The Myth of the Thuggee Cult

In American culture, the meaning of the term “thug” varies depending on your background and the cultural context. By its modern dictionary definition, the word refers to violent criminals, or some kind of vicious ruffian, but among many who identify with urban street life and Black hip-hop culture, the term has taken on a different meaning, reflecting the idea that systemic racism creates gang culture. This use of the term was championed by rapper Tupac Shakur, who touted a “Thug Life” as a kind of determined response to the setbacks and obstacles that the disadvantaged face. For Tupac, “Thug” was an acronym deriving from “The Hate U Give,” referring to the idea that so-called thugs are created by hate and inequality, and that their very existence is an inspiring show of resilience in the face of great adversity. Interestingly, the word “Thug” entered the English language from Hindi, where likewise it referred to a subculture of violent criminals viewed as a savage threat by English colonizers but viewed quite differently in many Indian villages. The Thug, those who perpetrated a class of crime called Thuggee, would become legendary, not just in India where, during the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, their crimes were perpetrated, but across the Western world, where the word Thug could hardly be spoken without a shudder. The crimes of the Thuggee became well-known after English authorities in India undertook the task of wiping them out, when the world learned that they were not just bands of highway robbers, but actually a murderous sect that put to death every person they robbed, leaving none behind to witness against them, not even women or children. More than just ragtag gangs of bandits, they were an organized conspiracy that acted as one, it was said, controlled by some central authority. And not just thieves with a bloodlust, they were a cult, it was claimed, devoted to Kali, the goddess of destruction. It was explained that they strangled all their victims so as not to spill their blood but would afterward mutilate their corpses in their evil sacrificial rituals. On the lawless roads of India, it was said that Thuggee claimed the lives of 40,000 innocent travelers every year, until the 1830s, when British authorities began to stamp them out. But even after their suppression, the Thugs of India would loom large over European and American imaginations. They became the fabled villains of many  a work of fiction, and their name entered the lexicon, such that even today we talk about “thuggery” as a class of criminal behavior. And just as today hip-hop culture suggests that thugs are misunderstood or misrepresented, so too revisionist historians have looked skeptically back on the idea of Thuggee in India and suggested that it may have been a colonial construction, an exaggeration or misrepresentation exploited by colonizers to seize greater control of India. This revisionist view even goes so far as to suggest, in some arguments, that Thugs did not really exist, that Thuggee was only ever a lie promoted by the British.

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I am once again exploring a topic from the Indiana Jones film franchise in my quest to immerse myself in the real history and folklore behind the films ahead of what is likely the last film in the series this summer. When it comes to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the sequel to the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is actually a prequel, the macguffin itself, the Sankara Stones, are rather light on actual historical background, and at first I didn’t think I would make a full episode having to do with Temple of Doom, beyond perhaps a patron exclusive minisode. But that was before I started looking into depictions of India and Indian culture in the film. I was inspired to take a second look at the film because my wife, who is Indian by way of Fiji, has spoken more than once about how this film, which incidentally she loves, caused her some grief growing up in California because of its totally incorrect depiction of Indian culture. Specifically, she says that other kids would ask her if, because she is Indian, she eats monkey brains. This of course refers to the famous dinner scene in which Indy and his companions are disgusted by a dinner of live snakes and beetles, soup floating with eyeballs, and chilled monkey brains eaten directly out of the skull for dessert. Obviously the scene serves only as comic relief in the film, but a 2001 study conducted by the University of Texas does indicate that, as my wife experienced, a majority of Americans believed it to be an accurate portrayal of Indian cuisine. In fact, there is no historical evidence of such foods being eaten in India. Nor was my wife the only Indian to be troubled by this depiction, as the film was initially banned in India because of its misrepresentation of Indian culture, specifically because of the dinner scene. But as I looked further into the cultural representation in the film, a much larger problem revealed itself: that of the Thuggee cultists who served as the film’s villains. As indicated, there is historical debate over the very existence of such a group. I struggled a bit to access the research materials I needed to make this episode, but I was helped out by friend of the show Mike Dash, whose work on such topics as the missing lighthouse keepers of Eilean Mor, the Devil’s Footprints, and Spring-Heeled Jack I have relied on before, and whom I interviewed for the podcast some years ago. Mike Dash wrote an exhaustively researched book on this topic, Thug: the True Story of India’s Murderous Cult, and when I couldn’t get a copy in time, he generously sent me the galleys of the book. I really recommend listeners interested in this topic check it out for themselves. It is a fascinating read, and that is why it’s somewhat unsurprising that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas chose to feature the Thugs of India as the bogeymen of Indy’s second outing: they are and have long been a fascinating and terror-inducing group. Ever since the early 19th-century novel about them, Confessions of a Thug, appeared in 1839, they became a mainstay villain of literature. They appeared in the popular French novel, The Wandering Jew, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, even featured them in a story. Most notably, a series of swashbuckling stories by Italian novelist Emilio Salgari cemented them as apt villains for an adventure tale. Into the 20th century, they continued to crop up in novels and were featured in numerous films, including the 1939 adventure film Gunga Din, in which characters discovered that the Thugee cult was still active even long after its supposed suppression. It is this film that appears to have inspired their use as villains in Temple of Doom, but really, if the filmmakers were looking for a villain in India as iconic as the Nazis in Europe, then Thugs were the obvious choice. But to what degree were the filmmakers, knowingly or unknowingly, perpetuating a historical myth?

The poster for Gunga Din

First, we must understand the context in which a Thuggee cult supposedly operated, which means a few words about India and the establishment of British imperial interests there. Before the rise of British power in India, the last great dynasty was that of the Mughals, Muslim rulers who built an empire of such wealth and grandeur that it grew to be too much for lesser rulers to handle. The last of the great Mughal emperors was Aurangzeb, and after his passing in 1707, the Mughal Empire disintegrated into a patchwork of rival princedoms, with the governors of rich provinces ruling as independent monarchs, paying only lip service to later Mughal emperors. This chaotic state of affairs was further complicated by the conquests of bellicose Hindu tribes from Central India called Marathas who began seizing territories for themselves. At this time, the merchants of the British East India Company, who had established themselves over the preceding centuries as buyers of spices and other goods and had establishecd a network of warehouses and forts across India, began to view all these recent civil wars as bad for business. With muskets and artillery at their command, they realized they could subdue the subcontinent and improve their bottom line, which they set about doing, taking possession of city after city and establishing themselves as an imperial power. In 1784, parliament passed the India Act, placing company directors under government supervision, and thereby nationalizing the entire colonial venture. Thus the British came to rule numerous cities and regions of India, collecting taxes and charging exorbitant rents of area villagers and essentially monetizing the populace. It was in one such town in northern India, Etawah, about 300 kilometers southeast of Delhi, that the British first caught wind of the dreaded Thug menace. Thomas Perry, a British Magistrate struggling to bring order to the lawless area, began to receive reports of corpses being discovered in wells and roadside pits. It was a mystery that he seemed unable to solve. He knew that there were highway robbers in the area, as there were on the roads throughout India, but this was unprecedented. These murderers seemed to be mutilating and hiding corpses, and leaving no one alive, for no witnesses could ever be found, and the bodies themselves, assumed to be those of travelers, could not be identified locally. The horrifying conclusion was that some band of prolific killers resided nearby, or even among them.

Perry and other British, as well as the Indian people they had essentially conquered, were perfectly familiar with the threat of banditry. As Mike Dash points out in his book, some of the earliest of Indian texts, such as the Sanskrit hymns the Vedas, which are some 3000 years old at least, portray a certain Hindu deity, Rudra, as the lord of all highway robbers. And in one of the first accounts written by a foreign visitor to India, that of the 7th-century Buddhist monk Xuanzang, we see a traveler nearly being killed by pirates who haunt the rivers. British merchants reported in the 1600s that they could not travel with their goods on the roads without a large contingent of armed men because the country was “so full of outlaws and thieves that a man cannot stir out of doors without great forces.” The kinds of highwaymen that they were accustomed to, however, did not murder entire parties and hide the bodies like this. There were, though, organized bands of thieves who would not shrink from murder called dacoits. These gangs of robbers typically attacked their victims in town, however. They would target a rich man and fall upon his house without warning, invading his home and terrorizing all the residents and servants within. Indeed, dacoits were active in the area around Etawah, and an increase in banditry could be blamed on the British themselves. There was a region nearby, the Chambal, a maze of ravines that was difficult to navigate unless you were native to the area, and the men of the Chambal had long worked as soldiers for hire because the land of the Chambal did not support much agriculture. With the coming of East India Company, though, who refused to hire them as mercenary soldiers, they had little choice but to turn to highway robbery and to join dacoit gangs to support their families. But like most highwaymen, these dacoits did not typically set out to murder. They used fear, and when they were forced to attack those who did not cooperate with their robbery, they aimed to injure rather than kill. Indeed, dacoity was considered an honest profession by many, as dacoits served as a kind of informal militia for some villages, and they tended to rob the rich and share with the poor. As Thomas Perry looked into the murders occurring in his territory, he was quite certain that they were not being committed by run-of-the-mill highwaymen or dacoit gangs. And eventually, he confirmed this conviction when some of the murderers were arrested and confessed, identifying themselves not as dacoits but as Thugs. 

