden purposely within the Earth, likely as a test of mankind’s faith in the Bible. This notion of scientific discoveries that contradicted biblical claims being tests of faith would be asserted again and again. But men of faith had another explanation up their sleeves to account for fossils: the Flood of Noah. Most of us likely know the story. Angered at the sinfulness of mankind, as well as the sexual escapades of certain rebel angels among humanity, God sent forth a deluge to wipe the slate clean. The fountains of the deep broke up, and the windows of heaven opened, and it rained for forty days and forty nights, drowning the entirety of the earth, even the highest mountains, killing all living things, even every creeping thing, except for Noah’s family and a breeding pair of every animal, who were saved from the flood in a massive boat constructed according to God’s design to preserve life. This was the perfect explanation for fossils as it was supported by the Bible and did not threaten Judeo-Christian belief, and thus early Christian apologists, like Tertullian and St. Augustine, took it up and spread it wide. In the Renaissance, though, it began to be questioned by thinkers such as Leonardo DaVinci and Bernard Palissy. In the 17th century,  Nicholas Steno pioneered the science of stratigraphy, laying the foundation, so to speak, of our modern geological principle of the superposition of rock strata, and in the 18th century, the father of modern geology, James Hutton, by examining such strata, first began to recognize the enormity of the geologic time scale. The science was irrefutable, and despite some orthodox holdouts, like Cotton Mather and others in the 19th century who believed mastodon bones were actually the bones of Nephilim giants destroyed in the Flood, gradually the thinking men of Christianity defected and came to recognize that the findings of geologists could no longer be denied, necessitating some change in their understanding of the age of the Earth and the narratives in the Bible. The fact that science and reason won out in the late 19th century may be surprising to those of us today, who, like me, were raised to believe that dinosaur bones were baked into the earth at Creation just to mess with our minds, that the Grand Canyon was formed by the Biblical Flood, and that Noah’s Ark was sitting atop a mountain in the Near East somewhere, waiting to be discovered by some brave Indiana Jones-esque archeologist. What happened between then and now to so reverse the victory of science over religious superstition?

There is a name for what happened after the 19th century victory of science over biblical literalism to explain the commonality of modern belief in the literal and inerrant truth of the Bible. We can identify as the principal reason for this change the rise of Fundamentalism, a global religious phenomenon at the beginning of the 20th century that sought to move society away from secularism and revert to a religious order, enshrining spiritual traditions over democratic or humanistic values. Specifically, in the United States, the Christian Fundamentalist revival reacted strongly against the influx of non-Protestant immigrant populations and their growing awareness of other world religions, as well as against the perceived elitism of educators who taught concepts they felt were at odds with the teachings of their scriptures. Sound familiar? One of the principal scientific doctrines that Christian fundamentalists opposed was that of evolution, which, because of the great time frames required, they felt contradicted the story of a 6-day creation in Genesis and the long formerly held notion that Creation had occurred only about 6000 years ago. In opposition to the teaching of evolution, Fundamentalists began to call their literalist biblical view Creationism, and to suggest it was an equally scientific alternative. Formerly, Creationists were content to alter their views of the Biblical story of Creation to accommodate science. These Old Earth Creationists suggested that each day of Creation actually represented an entire geological age, or that there was a gap of millions of years between the creation of heaven and earth and the creation of light, a gap omitted and unacknowledged in Genesis chapter one. But more and more, such an accommodating view seemed unacceptable to fundamentalist Creationists. One writer who rejected anything but the most strictly literal reading of Genesis was George McCready Price, a Seventh-Day Adventist. Price adhered to the teachings of his religion’s founder, Ellen G. White, who emphasized the infallibility of scriptures and who wrote extensively about visions she’d had regarding the global flood described in Genesis. Price published his pseudo-scientific Creationist writings extensively, between 1906 and his death in 1963, and even posthumously. His writings attacked evolution by exposing what he claimed were logical errors made by theoretical geologists. He criticized all the principles of stratigraphy and propped up a form of flood geology updated for the 20th century. The scientific community did not take his work seriously and his writings even drew refutation from prominent fossil experts like David Starr Jordan, the President of Stanford University, who pointed out that his claims were predicated on “scattering mistakes, omissions, and exceptions against general truths that anybody familiar with the facts in a general way can not possibly dispute.” Nevertheless, when the Scopes monkey trial, the ultimate challenge to evolution in schools, came along, Clarence Darrow relied on Price’s claims in his arguments against the Old Earth Creationist arguments of William Jennings Bryant, who saw that religion could accept science without conflict. After Price’s death, his writings on flood geology were taken up by the next generation of Creationists, who touted the idea of “Creation Science,” a contradiction in terms, of course, since such an event as divine creation cannot be observed and tested and is, therefore, outside the purview of science. Creationists John Whitcomb and Henry Morris even managed to enshrine Price’s version of flood geology as the orthodox position of fundamentalists in their 1961 book, The Genesis Flood. So-called Creation Science was eventually ruled unscientific and kept out of public school science curriculum, as was its successor, “Intelligent Design.” Both were declared little more than thinly-veiled religious crusades pretending at science. But the culture war waged from every fundamentalist preacher’s pulpit has been very successful in turning the minds of congregants like, for example, my parents, against consensus scientific fact, and organizations like the Institute for Creation Research and the Discovery Institute, as well as countless Creationist websites and groups, continue to cast doubt on the scientific reality of the great age of the earth, which has since been empirically confirmed through observation and testing countless times, such that it is beyond reasonable doubt.

George McCready Price, the resuscitator of flood geology and champion of “Creation Science.”