A family of dacoits

Through Perry’s investigation and the confession of captured Thugs, as well as through the numerous East India Company records of later prosecutions, we can know a great deal about the practices of the Thugs. Unlike dacoits or other highway robbers, they worked in absolute secrecy. As already established, they left no one alive to witness against them, but they did not fall on their prey like a raiding party. Rather, they insinuated themselves, just a few at a time, into the travelling parties they targeted, convincing their marks that they were friendly and trustworthy fellow travelers and that it would be best for them to travel together to reduce the chances of highway robbery. This is one part of the horrific practices of the Thug, that they befriended and traveled with their victims, sometimes for days and weeks, always intending to murder them all when they could steer them toward an out-of-the-way location, at which time the rest of their band, which might be trailing behind on the road or even riding in advance, would converge to share the spoils. First, however, came their other horrible practice, the murder itself. Thuggee bands distinguished themselves again from other bandits in the methods of their violence, which were equally as intimate as their inveigling of targets: they strangled their victims to death. There were men among them whose specific job it was to do the strangling, cold-blooded killers who sometimes used nooses or special garrotes, but as these could easily identify a strangler, most instead began using scarves with a knot tied in it that could be used to mercilessly tighten it around a victims throat with a twist. Some wrapped a coin in their scarves that proved effective at crushing windpipes. These stranglers were callous executioners, murdering entire retinues and convoys full of people, whole families, men, women, and children, though sometimes a child would be kept alive and raised to become a Thug themselves. Strangely, they did not shrink from stabbing and cutting open their victims before burying them, but they only did this after they had strangled them to death, and this practice would be the cause of some myths about Thuggee, as will be seen. But the Thuggee were already, even among themselves, it seems, surrounded by myth. It became clear during the earliest investigations that Thuggee gangs had been operating beneath the nose of the East India Company for many years without their even being aware of the group’s existence. According to the oral traditions of the Thugs themselves, given under interrogation in later campaigns against them when many turned King’s evidence against their fellows, Thuggee tribes had existed since great antiquity, all the way back to the time of Alexander the Great, and they claimed to be descended from Muslim families of a high caste. However, the word “thug” does not appear to have been used to refer to murderers before the 1600s, and other traditions trace Thug tribes to 16th-century Delhi, when a clan was exiled by the Mughal Emperor for killing one of his slaves. Other ideas were that the practice of Thuggee started among destitute Mughal army soldiers, or among poor herdsmen driving cattle on the roads. In short, Thugs did not themselves agree on the origin of their way of life, but some of their boasts about their ancient heritage, and some of the consistent practices among even distant bands, such as their secret communication by coded phrases and signs, and their very particular murder rituals, fed into later claims that they were an ancient secret society, a murderous cult operating as one, its crimes coordinated by some sinister overseer.

The first of the campaigns against Thuggee gangs began in the Chambal ravine country, as British forces commanded by Magistrate Perry’s assistant followed some leads to that area, where they ended up being first poisoned by local villagers and then ambushed by Thugs in the ravines. Concerned about an all-out rebellion against their government, the British returned with artillery and leveled the Thug stronghold in the area. For several years, then, the British approach to Thugs was just to pursue them if they plied their grisly trade too close to British-controlled towns and cities. This seemed amenable to Thugs, who were travelers by nature and simply began murdering farther afield, on roads where it was safe to operate without rousing the ire of the British. However, the view of the threat they posed changed over the next several years as British citizens more and more became the victims of these highway killers, and as Thugs chose to target many soldiers-for-hire who had sold their service to the British, not so much because of who they served as because they were a perfect target when they took their leave and traveled home with all their back pay on their person. And when the Thugs began robbing the treasure parties of powerful Indian bankers, all tides finally turned against them. British Company men began pursuing and trying Thugs regardless of where they were operating, and one officer, William Sleeman, an ambitious man, saw in the hunt for Thugs the cause of a lifetime. He felt strongly about the evil of Thuggee and believed wiping them out entirely would be a boon to the Indian people, but he also saw that he could make a name for himself doing it and earn a comfortable political position. He threw himself into the campaign with religious fervor, greatly relying on a tactic he had seen was working elsewhere, that of turning captured Thugs into informers, or what were called “approvers.” This was somewhat necessary, since by the very nature of their crimes, Thugs did not leave witnesses alive. By promising that Thugs who turned King’s evidence could keep their lives, he found many eager to cooperate in identifying other Thugs. As he developed his tactics in 1829 and 1830, Sleeman jailed hundreds of alleged Thugs, but his suppression of Thuggee did not kick into high gear until he pursued and captured an influential young Thug leader named Feringeea, who had been raised a Thug and knew everything about how they worked. With Feringeea as his principal approver, Sleeman was able to identify and arrest more than 700 Thugs in 1831 and 1832, and more than that, Feringeea was able to predict the movements of Thug gangs like no other informant before him. By the mid-1830s, with Feringeea’s help, Sleeman had produced charts marking known Thug routes as well as their favorite places to dump bodies. And more than that, he had mapped the homes of all identified Thugs and, believing based on the confessions of Feringeea and other approvers that Thuggee was a hereditary profession, he compiled genealogies in order to identify and arrest Thugs simply for familial association. We begin to see here the potential for egregious miscarriages of justice.

An 1857 drawing in the Illustrated London News depicting Thugs and other classes of Indian criminals

It is easy to take the side of the British in this story, as on the surface, they are pursuing and bringing to justice bands of brutal murderers. But of course, we should also look at the entire imperial presence of the British in India as morally and philosophically wrong, and thus any law enforcement campaign of theirs, administered as it was on their unwilling subjects, as being inherently unethical. And that is the lure of historical revisionist views of the Thuggee, some of which deny Thuggee’s existence altogether and see it as a kind of witch hunt used as an excuse by the British to brutally crack down on those they had imperially dominated. From a postcolonial view, it is a tempting position to take, and it certainly illustrates well the true evils of imperialism. Indeed, revisionist historians are not even the originators of this view, as in the beginning of anti-Thug campaigns, even many British in India were skeptical, finding it hard to believe that such a mighty evil as Thuggee could possibly have been at work right beneath their noses for years without them knowing it. And just as historical revisionists focus on Sleeman’s reliance on the testimony of approvers, approver testimony was viewed as unreliable hearsay by many even at the time, and in the beginning, Thugs were usually acquitted simply because they categorically denied what approvers said about them. Much of what critics point out is absolutely accurate. The motives of approvers should be questioned. They turned King’s evidence to save their own necks, and they knew that, to receive clemency, they would need to provide what Sleeman was looking for, and that might have meant telling him what he wanted to hear. Moreover, there certainly were miscarriages of justice. Innocent and guilty alike were arrested in the sweeping anti-Thug campaigns of the 1830s. Sleeman’s genealogies of Thug families included men who had chosen not to become Thugs like others in their families, so certainly many innocents were detained. And he served warrants and prosecuted suspected Thugs based on hearsay evidence from known criminals with reliability problems. There is the clear possibility that approvers simply accused innocents of Thuggee because they had some personal ax to grind with them, much as in a witch hunt. All of this is true, but it does not amount to the British inventing the entire phenomenon.

Company records, which Mike Dash researched exhaustively, reflect that great care was actually taken to marshall convincing evidence due to the very fact that Sleeman had to overcome skepticism about Thuggee. His approvers must have been giving mostly reliable information, and there are a few indications. First, they viewed turning King’s evidence as a valid change in career path; just as previously they viewed Thuggee as a legitimate occupation, changing their allegiance to serve the British was viewed as just a change in profession, nothing dishonorable about it. Many, like Feringeea, appeared earnest and eager to serve Sleeman to the best of their abilities. And the threat of losing their privileges, or even losing their lives, hung over them if they were caught lying. Also, we know that they provided accurate information in most regards, as their depositions led to hard evidence. They routinely led Sleeman to the places where they and others had hidden bodies and helped exhume the remains of these victims to be identified. Likewise when they fingered fellow Thugs, stolen loot was frequently recovered from those they identified, confirming that they were indeed involved with Thug murders. Furthermore, as Mike Dash shows in his research, Sleeman and others did not trust approver accusations blindly; they pitted approvers against each other, cross-examining them to ensure their claims could be believed, and having each of them pick suspects out of line-ups, or identity parades as the British call them. And whatever we might say about the ethics and fairness of the British, their tactics certainly worked, for Thug murders plummeted amid the anti-Thug campaigns. Some historical revisionists who claim that there never were any Thugs, that the whole thing was made up as a cudgel to keep the Indian people down, might say the reduction of Thug crimes was a further lie, but their position is simply insupportable. Thuggee gangs certainly existed. The British were not alone in pursuing them, as Indian bankers had also undertaken anti-Thug campaigns. These bands of stranglers left a wake of bodies behind them, and the records of the East India Company attest to the discovery of these corpses even before the threat of Thuggee was properly identified. And early reports about and investigations into these highway murders demonstrate that this was no conspiratorial lie spread by the East India Company. The Thugs of the Chambal ravines were viewed as a local threat at first, but unbeknownst to Magistrate Perry at the time, about a thousand miles away to the south, near Madras or what is today Chennai situated on the Bay of Bengal, another Company administrator had been recording his own struggles to bring a tribe of highway murderers to justice, these called Phansigars, or “stranglers.” But while the existence of Thuggee stranglers cannot be denied, their nature was certainly misrepresented, and while Sleeman’s practices in bringing them to justice may have been effective, though unethical and imperfect, he certainly was responsible for the creation of the lasting myth of a Thuggee cult.

As William Sleeman waded through so many approver depositions and testimonies, learning all he could about Thuggee methods, including their customs and their beliefs, he latched onto frequent mentions of the goddess Kali as being protector of Thugs, and he developed a notion that Thug bands were not actually thieves, that their looting of corpses was an afterthought, and that in fact they were sacrificing their victims to Kali. In his mind, this explained why they did not shed blood until after they had strangled their victims, because they intended to offer that blood to Kali, thus the post-mortem stabbing and mutilation of corpses. This seed of an idea grew in his mind, added to with further speculation, until he imagined that all Thugs across the subcontinent served some central Thug priesthood, funneling money from their highway robberies to a certain temple that he believed was their headquarters. This notion was almost certainly engendered by the typical Christian British view of Hinduism as a barbaric religion. Many were the misconceptions about Hinduism among the British, who believed false claims that Hindu sacred texts actually encouraged some of the terrible things they heard about Indian customs, such as the murder of unwanted infant daughters, the sacrifice of children, and the practice of suttee, in which widows were thrown onto their husbands’ funeral pyres. In fact, these practices were uncommon, if they existed at all, and were forbidden by the tenets of the Hindu faith. But British could not get over their view of the Other as savage and backward. Every year they saw Hindus pushing massive wooden carts carrying gargantuan statues of Hindu deities to a temple in Puri on the Bay of Bengal dedicated to the god Jagganath, and often some faithful were crushed to death beneath the huge wheels of these wagons. Indeed these massive Jagganath wagons that rolled right over people are where we derive the English word “juggernaut.” The British learned of these deaths, and saw the sun-bleached bones that lined the roads to this temple, and believed that Hinduism encouraged a religious madness, murder, and suicide. In fact, the bones on the road were those of the terminally ill people who had died making pilgrimage to the temple, and crushing deaths beneath the wheels of juggernaut carts were rare and accidental. But the British came to view Hinduism as a death cult, and Kali, who is depicted with blood on her hands and a blood-drenched sword, wearing a necklace of severed heads, was the most horrifying aspect of the religion. Thus it is not that surprising that William Sleeman would latch onto mention of Kali by his approvers and invent this dark and horrifying backstory for the Thugs he pursued.

It seems, however, that William Sleeman was so steeped in the massive files and endless records he was keeping that he simply could not see the forest for the trees. Study of his own records, undertaken by scholars like Mike Dash and another academic whose work I’ve relied on, Kim Wagner, demonstrate that religious belief was not central to Thuggee culture. Certainly Thug approvers mentioned their belief that Kali protected them, but this was little more than common folklore. In fact, many Hindus thought of Kali as a protector, and that belief was especially common among criminals of all stripes. Nor was this the only kind of superstitious belief common among the Thugs, who put great stock in portents and omens that had nothing to do with Kali or Hinduism, such as believing that the movements or cries of certain wild animals, like owls, may mean bad luck, necessitating a change in plans. The Thugs had no official religious texts, no uniform ritual of worship; in fact, there was great religious variety among them, as some were Hindu but others were Muslim and Sikh. It is possible that some of Sleeman’s approvers emphasized the Thuggee connection to Kali as a kind of excuse for their murders, to suggest it was Kali who really killed, and not them, but the bulk of all testimony makes it abundantly clear that they killed in order to rob and leave no witnesses. There was even among the many confessions of Thugs a clear reason given for why they strangled and only afterward stabbed and mutilated corpses. In the Mughal empire, under Islamic law, murder by strangulation did not incur the death penalty, thus they likely strangled just so that they wouldn’t be put to death if caught. Afterward, they stabbed only to make sure their victims were dead, or in some cases, they disemboweled in order to minimize bloating during decomposition, which often caused the soil of the shallow mass graves they used to rise, revealing the hiding places of bodies. But even though Sleeman’s speculations about a Thuggee cult could be refuted by his own research, he became the mouth of the anti-Thug campaign and spread these rumors. He sent anonymous letters to the Calcutta Gazette, published as a series called “Conversations with Thugs,” and in it he promulgated his view of the Thugs as a vast secret religious society devoted to performing blood sacrifices to Kali. Soon his version of the criminal band was generally accepted among the British, and the 1839 novel Confessions of a Thug, inspired by Sleeman’s accounts and depicting Thugs as being somehow both Muslim and devotees of a Hindu goddess, became a bestseller in Britain. Thus the myth of the Thuggee blood cult, brought so vividly to life in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, was born.

Image falsely depicting Thuggee as a cult of Kali.

By 1840, the practice of Thuggee had effectively been wiped out by the aggressive policing and prosecution of William Sleeman and other Company administrators. But there would always be rumors that some Thug enclaves, perhaps in the foothills of the Himilayas, had evaded capture. This is what served as the core notion of adventure films like Gunga Din and Temple of Doom, the idea that, after its supposed suppression, the cult had survived and remained secretly active. It is not unlike fiction in which escaped Nazis scheme to bring about a Fourth Reich in the 1970s, like the novel and film The Boys from Brazil, or the current streaming series Hunters. In truth, there are records that indicate some Thugs escaped the anti-Thug campaigns, but since Thuggee was not a cult that might grow in secret and rise again but rather an occupation resorted to due to socio-political and economic circumstances, when it was no longer safe nor profitable to practice Thuggee, former Thugs just went into other work, becoming soldiers-for-hire or even merchants. The real mystery that remains is not whether they survived their suppression, but how many victims they claimed. William Sleeman’s grandson published a book about a hundred years after the anti-Thug campaigns called Thug, or a Million Murders, in which he asserted that Thuggee claimed in the neighborhood of 40,000 lives a year, and since he believed the claims that Thuggee had been practiced since the 13th century, he claimed it must have been responsible for something like 20 million murders. Mike Dash, however, is skeptical. Pointing out that Thugs may not have really existed, as such, so long before the British noticed their trail of dead, and further pointing out that their activities were seasonal, only undertaken in the cold season, and that Thug confessions were extremely inconsistent vis-à-vis the number of dead, that they were possibly inflating numbers out of braggadocio or to please their captors, Dash estimates a far more conservative fifty to one hundred thousand victims… and yet this too is staggering and stomach-turning. In the end, we find multiple layers of false history surrounding the Thugs of the Temple of Doom. They were misrepresented by the British at the time in such a way as to mischaracterize and defame Indian culture generally, representing it as a cesspool of evil pagan blood cults, and then the historical reality of Thuggee was erased by revisionist historians who sought to use them as an example of the evils of imperialism, which of course can be easily demonstrated without resorting to historical negationism. And in between, they were made into the nefarious villains of a blockbuster eighties adventure film whose depictions of Indian culture should rightly cause us to cringe today.

Further Reading

Dash, Mike. Thug: The True Story of India's Murderous Cult. Granta Books, 2005.