Ever since the Renaissance, believers in a literal global flood and Noah’s Ark have attempted to demonstrate how this fantastical story is actually very believable. Since it was taken for granted that, being in the Bible, the story must be accurate, Renaissance thinkers tried to determine how such a ship must have been designed to accommodate so many creatures. According to the scriptures, the ark was constructed out of 450 cubed cubits of gopher wood and sealed with pitch against the floodwaters, as well as supernaturally sealed up by God himself according to Genesis 7, with only one window described, apparently in the top of the vessel to let sunlight in. So there was some question of how the occupants disposed of their feces. Early 15th century Spanish theologian Alphonso Tostado handily explained this issue away by imagining the interior of the ark, with Noah’s living quarters on the upper decks and a series of stairs that allowed him and his sons to feed the animals in their stalls as well as to carry away their waste, which they must have fed into the bilge of the craft, he claimed. Hand waving the foul stench that must have emitted from such an arrangement, he explained that “[o]ne could also believe that the odour of the dung was miraculously carried off so that the air was not corrupted.” In the next century, French geometer Johannes Buteo did Tostado one better, calculating the precise interior measurements and determining how much space animals of certain kinds would require, as well as how much space would be needed for feed, and how the ship might accommodate all of this, as well as a gristmill and smokeless ovens for Noah and his family’s subsistence. From the Renaissance to the modern age of Creationism and science denial, thinkers have postulated just how the feat of housing a breeding pair of each creature could have been pulled off. Logically, they could do without pairs of any hybrid creatures, like mules. They would need only a breeding pair for all the animals such hybrid species originated from. Just how they would determine that the pair they chose would be successfully reproductive is unclear, but you could always hand wave that by suggesting God had pointed out which pairs to take aboard. However, they must have had more than a pair of some creatures so that they could feed them to the carnivores. Certain animals, of course, required more room than others. For example, snakes, some thought, would be content to wind themselves around beams and would need no chambers of their own, though I can’t imagine having loose snakes on a boat would be a great idea, especially those of a venomous variety. Johannes Buteo even considered where Noah might have fit aquariums to save species of marine life, hitting on one of the major problems with the Flood Myth: why marine lifeforms would even be destroyed by a flood. Buteo considered that perhaps fish were without sin and thus allowed to swim free outside the ark, in the waters of the Deluge.  But this was far from the last of the problems with the story. When naturalists in the Age of Exploration began to document the variety of unique animal species in different regions of the world, the question was raised, if these creatures had been made at Creation and then preserved on the same Ark, and their presence was explained by the dispersion of species after the landing of the Ark, then why were some species only found in one place while others were found in many places? This would not be the last problem with the Flood myth with which biblical literalists would have to perform mental gymnastics to contend.

One of the principal impossibilities of the story of Noah’s ark comes from the construction of such a massive and seaworthy vessel itself. Creationists will say that God himself gave Noah the ship’s specifications, or they would vaguely suggest that ancient man was capable of many great feats of engineering, as seen in the Seven Wonders of the World. The problem is, if ancient man really had this divine knowledge of massive shipbuilding, then it unaccountably disappeared afterward. If Noah lived for hundreds of years after making it back on dry land, why was this God-given science of naval architecture promptly lost? We’re meant to believe that Noah traveled to all kinds of different habitats to acquire all kinds of different animals, which would certainly mean that some species he was entirely unfamiliar with, not knowing the dangers they posed or the requirements for how best to house them. Yet somehow, he was able to design quarters for each that would allow him to water each at an appropriate height and keep each from injuring itself within its enclosure. All within a boat the size of a skyscraper that could withstand the buffeting of violent waves. It would have been the greatest feat of engineering in all human history, and if we’re to believe God provided Noah with complete instructions, blueprints, if you will, then it beggars the imagination that Noah would have been capable of reading and following them. After all, he was just a humble farmer. On that topic, how could a farmer have paid for all the timber and all the labor it would have required to build such a construct? The only comparable ancient feat of engineering, the pyramids, is estimated to have required the labor of 100,000 people. Moreover, he would have needed many tons of pitch to seal it up as the scriptures state he did, but pitch, a natural hydrocarbon formed underground at extreme pressures, would not have existed in the antediluvian world if we are to subscribe to flood geology. Lastly, there is the simple impossibility that 40 days of rain could possibly drown the entire world, even its highest mountains. Ancient apologists, using the hints in the scriptures about the firmament separating the waters above and below, as well as the verse about the fountains of the deep being broken, held the belief that there had formerly been a great mass of water suspended overhead, as well as a watery abyss below ground, all of which waters crashed down and sprang to the surface at once. But even if one were to credit such a weird cosmogony, it doesn’t explain how so much water would disappear so quickly, such that the ark could find land again after only 150 days, and after a year and change the earth was all dried out again. The suspension of disbelief required is extraordinary, leading some believers to concede that maybe it wasn’t worldwide, but rather a regional flood.

1493 artist's depiction of the construction of the Ark.

As I reported in the beginning of my series on giants, in 1872, a British banknote engraver named George Smith who was such an enthusiast of the British Museum’s collection that they hired him to study some clay fragments taken from Ninevah, cried eureka one day when he had translated a portion of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh that appeared to confirm the biblical story of the Flood. In this passage, the story of Uta-Napishti or Utnapishtim is related, in which he is forewarned by the god Ea of a catastrophic flood that would be sent by the god Enlil, and therefore urged to build a ship for the survival of his family and animals that he preserves. In this version, the storm subsides after only 7 days, when his ship lands on a mountainside. As with the biblical tale, there is an account of Utnapishtim releasing a bird to ascertain whether the floodwaters had sufficiently receded. Unsurprisingly, George Smith thought he had discovered proof of the literal truth of the Bible and evidence against the geologic time scale and evolutionary theory. Unfortunately for proponents of this claim, the math doesn’t precisely line up. Those who believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible typically place Creation at around 4004 BCE, and the Flood at around 2348 BCE, judging by the dubious genealogies I discussed in the previous episode. The oldest surviving version of the Gilgamesh poem is dated to around 2000 BCE, but it purports to tell the story of a Sumerian king who, based on surviving Sumerian sources, like the Sumerian King List, likely lived around 2700 BCE. Now, to qualify this, the lengths of the reigns of antediluvian and post-diluvian kings in the Sumerian King List are just as problematic as the genealogies of Genesis, with figures ruling for many thousands of years before the flood and many hundreds of years after. Nevertheless, all signs point to the Epic of Gilgamesh being a mythical tradition that predates the story told in Genesis. And since Smith’s discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh, other Near Eastern flood myths that predate Genesis have turned up. There is the Mesopotamian Epic of Atra-hasis, which appears to have preceded the Gilgamesh epic and to have served as the source for the story of Utnapishtim found in that poem. In this epic, Atra-Hasis is the Noah figure, warned again by Ea of Enlil’s intentions and told to build a roofed boat sealed with pitch. The predecessor of the Atra-Hasis epic, the Eridu Genesis or ancient Sumerian creation myth, was discovered in 1893 on a tablet in the ruins of the ancient city of Nippur, founded around 5000 BCE, and it was translated in 1912. In it, one Ziusudra is commanded by the god Enki to build a boat and preserve his family from the coming storm. So as we can see, rather than going to prove the veracity of the Genesis flood myth, these other Near Eastern flood myths actually show us that the Genesis flood story is just a common myth of the region, passed down from Ancient Sumeria, to Babylonia, and then incorporated into Judaism, whose founder, Abraham, is believed to have lived in Sumerian Babylon.

If the Genesis flood is merely a retelling of the Sumerian flood myth, then it would stand to reason that it is the story of a localized flood, perhaps relating to the annual flooding of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers in Mesopotamia, which may have seemed to drown the whole world for Mesopotamians, but was certainly not a global Deluge. Some will protest this, pointing to other flood myths not originating from the region, such as the Greek myth of Deucalion, but of course, the myth of Deucalion seems to have been borrowed by the Greeks, a migration of myth, which did not require an actual flood to have taken place. It has sometimes been argued that the lack of flood myths in Asia proves that all flood myths describe a regional rather than a global event, and this certainly holds true when no flood myth appears to have been preserved by ancient civilizations. However, there were Asian flood myths. In India, the story of Manu tells of a sole survivor of a flood, who built a boat and ran aground on a mountaintop. And in China, there were no less than four separate flood myths, those of Nü Kua, Kung Kung, Kun, and Yü. Even as far away as Central America, a variety of Mesoamerican peoples appear to have had their own flood myths. This is no proof of a worldwide flood, however, but rather evidence that people everywhere are the same. If they live in an area prone to flooding, they fear the flooding, and believe it was sent by a god, and any who survive a flood in a vessel come to believe they have been spared by a god, and they tell their children as much. The variation in these more distant traditions is enough to prove that they hold little resemblance to the Near Eastern traditions and represent the separate legends of distinct regions, based on local floods if based on any actual event. In Mesoamerican myths, the survivors do not preserve animals, just themselves, in hollow logs, and afterward are turned into dogs or are obliged to repopulate the world by lying with a weird supernatural dog that takes the shape of a woman. In the Indian myth, Manu is more like Adam, being the first man, and he is told of the coming catastrophe by a fish to whom he had previously been kind. Again, not preserving animals, Manu alone survives, and creates woman by pouring sour milk into the sea after he lands. The Chinese myths are perhaps the most distinct, as they do not tell of a sole survivor that rides out the flood on a boat but rather of a hero who saves the world by controlling the flood. These myths clearly seem to have originated from flood-prone regions around the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, where inhabitants had to develop flood management techniques, such as retention barriers and drainage, in order to survive.

The so-called Flood Tablet, containing the flood myth preserved in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

In 1997, a new, seemingly credible scientific hypothesis was published by two marine geologists, William Ryan and Walter Pitman, proposing that around 8,000 years ago, the Black Sea, which had previously been a freshwater lake, was suddenly and cataclysmically inundated by seawater that broke through a natural dam. According to them, this “sudden infill” hypothesis would mean the displacement of a great many Neolithic farmers, whose oral tradition about the catastrophe may have been the origin of Near Eastern Flood myths. By their estimation, an earthquake caused the natural dam to break, resulting in a violent jet of water they figure was 20 times more powerful than Niagara Falls. To support their theory, they produced sophisticated computer models, cited certain seafloor features they argue could only have been caused by the currents of this catastrophic inundation of saltwater, identified a “debris fan” in the area where they believed the flooding would have deposited materials, and pointed to saltwater mollusk fossils in a certain sedimentary layer that they argue must have appeared suddenly. I am not much opposed to this theory myself, as at its heart, it argues for a non-literal interpretation of Genesis. First of all, if the theory were proven accurate, it would not prove anything about the origin of the flood myth. And if one chose to believe it did, it necessitates a non-literal reading of the Bible. It would mean the flood was local, not global. It would require acknowledgement that the Genesis story is just one mythologized iteration of a mytheme passed down through multiple cultures, and it would mean the time frame of Creationists is dead wrong. The world could not have been created 6000 years ago if the flood described in Genesis occurred some 8000 year ago. However, the scientific community has not been so open to the possibility. In the years after the first work of Ryan and Pitman appeared, a great deal of peer-reviewed scholarly research was published refuting their claims. According to academic consensus today, all evidence suggests that the Black Sea gradually filled with saltwater over thousands of years prior to the date that Ryan and Pitman pinpointed. Their evidence comes from cores taken from the Black Sea floor that show sediment laid down under several meters of water at a location that Ryan and Pitman claim would have been dry at the time. Moreover, they mapped an entire history of the slow rise of water levels by identifying on the Black Sea floor the lagoons and beach ridges that steady rise must have caused. They even discovered a delta where sea water was pouring into the Black Sea 10,000 years ago. Ryan and Pitman offer alternative explanations for all their findings, but the scholarly community rightly points out that they are outliers, and that they have proceeded in their investigations on very unscientific grounds. Ryan, it seems, had been obsessed with the myth of Noah’s flood for 30 years, and all his findings are colored by his desire to prove the truth behind the myth in some way. This may have made for more popular science, grabbing the attention of news organizations and the general public, but it did not make for a sound scientific process.