Wagner, Kim A. Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

The Key to the Secrets of King Solomon (an Encyclopedia Grimoria volume)

The push today by the religious right to remove so many books from schools and libraries has many parallels throughout history, stretching much further back in time than any curriculum controversy I have previously discussed. While Nazis are known for their burning of books, their actions, at least in this regard, are likely dwarfed by those of the Catholic Church, whose history of inspecting libraries, removing offending literature, and banning and burning books is unparalleled. In 1966, Pope Paul VI discontinued a longstanding and frequently updated list of authors and works that were forbidden by the Catholic Church. This Index Librorum Prohibitorum included the names of many playwrights, novelists, philosophers, and theologians, specifically any whose works were deemed morally objectionable or heretical. This index, and others like it, have a long history, going all the way back to the Inquisition, when many of the works included in their earliest versions were more magical in nature. Many of the books banned by the Spanish inquisitor Fernando de Valdés y Salas in 1559, for example, were books believed to be instruction manuals for the practice of black magic—grimoires, they were called. Among the most popular of these magic handbooks was one attributed to the biblical King Solomon, the son of King David, thought to have reigned in ancient Israel sometime between 970 and 920 BCE. Indeed, there have been numerous books of magic attributed to King Solomon, each with a variety of different names, some said to be separate works and others believed to be variations of the same. In the 17th century, a book called the Secrets of Solomon was seized by the Venetian Inquisition and said to be a handbook for practicing witches. This may have been a version of the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, the Lesser Key of Solomon, thought to have been authored in the 1600s, or it may have been a version of an earlier work, which inspired the Lesser Key, Clavicula Salomonis, The Greater Key of Solomon. This work appears to have been authored not in antiquity but during the Italian Rennaissance, in the 14th or 15th centuries. Certainly earlier pseudepigraphal works had inspired this one as well, such as the Hygromanteia or Magical Treatise of Solomon, which may date back even to the thirteenth century. Some version of this book, under the name “The Book of Solomon,” is said to have been ordered by Pope Innocent VI to be burned during the 1300s. The various versions of the Keys of Solomon provide instructions for the practitioner of magic, directing them in purification rituals and how to prepare the tools they will require. They collect incantations like recipes, demonstrating how to cast spells that invoke rain, conjure gold coins, make oneself invisible, instill love, and curse enemies. And perhaps most offensive to the Church, they name and describe many demons and teach the magician how to summon them and how to compel them to do their bidding. The question this begs is not why the church would ban such literature, but how the figure of Solomon, presented in the Bible as a wise and holy king favored by the Judeo-Christian God above all other men, came to be associated with black magic.

According to the lore of magic, King Solomon was not only a master magician, he was the originator of some magics. Just as Zoroaster is viewed as the first magus and inventor of astrology, and Hermes Trismegistus the first alchemist, King Solomon is thought of as the originator of more than one form of magic, such as Ars notoria, the magical art of supernaturally achieving knowledge, and perhaps most importantly, Ars goetia, the ritual magic used to summon and bind demons and thus obtain favors from them. As we will see, though, much like those of Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus, the legend of King Solomon’s contributions to magic prove impossible to credit upon closer examination. This should be apparent even at the outset, as we see the legend evolve into folklore about King Solomon that rivals even the most fantastical of fairy tales. Anyone who attended Sunday school knows that the wisdom of King Solomon is legendary, and we already know that he is associated with magical artifacts, for he had possession of the Ark of the Covenant, for which he built a permanent Temple in Jerusalem. But according to the magical myth of Solomon, which developed out of numerous traditions in multiple cultures, God granted him supernatural wisdom like a superpower, including even the ability to talk with animals and to command spirits. From angels he received four magical stones, one that gave him power over the animal kingdom, one that empowered him to move heaven and earth, one that granted him dominion over all angels, and one that enabled him to bind even demons to his service. Like Thanos, he united these stones into a ring that made him the most powerful human of all time. He possessed also the philosopher’s stone, it was believed by others, and thus was able to create gold and riches. And with this great wealth and power, he built many wonders, forcing demons to complete the labor on his behalf. Not only did he build the Temple of Jerusalem in this manner, but also mythical constructions like the walled city of copper, a vast and secret city built to contain all his treasures and books of arcane wisdom. Even if the city were ever found, as it is said has happened before, no mortal can penetrate its walls without dying of laughter. How King Solomon himself might have visited this marvelous place is clear, though, for like a tale out of the Thousand and One Nights, he rode a flying carpet, carried aloft either by the demons at his command or by the winds that he could tame, depending on what source you read. In total, he was an ancient superhero, and his legend would provide the background for quite the adventure story. But where does this all come from? As mentioned, those who only know Solomon from the Bible know him only as the wise king, a writer of songs, lauded for his clever judgments, the builder of the First Temple, arrayed in riches and luxuries, and known for his sexual escapades. Unsurprisingly, there is no biblical basis for these fanciful legends, but perhaps more surprisingly, there is little scriptural support for any claims of Solomonic magic. To find the origin of this pseudohistory, we must revisit these scriptures, the earliest of sources recording the life of Solomon, and trace the evolution of his legend from there.

A depiction of Solomon’s dream, when his celebrated wisdom was imparted by God.

The books of the Bible that give us a portrait of Solomon are the first book of Kings and the second book of Chronicles. Additionally, the book of Proverbs is attributed to him, as is, of course, the Song of Solomon. The story told of Solomon in the Bible centers around his wisdom and his building of the Temple, as well as his lusting after foreign women, like the Queen of Sheba. It is emphasized that his great sin was not so much his marrying of foreign women, but that he thereafter built temples for their foreign gods. This is given as the reason for the secession of the northern tribes and the division of his kingdom into the Kingdom of Judah, ruled by his son Rehoboam after his death, and the separate northern Kingdom of Israel, inhabitants of which would later be deported after its conquest, thereby creating the idea of the Lost Tribes of Israel, as I spoke about in my series on the subject. The image of Solomon in the Bible gives no indication of the esoteric magus he would later become, but there are present the seeds of the idea, which would later be developed through exegesis and adaptation to the values of future eras and cultures. For example, Solomon receives his wisdom in a divine vision, during which he requests it of God. Already here we find the idea that he was gifted some supernatural faculties in a kind of celestial encounter, and it is easy to see how this would later be transformed into the fantasy tales I have already described. While millennia later, this wisdom would be interpreted as arcane knowledge, in Kings and Chronicles, it is very clearly the practical wisdom to be a just ruler, depicted in the stories of his judgments, such as the famous example when two women come to him both claiming to be the mother of a certain child and Solomon suggests cutting the child in half simply to discern who the real mother is by their different reactions. But even these scriptures, the earliest of records about Solomon, cannot be relied on as accurate historical portrayals, as we already see a process of shaping his legend to suit the authors’ purposes and the tendency to attribute to him works he did not write. Scholars agree that the Book of Kings was not authored by the prophet Jeremiah, as tradition suggests, but rather was composed, compiled, and edited by the same authors as the books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Jeremiah, during the Babylonian exile, hundreds of years after Solomon’s reign. There is even analysis of Kings that suggests it was redacted from some unknown source material, edited to depict Solomon as a kind of idealized universal king of all humanity, but also to emphasize his sin and blame him for the division of the kingdom. Likewise the book of Chronicles is believed to have been written by a single person even later, post-exile, during the Achaemenid Empire after Cyrus the Great liberated the Hebrews and allowed them to return to Jerusalem and rebuild. This author presents an even more mundane version of Solomon, idealizing him as the best of Jewish kings, but not so much as the perfect king of kings. As for the Book of Proverbs, which appears to display the preternatural wisdom of Solomon, and Song of Solomon, also called Song of Songs, which is basically an erotic poem that demonstrates Solomon’s lustful nature, debate rages regarding whether these were unified works or collections, with most scholars agreeing that they are certainly later pseudepigraphal works attributed to Solomon. Thus even in the Bible, among the very first pieces of writing related to Solomon, we already see him being credited with writing things he did not write.