William Ryan is not alone in his obsession with the Flood myth. For most, however, the object of their obsession is not geological evidence of a flood but rather the ark itself, a kind of MacGuffin artifact that many Christian wannabe Indiana Joneses have sought for about a century. These ark seekers follow clues in ancient writings as well as more modern rumors. Their first clue is in Genesis, Chapter 8 verse 4, when it says the ark came to rest “upon the mountains of Ararat.” But where is that? In the first century, CE, Flavius Josephus recorded a rumor that the ark could be found in eastern Turkey, or Armenia, a rumor that would be repeated by numerous other writers, including Eusebius of Caesarea, over the next several centuries.  Likely because of this well-known rumor, a certain mountain in Turkey came to be called Ararat by medieval Europeans. Then in the 14th century, the Travels of Sir John Mandeville was published. In this work, which I discussed in my episode on Prester John, the English knight Sir John Mandeville writes of a monk who found the ark on Ararat and managed to bring back a plank of it as proof. Mandeville gave precise details about the abbey at the base of the mountain where the plank was kept, but no such abbey has ever been found, and most scholars now believe the Travels of Sir John Mandeville is entirely fantasy, and that even its knightly author is a literary construct. In the late 19th century, rumors once more surged. In 1883, a New Zealand newspaper printed a hoax about an avalanche revealing the ark, and the story circulated widely. In 1887, one John Joseph Nouri claimed to have summited Ararat and discovered the ark. Something of a mysterious figure, he made a career out of this claim, traveling widely and lecturing about his discovery without every offering any proof. In 1940, ark seeker fever arrived in America, when a Christian fundamentalist pamphlet called New Eden published the claim that a Russian pilot named Roskovitsky had discovered the ark on Ararat in 1917. In the first example of a recurring theme about atheists attempting to hide the discovery of the ark because it represented evidence of the Bible’s accuracy, the story claimed that the Bolsheviks promptly destroyed Roskovitsky’s report on the discovery as soon as they took power. In 1982, one Violet Cummings published a book entitled Has Anybody Really Seen Noah’s Ark? in which she promoted numerous unverified rumors and fired up a generation of would-be ark-seekers. Though no one had ever found proof of Roskovitsky’s actual existence, she claimed to have tracked the story down to Roskovitsky’s widow. She also repeated a story told to her by a Seventh-Day Adventist preacher who claimed an Armenian peasant once told him about a group of British atheists hiring his father as a guide on their expedition up Ararat. They intended to prove the ark was not there, but upon finding it, they supposedly “went into a Satanic rage” and swore the peasant’s father to secrecy, threatening to torture and murder him if he ever revealed that they had found the ark. Beyond the conspiracy of atheists to cover up the truth of the Bible, the old Smithsonian cover-up chestnut also shows up in the lore of the ark seekers. In 1972, a story appeared about a joint expedition between the Smithsonian and the National Geographic Society in 1968. Supposedly, this expedition recovered all the remains of the ark, as well as the alabaster coffin of Noah, which still contained his remains. Unsurprisingly, the Smithsonian investigator, whose existence has never been confirmed, was said by the pseudonymous author, whose identity has never been revealed, to have hidden all this evidence because it would pose a problem for evolutionary theory, which it wouldn’t.

John Joseph Nouri, mystery man who claimed to have found the Ark, was at one time committed to an insane asylum in America, and was later crowned Patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church.

There have been numerous real expeditions to Ararat in search of Noah’s Ark. Let’s have a look at how those turned out. In 1829, Friedrich Parrot ascended Ararat, and in his account of the expedition, he claimed Armenians believed the ark was atop the summit and, conveniently, prevented anyone from getting near it out of a sense of respect for the artifact. In 1876, James Bryce climbed Ararat and claimed to have found a piece of cut wood. This represents the first of many claims of recovering ark fragments that cannot be proven genuine. In 1955, French adventurer Fernand Navarre scaled the mountain and brought back a piece, not of gopherwood but of oak. He had to lie to the Turkish government about why he was entering the country, a common aspect of more modern ark expeditions, and he took many photos of himself and his son during their climb. He claims to have found the ark, covered in ice, and to have sawed off the piece he brought back. Suspiciously, he took no photos of the actual ark. Afterward, he claimed to have had an expert in Cairo date the wood to between 4,000 and 6,000 years old, but his piece of wood has since been carbon dated to around the 7th or 8th century CE. In 1982, fundamentalist Christian astronaut James Irwin, who had undertaken an Ararat expedition after resigning from NASA, fell 100 feet down the mountain and was knocked out cold. He returned a month later, despite his wife’s concern that his head injury had left him less than rational, as he insisted his family join him and that they could do without the proper equipment. When that expedition likewise failed, he came back in 1983, this time with a guide, and he found some wood sticking out of the snow during his climb. He was sure he’d found it, but had to descend without it due to a blizzard. When he managed to find it again 11 months later, he discovered that it was, in fact, a pair of abandoned skis. So it went with Irwin’s expeditions. In 1985, Kurdish guerillas prevented his ascent. In 1986, Turkish authorities detained him and his film crew on suspicion of espionage. Eventually, he gave up, and his ill-fated attempts represent well the attempts of all ark seekers. When they aren’t lying, they are simply failing.

The efforts of Creationists to prove their flood geology and of ark seekers to discover Noah’s big boat continue today. In fact, in 2016 in Kentucky, a Creationist theme park opened called Ark Encounter, complete with a 500-foot ark that they claim is “life size” and “historically accurate,” including exhibits that show you how Noah was able to fit and feed all those animals, though the supposed replica ark is only a façade with just three decks open to the public. Elsewhere in this theme park, one can take children to visit a Creation Museum, attend presentations at the “Answers Center” that reveal “Answers in Genesis,” and even enjoy an entertaining virtual reality experience called the “Truth Traveler.” As this is all clearly an elaborate indoctrination center, children unsurprisingly receive free admission. But, today, the search for the ark is more like the search for UFOs. Rather than mounting arduous expeditions, ark seekers pore over satellite imagery and point at “anomalies,” arguing they have finally found the ark. Despite all the weight of reason and evidence to convince the world that the story of Noah’s Ark is just a myth, fundamentalists anchor their faith on the literal truth of this tale and every other tale in their religious document. Surely much of this urge can be attributed to xenophobia and ethnocentrism, for if a fundamentalist admits that the stories told by their religion are mere myths used as analogies and metaphors to teach spiritual lessons, then they must admit that other religions have about as much claim to truth as theirs. Now don’t get me wrong. Archaeology has proven the literal truth of certain elements of the Bible. For example, the real existence of Gath, home of Goliath, or the actual site of Jericho, the city in Canaan whose walls miraculously fell when the Israelites sounded their trumpets. But archaeology tends to discredit at the same time that it confirms. Excavations of Gath turn up no giant skeletons, nor do excavations of Canaanite cities like Jericho for that matter, and excavations of Jericho show that it was not highly populated and was never a walled city at the time when Joshua is supposed to have assaulted its walls. But Christians should not take the findings of science as discrediting their beliefs. Those beliefs hinge on the idea that a moral code has been vouchsafed to them by a deity. The Bible’s inherent worth is as a moral document, not as a historical record. Disproving the literal accuracy of any story within it does not reduce its value as a vehicle to convey moral lessons. If fundamentalist Christians would place more value on the spiritual content of their scriptures than on their value as any kind of accurate chronicle, they would find themselves mostly impervious to the discoveries and criticisms of scientists.

American astronaut and failed ark seeker, James Irwin.

Further Reading

Birrell, Anne. “The Four Flood Myth Traditions of Classical China.” T’oung Pao, vol. 83, no. 4-5, BRILL, 1997, pp. 213–59, doi.org/10.1163/15685322-90000015.

Conant, Eve. “In Search of Noah’s Ark.” Newsweek (International, Atlantic Edition), Newsweek LLC, 2003, p. 46–.

Holden, Constance. “‘Noah’s Flood’ Theory Questioned.” Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), vol. 296, no. 5577, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2002, pp. 2331–2331, doi.org/10.1126/science.296.5577.2331a.

Kerr, Richard A. “Marine Geology. Support Is Drying up for Noah’s Flood Filling the Black Sea.” Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), vol. 317, no. 5840, 2007, p. 886–.

Montgomery, David R. The Rocks Don’t Lie : a Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood. 1st ed., W.W. Norton, 2012.

Moore, Robert A. “The Impossible Voyage of Noah’s Ark.” Creation/Evolution Journal, vol. 4, no. 1, Winter 1983.  National Center for Science Education, ncse.ngo/impossible-voyage-noahs-ark.

Schiermeier, Quirin. “Noah’s Flood.” Nature (London), vol. 430, no. 7001, 2004, pp. 718–19, doi.org/10.1038/430718a.

Toumey, Christopher P. “Who’s Seen Noah’s Ark? (controversial Ark Sightings).” Natural History, vol. 106, no. 9, Natural History Magazine, Inc, 1997, pp. 14–17.

Weber, Christopher Gregory. “The Fatal Flaws of Flood Geology.” Creation/Evolution Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, Summer 1980.  National Center for Science Education, ncse.ngo/fatal-flaws-flood-geology.

The Secrets of Enoch (An Apocryphal Catechism)

In Genesis, Chapter 5, a written account of the family line of Adam is given. This genealogy states, in every major translation and in no uncertain terms, that Adam lived for 930 years. His son Seth lived 912 years, and Seth’s son Enosh lived 905. Enosh’s son Kenan lived to 910, his son Mahalalel lived to 895, and his son Jared lived to 962. The oldest was Jared’s grandson, Methuselah, who it’s said reached the astonishing old age of 969. Those who insist on a literal interpretation of the Bible must therefore explain why early mankind enjoyed such extreme longevity while we, today, who enjoy far longer lifespans than many in the past, still have an average life expectancy of only seventy years and change. According to one obsolete explanation, there had once been a solid dome around the earth, referred to as the “firmament” in Genesis, which somehow enabled such longevity, perhaps by shielding us from ultraviolet radiation? Apart from outmoded cosmological notions, there is the rather simpler, faith-based explanation that, since it was sin that took from us our immortality, shorter lifespans simply reflect the greater influence of sin in the world. That would seem to suggest that, since we live longer today, there is actually less sin today than there was in, say, the Victorian era, known for its strict morality and religiosity, or even the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church’s power was at its height. I’m not sure many Christians would actually agree with that. Luckily, the very next chapter of Genesis offers a handy explanation, right before acquainting the reader with the Nephilim, giants that issued from an unholy union with fallen angels, according to most understandings. In verse three of Chapter 6, God, seeing that angels were marrying human women, declares that his “Spirit” will not always be with mankind, and since people are made of flesh and are therefore corrupt, our “days shall be a hundred and twenty years.” So it would seem people only lived to such advanced age because of God’s Spirit, which somehow was present and lengthening our lives at least through the flood, when Methuselah’s grandson, Noah, lived to 800 years. Only over the next dozen or so generations did the longevity fade, until Moses reached only a paltry 120 years old. Again, does our increase in lifespan today mean God’s Spirit has returned? Or is it more likely that these unbelievably great ages are the result of an error, as some religious scholars defending the scriptures have claimed. It has been argued that their real ages had simply been multiplied by ten, but Genesis 5 also shares what age these men were at when they fathered children, and though most seem far too old to be fathering children, this solution would mean some of them were fathering children at only 6 years old! Another has suggested that the great longevity of the first patriarchs was a mistranslation, counting months as years, which does seem reasonable, making Methuselah more like 80 years old rather than almost a thousand. Further rational explanations are that generation gaps existed in the record, requiring ages to be lengthened to account for a greater passage of time, or that each patriarch listed was actually just the most prominent figure of their epoch, making of the chapter less a genealogy and more a who’s who of those millennia. Being no apologist, I would offer the additional explanation that Genesis is mythology and should not be defended as a legitimate historical record. But there is one entry in this list of long-lived patriarchs that bears further scrutiny. Great-grandfather of Noah, and father of Methuselah, Enoch, he who was said in magical traditions to have received the hidden knowledge of the world from angels and to have preserved it from the Flood’s destruction, is revealed in verses 23 and 24 to have only lived 365 years before “he was not; for God took him.” If one wants to learn more about Enoch, and his being taken by God, one must look beyond the canonical books of Judaism and Christianity, to the apocryphal book that bears his name, a book steeped numerous mysteries.