This rewriting of Solomon’s life continued in the postexilic Second Temple period, when much “parabiblical literature” was produced that adapted the history and lessons of the Bible for Hellenistic sensibilities as the known world came under the influence of ancient Greece. Works such as The Wisdom of Ben Sira, Eupolemus’s work Concerning the Kings in Judea, and of course Flavius Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities again emphasize the wisdom of Solomon, but in a more Hellenized sense, this wisdom is conceived of not just as a practical political skill, but also as a knowledge of physical sciences and of divine and philosophical truths. We must remember that the Hellenized world was the hotbed from which emerged all the lore about the beginnings of magic. I traced the claims about Zoroaster’s invention of magic to the Hellenized Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, and I further traced the lore of alchemy to the syncretistic transformation of the Egyptian god Thoth into the Greek figure of Hermes Trismegistus during the Hellenistic period. Likewise, in Second Temple literature and Hellenistic culture, the figure of Solomon was transformed into a kind of Hermetic sage. This reinterpretation of his character reflects the philosophical milieu of the late Hellenistic period, the 1st century BCE, and beyond. It can be seen in the aforementioned work of Josephus as well as in the deuterocanonical Book of Wisdom, also called the Wisdom of Solomon. Again, “deuterocanonical” means this work is part of Catholic and Eastern Orthodox canon but tends to be viewed as apocryphal by Protestants. In it, Solomon is not only wise, he is also a teacher of wisdom, a revealer of secrets. The secrets to which he is privy are those of the structure and elements of the earth and the heavens. We see here the root of later folktales in that he bears knowledge regarding the nature of animals and how to tame them, as well as sorcery in that he understands all there is to know about plants and what can be done with them. Thus in the Wisdom of Solomon, and also in Jewish Antiquities, he is depicted as a master of occult knowledge, and specifically two areas of knowledge: astronomy, which would further link him to the magical art of astrology, and demonic exorcism, which would contribute to the tales of his power to bend all spirits to his will.

A depiction of Solomon planning the Temple’s construction.

The 1st century BCE author of The Wisdom of Solomon and Flavius Josephus, writing about a hundred years later in the Common Era, were presenting reinterpretations of Solomon that were entirely extra-biblical. However, they were likely deriving their portraits of the king from Jewish traditions that had developed during the Second Temple period, especially among Jews in Hellenized Egypt. The portrait of Solomon as a powerful exorcist certainly goes hand in hand with the portrait of him as being endowed with esoteric knowledge like a hermetic sage, as his power over demons was said to come from his knowledge of their nature and their names. However, there already existed some Jewish traditions connecting kingship with exorcism in the story of Solomon’s father David, who in the Book of Samuel soothed an evil spirit in King Saul by playing his harp, thereby setting him on the path to succeed the king. This was likely not the only source of the depiction of Solomon as an exorcist, though. In part it must have been derived from the tendency in Hellenistic culture to portray kings as divine and capable of performing miracles. And in even larger part, it represents a syncretism of ideas that were very popular in the Hellenized world regarding the hierarchies of demonology and angelology. In short, it just made sense, if Solomon were a great king endowed with divine wisdom, that he be a demonologist and be capable of performing the miracle of exorcism. The oldest Second Temple literature portraying Solomon as an exorcist was not found until modern times, in a cave in Qumran. These apocryphal Psalms, which date to between 50 and 70 CE, read somewhat like instructions for casting out demons and talk of Solomon invoking the name of God and asking the name of the demon in order to command it. A few decades later, in the 90s of the 1st century CE, Josephus included in his Jewish Antiquities an account of an exorcism performed by a man named Eleazar who cast out demons in the name of Solomon, speaking incantations the text says were written by Solomon, and pressing a ring said to bear the seal of Solomon to the possessed man’s nose. Clearly by this point, the exorcism rituals attributed to Solomon had become a kind of folk healing remedy, and his name and seal an apotropaic protection against evil spirits. Interestingly, we see here a ring, though not the magical ring gifted by angels to endow Solomon with power over all things. Rather it seems perhaps many such rings may have been made and used in such rituals, their power thought to derive from the “seal” engraved on it. Here we find the myth of Solomon’s ring and his power over demons in its infancy. Over the following centuries, many apotropaic amulets would be inscribed with the names of demons, following the Solomonic exorcism ritual, and would even claim to bear the seal given to Solomon to ward off demons. Sometime after the first century CE, likely in the period of Late Antiquity between the 3rd and 6th centuries, we find this legend fully formed in the fragments later collected in the Middle Ages as the pseudepigraphal work called the Testament of Solomon, which not only has him wielding his magic ring but also compiles an entire demonology, with the names of each offending spirit, the nature of their activities, and specific prescriptions for exorcising them.

Present in the demonologies later attributed to Solomon are also some elements of astrology, identifying spirits with certain heavenly bodies. While incantations and seals for warding against and exorcising demons certainly was a kind of miracle and magic, and would develop through the centuries to be represented as a different kind of magic—the binding and commanding of spirits to do one’s will—it may seem rather less occult today, since priests still claim to cast demons out of people. Such is the case as well with astrology, a kind of divination magic, which as we discussed in my previous volume in this series, on Zoroaster, was thought to be one of the oldest forms of magic, invented by the magi, from whom we derive the word for magic. In the Testament of Solomon, the view of Solomon as astrologer is definitely present. In it, he refers to planets and their identification with demons, and he even refers to the signs of the Zodiac. The tradition is further developed in the Hygromanteia or Magical Treatise of Solomon, a work that appears to bridge the Hermetic sage and exorcist Solomon of Late Antiquity with the all-out sorcerer and alchemist Solomon of the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance. In some ways this portrayal of Solomon also has its roots in the Bible, as in 1 Kings 5:10, it is claimed that “Solomon’s wisdom excelled the wisdom of all the children of the East and all the wisdom of Egypt.” As Midrashic commentaries have emphasized, the wisdom of the East and Egypt was astrological in nature, so it would only make sense then that Solomon’s surpassing wisdom also partook of this kind of divination and augury. And in the Magical Treatise, we can even find evidence of the further evolution of this depiction of Solomon as magus. The Hygromanteia is a Greek work, but portions of it appear to have Italian influence and to have been added later, in the early Middle Ages. In these sections, Solomon is not only a practitioner of astrology, but also of other forms of magic, such as hydromancy, the summoning of demons in a water basin to create a kind of crystal ball that would show him things he desired to see. Here we have the notion of his control of demons that had evolved from the view of Solomon as exorcist combined with a form of divination evolved from the view of Solomon as astrologer, syncretized in such a way that we see Solomon compelling demons to do him favors. Thus the image of Solomon the commander of demons, master of Ars goetia, is forged.

A magic circle used in the summoning of demons, according to the Lesser Key of Solomon

Since by the Middle Ages, Solomon had already picked up these extra-biblical magical trappings, like a snowball gathering mass as it rolls downhill, growing from a wise king and builder to a magician endowed with a magical ring that allows him to bend spirits to his will, it is unsurprising that medieval alchemists and Renaissance magicians, many of them Christian, focused on Solomon as the originator of some of their esoteric beliefs and even attributed new works on magic to him. In Hellenistic Egypt, the alchemists and writers who immortalized alchemical lore looked not just to the mythological figure of Hermes Trismegistus as the progenitor of their art, but also to biblical figures. They were very familiar with the Greek translation of the Bible, and as their Hermetic perspective taught them to seek mystery and symbolism in everything, they looked to the scriptures, seeing in the Genesis narrative of Creation an analog for their Great Work of transmuting base metals into gold. They even went so far as to write the protagonist of their mythos, Hermes Tristmegistus, into the lineage of antediluvian heroes, claiming he was a grandson of Noah who preserved the ancient knowledge of alchemy revealed to mankind. This adaptation of the Bible to suit the purposes of alchemists began in Alexandria, toward the end of the 3rd century CE and into the beginning of the next, by Zosimos of Panopolis, a Gnostic mystic and alchemist who invented entire traditions in his prolific writings, which survive only in fragments today. Zosimos combined Hermetic ideas with the Gnostic view, prevalent during his time, that the secrets of the universe, including alchemy, had been shared with humanity by the fallen angels who lay with human women mentioned in Genesis as well as various apocrypha. If you want to learn more about Gnosticism, check out my post Gnostic Genesis, and for more on the wild traditions about these fallen angels, find my 2-part series No Bones About It, on giants, as well as my post on The Secrets of Enoch. Much of what we know of Gnostic tradition comes from the Nag Hammadi library, a trove of ancient codices whose discovery rivals that of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and some of the demonological and astrological material that has been attributed to Solomon seems to be echoed in or even have been derived from these Gnostic traditions about the spiritual forces in the world and their identification with certain planets. Thus already, in Zosimos’s time, the traditions surrounding Solomon were being incorporated into new belief structures. The writings of Zosimos, who combined Christian Gnosticism with Hermeticism and sought to tie the practices of alchemy to the Old Testament, talk of Solomon binding demons not with a ring or a seal or even in a water basin, but in sealed bottles that he specially made, on instructions from angels, by mixing silver, copper, gold, and a mystery metal called “orichalcum” into a magical kind of electrum alloy. Thus Zosimos takes the myth of Solomon the demon-binder and turns him into an ancient alchemist. He even in one work refers to some supposedly ancient and conveniently lost book purportedly written by Solomon that is said to have detailed the many uses of quicksilver. As the legend of Solomon grew among alchemists, they saw hidden meaning in every part of his story. His songs, they said, must have been incantations, and he must, they reasoned, have had possession of the Philosopher’s Stone, for only that could explain how rich in gold he was said to have been. So scouring the scriptures, they fell on a verse in 1 Chronicles that talks of King David collecting wealth for the future Temple Solomon was to build, which mentions “all sorts of precious stones,” whose original Hebrew referred to “stones of pukh,” a term whose true meaning has been lost to time, and they said that was the Philosopher’s stone. Alternatively, some looked at 1 Kings, which tells of the Queen of Sheba gifting him jewels or precious stones, and they invented an entire story about Solomon recognizing the Philosopher’s Stone among the jewels. Regardless of what version of this story they believed, the idea stuck. Solomon was not just a wise king, not just a sage mystic, not just an exorcist, not only a diviner, he was among the most powerful of wizards, an ancient practitioner of alchemy, and if you wanted the grimoire you were writing to be taken seriously and be copied down through the centuries, you might just want to slap his name on it.

The legend of King Solomon and his place in the vast myth complex about magic is a truly global phenomenon. It had its beginning in ancient Israel, with what must have been a real man, and his memory was edited and redacted for political and cultural purposes in the Second Temple Period. Thereafter, with the Greek influence on the Hellenized world, his legend continued to evolve, and to incorporate new views of wisdom and kingship along the way, until he came to be viewed as a kind of esoteric guru like Hermes Trismegistus, and an astrologer like the ancient Zoroaster, and an exorcist, like another great sage of the era, Jesus Christ. Indeed, the connections between Christ and these depictions of Solomon are many. Both were exorcists, and both were teachers of sage wisdom. Indeed, both were called the “Son of David,” Solomon because he was literally the successor of David and fruit of his loins, and Christ because he was said to be of Davidic descent. Indeed, some apocryphal texts go further in identifying the two, such as the Questions of Bartholomew, sometimes thought to be the lost Gospel of Bartholomew, which describes Christ binding demons in fiery chains and torturing them, and even name dropping Solomon as he does so. It has led some scholars to question whether the development of Christian lore may not have borrowed from the emerging lore of King Solomon in an effort to legitimize Christ as a kind of new Solomon, King of the Jews and king of kings. Certainly the evolution of the Solomonic legend is a story of one tradition borrowing from another throughout time, resulting in a syncretistic amalgamation. Other figures that are suggested to have been amalgamated with King Solomon are the legendary Indian king Vikramaditya, or the much mythologized Greek philosopher Apollonius of Tyana, whose legend has also been suggested to be the true origin of the story of Jesus Christ—a theory sometimes called the Jesus Myth Theory that I may have to explore in more depth in the future, perhaps in my annual Xmas episode. But the legend of Solomon does not belong to the Jews or even the Christians alone. Certainly the myth complex that depicted him as a mage and alchemist proved quite popular among Jewish mystics and Christian alchemists of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but from the hotbed of syncretism that was Hellenistic Egypt, his legend also spread to and was further developed in the Arab and Muslim world, where he was called Nabi Sulayman and was said to be master of their version of demons, the djinn. Indeed, the entire notion of Solomon keeping demons in a bottle and forcing them to do his bidding may explain much about the development of stories featuring wish-granting genies kept in bottles. But as with all mythology about magic, it is nearly impossible to discern if one legend gave birth to others or was itself born of them.

 Further Reading

Lecouteux, Claude. King Solomon the Magus: Master of the Djinns and Occult Traditions of East & West. Translated by Jon. E. Graham, Inner Traditions, 2022.

Schwarz, Sarah L. “Reconsidering the Testament of Solomon.” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, vol. 16, no. 3, May 2007, pp. 203–37. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/10.1177/0951820707077166.

Torijano, Pablo A. Solomon the Esoteric King: From King to Magus, Development of a Tradition. Brill, 2002.

The Whereabouts of the Lost Ark of the Covenant

According to the biblical narrative, about a year after the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, thought to be around 1200 BCE, God appeared to them at their encampment at the foot of Mt. Sinai. The description of His visitation sounds like little more than a thunderstorm to modern readers, but the Israelites believed Moses was called up the mountain to confer with God. After Moses ascended, he returned and explained that no one else was to likewise ascend the mountain in an effort to see God for themselves. He also told them that, on the mountain, God had given him a new law, not just the well-known Ten Commandments, but also an entirely new covenant, detailing a social and civil legal code. God even allowed some other priests to see him, and afterward it is said that Moses spent 40 days and nights on the mountain alone with God, during which time he was provided with further detailed instructions for priestly ordinances the Israelites were to keep as well as directions for how to design the Tabernacle, a portable sanctuary to be constructed as a place of worship. Along with these instructions were detailed designs for a cask to be built of acacia wood and overlaid with gold. This cask or chest was intended to carry the tablets of the law, which would be written by the very finger of god. On its lid, two cherubim were to be carved, facing each other, extending their wings so that the tips of them met above the center of the chest, and it was in this place, between the two cherubim, a place that was called the Mercy Seat, that God would reside, invisible. As the very throne of God, it was too holy an object to be touched by man, so rings were to be crafted on its feet, through which poles could be passed so that it could be carried aloft without being touched. This object, called the Ark of the Covenant, was considered the most sacred relic of the Israelites, kept in the Holy of Holies, the most secure central chamber of the Tabernacle, approached only by priests. Legend of the Ark grew over the ages. In the Letter to the Hebrews it is said that it contained not only the tablets of the law, but also the Rod of Aaron, a talisman endowed with the power to perform miracles, as well as a pot of manna, the supernatural substance that fell from the sky to sustain the Israelites during their travels in the desert. But most importantly, it was the very seat of God’s power on Earth, and as such, it was the symbol of their power as well. They carried it aloft before them as they marched into the Promised Land. It miraculously made victory possible for their armies on more than one occasion, drying up the River Jordan so that they could cross, and simply by carrying it in a circuit around the walls of the fortified city of Jericho, it made it possible to bring the walls crashing down with the just the sounding of several trumpets. But as mentioned, this artifact, which carried their invisible God aloft and housed their most sacred relics, was too powerful for a mere mortal to touch. At one point, the Philistines captured the Ark and reveled in the idea that they had stolen the Israelite God, but when plagues of rats and tumors were inflicted on them, they sent the Ark back, and in 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles, it is described that one of the drivers of the cart carrying the Ark was struck down simply for laying a hand on it to steady it when the oxen pulling the cart caused it to lurch. Likewise, when the inhabitants of a certain city did not greet the return of the Ark enthusiastically enough, some seventy of them were struck dead, though by some interpretations, the Ark may have laid waste to something more like fifty thousand people that day. The Ark of the Covenant has grown in legend to become the most powerful sacred object in history, a talisman of untold power, a symbol that confers legitimacy, and a weapon. When King Solomon the Wise constructed his Temple, a permanent version of Moses’s Tabernacle, the Ark was placed in its Holy of Holies and was not officially ever heard of again. In 587 BCE, Solomon’s Temple was sacked, along with the rest of Jerusalem, by the Babylonians, and there are only rumors and conflicting accounts of what became of it thereafter.