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I am happy to finally be making another entry in this thematic series after a couple years. Anyone who has not listened to the first Apocryphal Catechism, called Gnostic Genesis, may want to go look for it and listen first. In it, I discuss the concept of apocrypha and pseudepigrapha as well as the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, all of which is somewhat required knowledge for this episode. I have been wanting to discuss the apocryphal Book of Enoch for a while now, ever since my episode about Hermes Trismegistus, in which the character of Enoch figures prominently, as Hermetic tradition conflates the two. Furthermore, after my episodes about Giants, in which I discussed the Nephilim of Genesis 6 as well as ideas about Flood myths and the lineage of Noah, previously discussed in my episodes on the Lost Tribes of Israel as well, it seemed the perfect time to tackle the topic, as Enochic traditions are deeply connected to these topics. To start a conversation about The Book of Enoch, though, we must first clarify which books of Enoch we mean, as there are several. The book most think of when one says The Book of Enoch, which is now called 1 Enoch, is a text that was long believed lost. The prophecies of Enoch were referenced in Jude, but no written source for them had ever been turned up. Some manuscripts, Ethiopian in origin, appear to have circulated during the Renaissance, but still the book remained legendary, with many not believing the rumors of its existence. Not until the 18th century were authentic copies of the Ethiopic Book of Enoch discovered and brought back to Europe by Scottish adventurer James Bruce, during his expedition to find the source of the Nile, and these were not translated into English and properly recognized until 1821. Some fragments of 1 Enoch were found in Greek and Latin, but its great antiquity was not confirmed until 11 fragments of it, written in Aramaic, and three in Hebrew, turned up in caves in Qumran in 1948, as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovery. But even within this first Book of Enoch, there are several different works, The Book of the Watchers, The Book of Parables, The Astronomical Book, and The Dream Visions, each of which scholars believe originated from a different time period, with different authorship, making 1 Enoch more of an anthology than a coherent work. To further confuse matters, there are also a 2 Enoch, which is the work more specifically called the Secrets of Enoch, a 3 Enoch, and a Book of the Giants, which is often lumped together with the others because of its subject matter. Like the different sections of 1 Enoch, these other three works appear to have been composed in different eras, though there is no firm scholarly consensus on the origins of certain of them. To simplify, we will speak more generally in this study of Enochic tradition, taking all the literature as a corpus, in the sense of a group of works on the same subject instead of works by the same author, since all of them are doubtless pseudepigraphal.

James Bruce, a Scottish explorer who found the source of the Blue Nile and rediscovered the Book of Enoch.

Of course, the principal reason why I’ve chosen to discuss Enochic traditions now is that they offer retellings of the story of the Nephilim from Genesis 6, about which I spoke in some detail in Part One of my recent series on giants. I spoke of the few places in which the word Nephilim had been used and why it was translated as giants, and I also gave some alternative views on who the bene Elohim or “sons of God,” who fathered the Nephilim, may have been, other than angels have sexual intercourse with human women. Some, however, may look at the same story, as told in Enochic tradition, as a disproof of any rationalist interpretation of Genesis 6. In the Book of the Watchers, by far the oldest of the Enochic texts, as well as in other texts in the corpus, it is made explicitly clear that the sires of the Nephilim were indeed angels, called “Watchers” here. In fact, these rebel angels are even named, chief among them Shemihazah and Asa’el, and their crimes were more than just lusting after women. They are said to have taught mankind the evils of sorcery, thus providing a separate origin myth for magic, different from that which blamed Zoroaster and the Magi, as I spoke about in a previous episode. The evil magical practices taught by the Watchers were such abominable traditions as metalworking and using cosmetics. I can almost hear the gasps of horror. With these and other variations on the story of Genesis 6, it becomes the story of the origin of all evil, a kind of demonology. The offspring of the Watchers with human women are clearly said to be not only giants, but murderers who drink blood and practice cannibalism and bestiality. The fallen Watchers, in the end, are bound and imprisoned in a pit, and their evil offspring are wiped out by the Flood God sends as punishment, although in this tradition, it seems rather a punitive act against these Watchers and giants that drown the rest of humanity rather collaterally. And even then, it didn’t do the trick, as it’s said that, though the evil giants’ bodies were destroyed in the Flood, their spirits were not, and this was the origin of demons, who resented, oppressed, and even occasionally possessed surviving humans.

Just to nip in the bud any argument that the Enochic corpus represents evidence of the truth of the Nephilim story in Genesis 6, it should be noted that even the oldest of the works, The Book of the Watchers, is believed to be no older than the 3rd or 4th century BCE. Whereas Genesis, although supposed to have been written by Moses, who is sometimes believed to have lived in the 13th century BCE, has been shown by scholars to have actually been written in the 5th or 6th century BCE. This means The Book of the Watchers was written hundreds of years after, clearly as a kind of expansion on the mythology that was already out there. Some scholars assert that the early chapters of Genesis were not composed until the 3rd century BCE, but even if that minority position were proven accurate, it would still only mean that both accounts were writing about events that had supposedly occurred about 2000 years earlier. It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the accuracy of the accounts. Moreover, the story of the Watchers fathering Nephilim with human women is told over and over in the Enochic corpus, varying with each telling, and in some cases appearing to be midrashes, or rabbinic interpretations, of the story. In other words, it is clear from the Enochic literature alone that the story of the Watchers and the Nephilim was a mythological tradition that had been and continued to be retold in innumerable variations, as the basis for differing philosophical and doctrinal positions. It is even told as an allegory in 1 Enoch verses 83-90, in what is called the Animal Apocalypse, which uses animals to tell the story much like George Orwell’s Animal Farm. In this passage, it recounts how certain stars fell from the heavens and then had sex with cattle, producing offspring that were entirely different species, including donkeys, camels, and elephants, which then devoured the cattle. If the story is treated in such a clearly metaphorical manner here, could it not have served some metaphorical purpose in every iteration?

A symbolic painting by George Frederick Watts (depicting the ideas of Love and Life and unrelated to the subject at hand) that some think illustrates well the story of the Watchers taking human wives.

With the suggestion that the story of the Watchers and the Nephilim may be allegorical, we are led to a variety of interpretations that reveal what meaning, other than literal, that the myth may have always had. For example, an astrological meaning has been found in the story. The names of the Watchers, it is pointed out, correspond with those of meteorological phenomena and identifiable heavenly bodies, such that it is really a story about the ill omens of irregular astronomical phenomena or of stars that alter their paths. The example from the Animal Apocalypse perfectly illustrates this interpretation, as the Watchers are depicted as stars that left their proper place and cause all kinds of trouble. Other interpretations require some further discussion of historical context. As discussed in my series on the Lost Tribes of Israel, in the 8th century BCE, Assyria conquered the Kingdom of Israel, during which ten tribes were lost. After that, during the 6th century BCE, the Kingdom of Judah saw their temple destroyed and their people placed in captivity by the Neo-Babylonian Empire. After the Persian conquest of Babylon, Cyrus the Great allowed their return and the reconstruction of their temple, and it was later in this Second Temple period, after Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Mediterranean and the age of Hellenism that followed his death, that Enochic literature became popular. One theory is that the story of the Watchers actually represent the Diadochi, Alexander’s generals, who defied Alexander’s wishes after his death to seize control over parts of his kingdom. The allegory works well, as the Watchers are described in decidedly martial terms as the generals of their own armies of angels, and they rebel to seize power for themselves, going native, as it were, on the Earth. Presenting the intermarriage of the Watchers and human women as an evil that results in corruption may also be seen as a lesson for the Jews not to mix with outsiders, and especially not to breed with them. Another interpretation suggests, rather convincingly, that the story of the Watchers was really a criticism or satire of all the neighbors and enemies of the Jews, whether Assyrian or Babylonian or Persian or Greek. The very nature of the Watchers as heavenly beings that lust after human women can be seen as a spoof of polytheist religions popular among their enemies in which deities were known to father children with human women. Think, for example, of the comparison I drew between Heracles and the Nephilim in a recent patron exclusive. If this were the purpose of the story, it would seem to have been an effort to subordinate the gods of their neighbors, suggesting their lustful deities were actually nothing more than the disobedient servants of the most high Jewish god.