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I was inspired to cover this topic by one of my favorite films of all time, the first installment in the Indiana Jones franchise, Raiders of the Lost Ark. I credit these films and the character of Indiana Jones with my lifelong interest in historical mysteries and arcane knowledge. In fact, as the release of the fifth and likely final Indiana Jones film, the Dial of Destiny, approaches, I had the idea to focus in a series of episodes that won’t necessarily be contiguous, on the macguffins and historical mysteries central to the Indiana Jones films. A lot of the episodes of this podcast have already touched on notions from the films, most notably my series on Nazi occultism, but I haven’t entirely focused on the mysteries explored in the films, and of course, I had to start with the Ark of the Covenant. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the stakes are high to find the Ark. As it was believed to be a supernatural weapon that could tip the balance of power, the Nazis are after it, and Indy must keep it from falling into evil hands. Today, the search for the lost Ark of the Covenant likewise carries far greater import than simple archaeological significance. Don’t get me wrong, though. If it were ever discovered that the Ark of the Covenant first of all was real and not just a fabled legend, and more than that, that it had survived to modern day like the Dead Sea Scrolls, it would be an earth-shaking revelation, academically speaking. Not all scholars agree that the Ark actually existed, or that it existed as described in Exodus, but many do, and its discovery would go a long way toward demonstrating the historicity of certain passages in the Bible, which of course would then be touted by biblical literalists as evidence for the historicity of the entire bible, even if it were shown not to possess supernatural powers. But more than this, the discovery of the Ark of the Covenant would have massive repercussions for peace in the Middle East. There are those who believe that discovery of the Ark would not only prove the truth of scriptures, but also the existence of God and the validity of Judeo-Christian faiths. Some orthodox Jews have hoped that its discovery might somehow heal the rift between Islam and Judaism by somehow proving the political legitimacy of Israel. However, as with most aspects of Middle Eastern conflict, the matter may not be so simple. While the discovery of the Ark in modern times might convince some to set aside their differences or even to convert, more likely it would exacerbate the conflict. One place where the Ark is rumored to have been hidden away is in a secret chamber beneath the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine built atop the Temple Mount in Old Jerusalem, perhaps the most contested holy place in the region or on Earth. To both Jews and Muslims, this place is believed to be the site of the creation of the world. To Muslims, it bears further significance as the place from which Muhammad ascended into the heavens on his miraculous Night Journey, and it is their third holiest site, known to them as the “Farthest Mosque.” To Jews, it is the place where God created Adam, where He asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, and where the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple was located, where the Ark, the seat of God on Earth, was kept. To really delve into this conflict and the significance of this site is beyond the scope of this episode, but what is important to know is that the rebuilding of the Israelite Temple on that site has been foretold as a precondition to the end of days, the resurrection of the dead and the last judgment for the Jews, Armageddon and the Second Coming for Christians. Indeed, there has long been a desire, among some Jews but perhaps even more so among Evangelical Christians, to relocate, or even to destroy, the Dome of the Rock in order to kickstart the end times by rebuilding the Temple. Certainly the prospective discovery that the Ark of the Covenant was real, that it had been recovered and was waiting to be restored to its place on the Temple Mount would raise the already high temperature of the region to a fever pitch. This scenario would prove the fiery power of the Ark, for it would be like tossing a match into a tinder-box.

The first photograph of the Dome of the Rock, c. 1842

This assessment of the explosive prospect of the recovery of the Ark of the Covenant is proven by an incident in 1911, when a British expedition intent on digging for the Ark under the Temple Mount nearly resulted in a Middle Eastern crisis. It began with a Finnish scholar named Valter Juvelius, who had convinced himself and others that by deciphering some ancient code in the Bible, he had discovered the location of the long sought after gold treasures of Solomon, including the Ark of the Covenant, believed by many to have been hidden away before the arrival of the Bablyonians. Juvelius engaged a wealthy English socialite, Montagu Parker, to help him bankroll his expedition, and in 1909, still some forty years before the State of Israel would be created, they traveled to Jerusalem, which at the time was controlled by the Ottomans. Excavation beneath the Noble Sanctuary Mosque on the Temple Mount was forbidden even then by the Sultan in Istanbul, but Juvelius believed that they could begin their dig outside the walls of the Old City and penetrate through to the ancient tunnels that would take them to the treasure they sought. It was the largest and most expensive excavation in the history of Jerusalem at the time, and indeed, they did break through into dark subterranean passages that honeycombed the area. What they did not find was any treasure beyond a few pieces of pottery. Finally, desperate to succeed after years of effort, in 1911, they bribed the sheikh in charge of the Noble Sanctuary Mosque to send his guards away to a ten-day festival that was then being held outside the city, and they set about digging numerous holes on the raised platform of the mosque, and even beneath the Dome of the Rock—the ultimate desecration. On April 12th, 1911, the tenth night of their secret dig, they were discovered, and word swiftly spread through the city that some Western Christians were despoiling their holy site. Muslims flooded the streets, enraged and searching for the offenders, and the Englishmen hopped on the first train out of Jerusalem, back to their yacht in Jaffa. Thousands of demonstrators continued to march the streets of Jerusalem, and Turkish soldiers had to be deployed to quell what looked like impending riots. Around the world, the leaders of Islam condemned the act. It was no exaggeration that they were on the precipice of a global holy war. Eventually, though, the sheikh who had accepted the bribe was arrested, as was the governor of the city, though he had had nothing to do with it. Investigators determined that nothing had actually been looted by the Englishmen, and trouble subsided. However, the expedition’s hasty retreat had led to numerous rumors, spread in the Western press, that Montagu Parker and his men had actually made off with the Ark of the Covenant. This was completely false, however, and indeed, Parker even tried to return later that same year to continue his excavations. Because of the scandal, however, he would never be tolerated to set foot again in Jerusalem. His expedition, though, would go on to inspire others who dreamed of digging up the Temple Treasure and specifically the Ark in Jerusalem, but they would never have the opportunity to excavate beneath the Dome of the Rock again. For about a month in 1967, during the Six-Day War, the site was wrested from Muslim control, but jurisdiction was ceded back before anyone attempted any organized search for the Temple treasure. Once, in 1981, a rabbi broke into a catacomb while constructing a synagogue beyond the Western Wall and organized a secret dig to reach the Holy of Holies, but the news media exposed their excavation and an angry mob put a stop to it, sealing the cavern. Besides these attempts, most other expeditions for the Ark of the Covenant sought the relic outside of Jerusalem, and some even claimed to have found it.

Perhaps the most outrageous of these adventurers was Ron Wyatt. This American nurse from Tennessee, a devoted Seventh Day Adventist, belongs among the biblical literalist fraudsters I previously discussed in my episode on the seekers after Noah’s Ark. He first entered the field of “biblical archaeology,” which is most of the time just amateur archaeology or often pseudoarcheology, because he believed that the Durupinar site, a kind of boat-shaped rock formation that I mentioned in that previous episode, was Noah’s Ark. Starting around 1977, he began organizing various Middle Eastern expeditions designed to recover biblical relics and thereby prove the historicity of the Bible. He had the idea of searching the bottom of the Red Sea for traces of Egyptian chariots, which he would tout as evidence of the scriptural account of the sea having parted for the Israelites and afterward swallowed the Pharaoh’s army. He claims that he discovered the exact place of the crossing and recovered the chariot remains of the army that he sought, but he provided no evidence that the artifacts had actually come from the bottom of the Red Sea, and professional divers have argued that he would not have been physically capable of diving to the depth he claimed. This is rather typical of Ron Wyatt’s adventures. When he provided evidence, it was always suspect, and he dismissed valid criticism as being the efforts of Satan to cast doubt on the truth. He claimed to find everything he looked for, and far too easily. He said he had discovered the true locations of Mt. Sinai, Sodom and Gomorrah, and even the site of Christ’s crucifixion. And here is where his most fantastical claims were made. According to Wyatt, the site of Christ’s crucifixion was just outside the Old City of Jerusalem’s walls, and he further claimed that an ancient earthquake had cracked the hill, an act of God to allow access to a chamber beneath, where the Ark of the Covenant had been hidden. By Ron Wyatt’s reckoning, God had opened the earth there to allow Christ’s blood to flow down onto the Mercy Seat of the Ark, making official the notion that Christ’s death was the ultimate sacrifice and marked the beginning of a new covenant between God and humanity. He further claimed to possess evidence of the find, including video and photographs and even samples of Christ’s blood, which remained upon the Ark and which through DNA analysis showing an absence of a Y-chromosome, proving he had been born of a virgin. But, with Wyatt, there was always an excuse. The Israeli government conspired, he claimed, to cover up the discovery, fearful that it would result in a mass conversion to Christianity. According to him, Israelis had been killing anyone who got close to discovering the site, and it was for this convenient reason that he could not release his evidence. But one day, he promised, he would reveal all to the world. Ron Wyatt passed away in 1999, and no such evidence has ever been shared.

Valter Juvelius, photographed during his and Montagu Parker’s excavations.

In 1946, Bedouin shepherds made the discovery of the century when they found numerous scroll fragments in the Qumran Caves of the Judaean Desert. This very discovery lends some hope to the otherwise far-fetched notion that an artifact like the Ark of the Covenant might be rediscovered today. In 1952, an archaeologist further searching the Qumran Caves discovered a scroll unlike the others in that it had been inscribed on a copper sheet. This “Copper Scroll,” as it has been called, was not a work of literature or a religious manuscript, but rather a list, detailing 63 locations at which gold and silver treasure had been hidden. Some scholars have suggested the scroll was a hoax, but as it has been dated to the 1st century CE, it would have had to have been a very ancient hoax, which doesn’t hold up to logical scrutiny. Some believe the Copper Scroll to be a list of treasures hidden by those at Qumran, others that it may be a key to the location of the treasure of the Second Temple, hidden away before the Roman invasion. But some, including John Allegro, the first scholar to study the Copper Scroll, believed it could refer to the treasure of the First Temple, taken out of the Temple by priests to prevent it falling into Babylonian hands. Allegro pointed to one passage that indicates a silver chest was buried under a hill “in the desolations of the Valley of Achor,” a location northwest of Jericho and thus far outside of Jerusalem, and that this chest contained “all the gold and silver of the Great Tabernacle and all its Treasures.” All the treasures of the Great Tabernacle certainly would include the Ark, but it is unclear how the Ark, which itself is supposed to be four feet long and 2 and a half feet wide and tall, would fit within another chest and still have room for further treasures. It would have to be quite a large silver chest indeed. Whether or not the simple question of how the Ark might fit within a silver chest puzzled him, he mounted a series of excavations to search for the Temple treasure in the West Bank and Jordan, following clues from the Copper Scroll. He never found a thing. Allegro would eventually go on to discredit himself in the eyes of many with some rather bizarre later work in which he claimed that Jesus had been a fictional character dreamed up by early Christians who were really just a sex cult that consumed a lot of psychedelic mushrooms, but Allegro’s work on the Copper Scroll would inspire others to search for the Ark in caves and other locations outside of Jerusalem.