Interestingly, just as the apocryphal Enochic corpus greatly expands on the tradition of the Nephilim, it also greatly expands the mythology surrounding the cataclysm that destroys them, the Deluge, and especially the lore surrounding Noah. According to the Enochic traditions, Noah was not necessarily a regular man. It is reported in 1 Enoch that, when Noah was born, his father Lamech was concerned about some unusual features of his appearance. His skin was unusually white, with platinum hair and eyes that shined. Lamech took the child to his grandfather, Enoch, was known to be wise. As we know from elsewhere in the Enochic corpus and from alchemical lore, Enoch had come into possession of divine knowledge, either from visions bestowed upon him by angels and written down in a book, or from the mysterious emerald tablet he discovered in a cave. Regardless of the source of his wisdom, it is clear why Lamech would come to him with his concerns, for Lamech believed his infant son’s strange appearance meant that he was actually the offspring of a Watcher, and Enoch knew all about the Watchers. It is striking here that whiteness and blondeness and bright eyes, features that Nazis and other white supremacists would later claim make one pure or superior, are here seen as an indication that Noah was of corrupt or mixed blood, the progeny of fallen spirits, and thus a demon like the other Nephilim. It may be the first indication of someone being viewed as a white devil. Enoch, however, says that is not the case, and that rather, these features are a sign that Noah had been chosen by God. As it turns out, Enoch already knows that the Deluge is coming as a judgment on the corruption of the Watchers and Nephilim, and he asserts that his great-grandson has been chosen for deliverance from this flood. This is a remarkable straying from the Biblical story of the Flood, in which Noah is chosen because of his righteousness and learns of the Flood directly from God. In the Enochic tradition, he was chosen before he could really display righteousness, and his family had known about the coming destruction for generations. As the story unfolds, Enoch bestows his divine wisdom on Noah before his ascension and transfiguration, either in the form of a book or the Emerald Tablet, and Noah becomes a magician and a healer, specifically an exorcist, able to expel the spirits of the demonic Nephilim when they enter people. Interestingly, Noah’s whiteness corresponds with insidious ideas about race after the Flood, with people of color having descended from one of his sons, Ham, who was supposedly cursed with dark skin. However, according to the Enochic tradition, it seems pretty clear that the strange whiteness of Noah, which may have passed to some but not all of his sons, appears to be something of an aberration, like albinism. I’m sure a white supremacist will look at this story and argue that it confirms whites are God’s chosen people, but an alternative interpretation is that it depicts whiteness as an inherited disorder and shows the earliest whites believing themselves superior to all others, such that they believed God wanted them to live and everyone else to die off.

The Birth of Noah by James Tissot

The Enochic corpus and other Second Temple apocrypha seem to refer at times to a Book of Noah that some scholars doubt ever existed. If it did exist, then the palimpsest that is Enochic apocrypha is further important in that it may be reproducing passages of a lost work. The simple fact that lost books of scripture exist cannot be denied. 1 Enoch itself had been a lost book outside of Ethiopia for centuries. Moreover, there are numerous proposed lost books, such as a proto-gospel that preceded the others, a certain “Severe Letter” written by the Apostle Paul, and the “Ascents of James,” said to be a heretical text. These are just some of the lost texts of Christianity. There are numerous Judaic texts that are believed to have been lost, and several Manichean texts. Moreover, we know the custom of Jewish pseudepigrapha to attribute works to major biblical patriarchs, and it would seem unusual if there had never been a pseudepigraphon attributed to so major a figure as Noah. Finally, there are explicit references to Noah writing a book, or to the “writing of the words of Noah,” in various apocryphal works and fragments. However, skeptics find it suspicious that content said to be from these writings of Noah seems to vary from work to work. On the other hand, when the content of other books is alluded to, it is usually pretty faithfully rendered. This has led some doubters to suggest that references to a Book of Noah are only literary devices, such as when the trope of the Book of Life is used in scriptures, with the metaphor of being blotted out of it. If there is no literal Book of Life for one’s name to be blotted out of, it has been suggested that references to a Book of Noah may only refer metaphorically to the wisdom of Noah or the lessons to be learned from his story.  Others have suggested that the Book of Noah is merely folkloric, much like the Emerald Tablet or the book containing the wisdom of Enoch, which certainly doesn’t seem to be the same as the pseudepigraphal works of the Second Temple period that I am discussing in this episode. By this view, it is as ridiculous to theorize about a real Book of Noah as it is to entertain the literal existence of Abdul Alhazred’s Necronomicon, a book that only exists in the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.

The way in which this question of whether there existed a pseudepigraphical Book of Noah butts up against the question of whether there ever existed writings penned by the man Noah, and whether Noah the man ever actually existed, is similar to one of the central mysteries of the Book of Enoch, which revolves around the chronology of when certain passages were written and what they refer to. This is because some parts of the Enochic corpus appear to refer to Christ, and since some portions of it predate Christianity, it is argued that these passages represent a pre-Christian prophecy that has been fulfilled. This mystery has to do with the cryptic phrase “the Son of Man,” a term that is used frequently in scriptures just to mean humanity, as in, the sons of man, but in some cases, with the definite article “the Son of Man,” has been interpreted to mean a specific heavenly being, one who is seen in certain visions, such as those of Daniel, as being in the presence of God and in a position of authority. Christians interpret this vision as depicting Christ, the son of God, who was given human form, “like a son of man,” as Daniel states, and who it is believed will stand at the right hand of God. Despite the fact that with this language Daniel only appears to be describing a a man, or someone who looked like a man, being in the presence of someone he calls the Ancient of Days, never actually calling him God, the Christian interpretation has led to many mentions of a “son of man” being interpretated as references to Christ. As it happens, in the Book of Parables, the second section of 1 Enoch, the protagonist is called “the Son of Man,” used as a proper noun. Now we may presume that this was an allegorical trope, like naming your protagonist John Everyman to indicate that he represents all mankind, but many Christians take it as evidence that the Book of Enoch foretold the coming of Christ. The problem with this interpretation is that most scholars see the Book of Parables as a later addition to the Enochic corpus, suggesting that these Christian themes and some veiled allusions to events in the 3rd century CE, indicate that it was actually written in Christian times, making these passages far less prophetic. Indeed, this section, the Book of Parables, was never found among the fragments of the Book of Enoch among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

A depiction of Enoch’s ascension.

These references to the Son of Man, far from confirming the beliefs of Christians, should actually be rejected by those who adhere to an orthodox view of Christianity. Indeed, this aspect of the book begins to approach why Enochic literature was excluded from the canon, as it leads to the notion that there are two powers in heaven. The vision of Daniel told of multiple thrones, and spoke of this one who was like a son of man being given “authority, glory and sovereign power.” Likewise, in the Book of Parables, this Son of Man sits on God’s throne, in glory and judgment. The Christian doctrine of the trinity was promulgated to explain scriptures that appear to indicate that there may be two coequal powers, as these passages indicate, arguing that Jesus is one and the same as God, along with the Holy Spirit, so it’s all just one godhead. But the Enochic corpus suggests a different interpretation. In the lore of this tradition, prior to Christ, there was another man, or son of man, who had ascended to heaven. It was Enoch, who was taken up by God instead of dying. Thus, the most common interpretation of this passage is that Enoch is the Son of Man, and it is further developed in 3 Enoch, when Enoch’s transfiguration into an angel is described. Later traditions suggest that Enoch was transformed into an archangel named Metatron. The name Metatron, which sounds like a transformer, was never mentioned in the Enochic texts, and some argue that it is derived from phrases elsewhere used for the Angel of the Lord, and this accords well with the interpretation that Enoch, the Son of Man, who was raised above other sons of men and raptured into heaven, was transformed into an angel and given his own throne and power equal to that of god, an idea so dangerous that it would lead to the Book of Enoch being suppressed and lost for centuries.

While the doctrine of two powers in heaven was heresy to orthodox Judaism, since Christians applied their bit of sophistry to explain away these multiple gods as one, it shouldn’t have been so problematic to them. However, there was a further problem posed by the Enochic literature, that may explain its exclusion from Christian canon at the Council of Nicaea. This problem is that, the story of Christ, in several respects, appears to match in key regards, the story of Enoch. Let us consider these parallels. Like Enoch, Christ ascends and is transfigured and then sits enthroned in heaven in judgment on mankind. And just as, according to 1 Peter, Christ descends into Hell and condemns the rebel angels there, so too did Enoch visit the disobedient Watchers and declare their punishment to be eternal. While some of these similarities may be explained away if the Book of Parables is indeed a later, Christian-era addition, some elements originate in portions of the Enochic corpus that are considered definitely pre-Christian, which raises the question of how much of the story of Christ may actually have been recycled myth. Of course, to suggest the Council of Nicaea excluded Enochic texts to hide this may be something of a conspiracy theory. The Council of Nicaea may simply have excluded Enochic traditions because they had already been excluded from the Jewish canon or because they were pseudepigrapha, and thus, by definition, a kind of forgery. But knowing as we know now that 1 Peter and all the canonical gospels are widely considered pseudepigrapha as well, with the exception of John, whose author remains a mystery, it rather seems more like the church fathers just picked and chose among a variety of dubious texts falsely attributed to famous figures in order to best reinforce that creed they chose to adopt. Regardless of whether the story of Christ is really the story of Enoch, or vice versa, though, the lesson to be taken here is that all such doctrine and dogma should be viewed with skepticism, based as it is upon a hodgepodge of antiquated writings that, despite all the claims of the faithful, are clearly crafted by man.

Further Reading

Baxter, Wayne. “Noachic Traditions and the Book of Noah.” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, vol. 15, no. 3, May 2006, pp. 179–94. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/10.1177/0951820706066633.

Boyarin, Daniel. “Beyond Judaisms: Meṭaṭron and the Divine Polymorphy of Ancient Judaism.” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period, vol. 41, no. 3, 2010, pp. 323–65. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24670476. Accessed 21 Jun. 2022.

Elliott, John H. “1 Enoch, 1 Peter, and Social-Scientific Criticism A Review Article on a Major 1 Enoch Commentary.” Biblical Theology Bulletin, vol. 39, no. 1, Feb. 2009, pp. 39–43. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/10.1177/0146107908100115.

Etz, Donald V. “The Numbers of Genesis V 3-31: a Suggested Conversion and Its Implications.” Vetus Testamentum, vol. 43, no. 2, 1993, pp. 171-187. BRILL, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/156853393X00034.

Lumpkin, Joseph B. The Books of Enoch: The Angels, the Watchers, and the Nephilim (with Extensive Commentary on the Three Books of Enoch, the Fallen Angels, the Calendar of Enoch, and Daniel’s Prophecy). 2nd ed., Fifth Estate, 2011.
Mearns, Christopher L. “Dating the Similitudes of Enoch.” New Testament Studies, vol. 25, no. 3, 1979, pp. 360–369., doi:10.1017/S0028688500004975.

Paz, Yakir. “Metatron Is Not Enoch: Reevaluating the Evolution of an Archangel.” Journal for the Study of Judaism: In the Persian Hellenistic & Roman Period, vol. 50, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 52–100. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/10.1163/15700631-12501239.

Roark, Kyle. “First Enoch 8 and the Origins of Civilization.” Henoch, vol. 41, no. 2, July 2019, pp. 188–203. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=145759442&site=ehost-live&scope=site.