One Vendyl Jones, an American archaeologist who had moved to Israel in the 1960s, claimed to have used the directions in the Copper Scroll to find some of the hidden treasures it told of, including a small jug of the oil used to anoint the kings of Israel, called the balm of Gilead. Vendyl Jones believed that the Copper Scroll was one key to the mystery of the Ark, but that another could be found in the book of Second Maccabees, a deuterocanonical book, meaning it is considered canon by Catholics and certain Eastern churches, but is disregarded as apocryphal by others, in this case both by Jews and Protestants. In Second Maccabees, it is stated that the prophet Jeremiah, having been warned about the impending Babylonian invasion, absconded with the Ark and hid it in a cave on Mount Nebo, well east of Jerusalem, past the Dead Sea, and that its location would remain unknown until the Gathering of Israel. This foretold event, also called the Ingathering of the Exiles, is an eschatological milestone, prophesied as a precursor to the reign of the Messiah, and so Vendyl Jones, who made some efforts to find the Ark, believed that when he discovered it, he would be ushering in the End of Days. Vendyl Jones claimed that he may have been the inspiration for the character of Indiana Jones, asserting that someone who had joined him on his digs wrote a screenplay about an archaeologist named Endy Jones based on him, and that the makers of Raiders of the Lost Ark had cribbed ideas from that script. This claim has been vigorously disputed, however, and Vendyl Jones’ involvement with Kabbalist mystics and fundamentalist rabbis seeking to re-establish a national rabbinical court in Israel, along with his inflated sense of himself as being the person who will usher in the end times by discovering the Ark, rather undermine his credibility as an archaeologist. For example, he announced in 2005 that he would bring forth the Ark on the anniversary of the Temple’s destruction in August of that year, but then didn’t, claiming much like Ron Wyatt and probably just to save face, that he had been prevented by the government, though not because of a conspiracy but rather because of some bureaucratic constraints.

The Copper Scroll.

The notion that the Ark was hidden away in a cave on Mount Nebo, where Moses is said to have died, was not a new one in the 1970s and 80s. Back in the 1920s, a Californian named Antonia Frederick Futterer followed the verse from Second Maccabees to Mount Nebo and claimed that he found a cavern entrance closed with stone and engraved with some sort of ancient glyph, which he claimed his Hebrew translator interpreted to mean “Herein Lies the Golden Ark of the Covenant.” The only evidence he ever offered was a sketch of the entrance, which of course is no evidence at all, and considering the fact that he could have reproduced the hieroglyph and named his Hebrew interpreter as corroboration and never did, it’s pretty safe to dismiss this as a hoax. But in the 1980s, another American, Tom Crotser, took Futterer’s claims seriously and mounted a new expedition to Mount Nebo in Jordan. Unsurprisingly, Crotser could not find the cave entrance described by Futterer, but on a nearby mountainside he claims to have discovered a ravine closed off with a tin metal sheet. According to Crotser, his team penetrated this barrier and discovered a crypt beyond, in which lay a gold chest that perfectly matched the description of the Ark of the Covenant. Unbelievably, he states that he only took photos of it rather than bringing it back with him. Crotser’s claims too can be easily dismissed based on his general lack of credibility. He has devoted his life to finding artifacts that prove the historicity and literal truth of the Bible, and he further claims, without convincing evidence, to have discovered the stone on which Cain murdered Abel, the Tower of Babel, and Noah’s Ark. Furthermore, he refused to make his photographs of the Ark of the Covenant public, only circulating them among a select few of his supporters. Eventually, he made the mistake of showing them to Siegfried Horn, a Bible scholar who was a genuine archaeologist and antiquities expert, and Horn promptly revealed that Crotser photos were of a brass-plated chest that appeared to have been manufactured in modern times using machine-cut materials, with a regular, modern-day nail protruding visibly from it. In short, it was just another hoax.

Many seekers after the lost Ark of the Covenant set their eyes farther afield than Israel, and there is some compelling reason to consider that the Ark was at some point in its history taken out of Israel. Some claims, however, are rather ludicrous. In my series on the Lost Tribes of Israel, I spoke of the failed excavations at the historic Hill of Tara in Ireland by Anglo-Israelists or British Israelites, who rather foolishly believed the Ark of the Covenant had been buried there and would prove that the British were descended from the Lost Tribes. In fact, they only damaged a historical site and found nothing, proving only that they were destructive and wrong. Other theorists point to the Knights Templar, a Christian military order organized to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land during the Crusades in 1119. I have spoken about the Templars before in a patron exclusive episode back in February of 2020 called Philip the Unfair and his Unholy War. In short, the Templars grew extremely wealthy over the nearly 200 years of their existence, and the French king Philip the Fair conspired to steal their wealth by making dubious claims about Templars being sodomite Satanists. In 1307, they were arrested, some of them burned alive, and their wealth seized by the crown. In that exclusive minisode, I refuted the notion that the Templars secretly survived in the Freemasons, but there are countless other conspiracy claims about the Templars, such as that they discovered the New World before Columbus, and that they removed the Temple treasure and brought it to Europe. This last claim derives from the fact that they made their headquarters at the Temple Mount. As the brotherhood became extremely wealthy, legend had it that they had dug up the treasure some believe was or is still buried beneath the Dome of the Rock. In fact, Templar wealth derived from the many donations made to the order across all Christendom, as well as the vast trade network they established. But rumor breeds myth, and today there is no shortage of conspiracists who will tell you with unfeigned certainty that the Templars brought back and hid away such mystical treasures the Spear of Destiny—about which I spoke in my series on Nazi occultism—the Holy Grail—about which I spoke in my episode on the Secret of Rennes-le-Château and Abbé Saunière's Riches and which I intend to explore further in our adventures into Indiana Jones lore—and finally, the Ark of the Covenant. Common is the speculation that the Ark may have been hidden in the south of France by the Templars, or even farther afield. One claim has it that the Templars carried it to the New World and buried it on Oak Island, and that’s a whole other rabbit hole that some patrons have actually requested I excavate. I do intend to dig into that morass of pseudohistory eventually, but for now, suffice it to say that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the Templars found the Ark of the Covenant or stashed it anywhere. In fact, logic would dictate that if they had discovered it, they would have announced it to the world as a symbol that God was on their side of the conflict, just as they certainly would not have kept secret the discovery of Christian relics as important as the Holy Grail or the Spear of Destiny.

The photograph of what Tom Crotser claimed was the Ark. Reproduced according to the Fair Use doctrine.

And now we come to the seemingly more credible but, in reality, just as unreliable claims of Graham Hancock, who in his 1992 tome The Sign and the Seal also traces the paths of the Knights Templar and engages in speculation about their carrying of the Ark of the Covenant out of Jerusalem, though he focuses more on Africa. Several listeners have asked when I will be devoting an episode exclusively to refuting Graham Hancock’s claims, especially since his Netflix series premiered. The thing is, the ideas that Hancock resurrects in his pseudohistorical, pseudoarcheological Netflix series, which I won’t amplify by naming it, are old racist ideas that I already refuted in detail in my episode on the Myth of a Lost Mound Builder Race. Likely I will refute Hancock again whenever I get around to producing a series about Atlantis, which he has written a lot about, but in the meantime, I’ll just talk here about his Ark claims, which like his other claims are not original. He is not an archaeologist, and actual experts recognize him for what he is: a journalist engaged in popular writing. So to argue that he is a conspiracist or a fringe lunatic would be unfair. He writes lucidly about a lot of real scholarship, and in some ways he is an effective science communicator in that he makes very complicated and esoteric academic material digestible and accessible to wider audiences. The problem is that he is not as concerned as a real academic about credibility and truth. His are elaborate stories that err on the side of entertainment rather than fact, and as such, he tends toward the fantastical rather than the accurate, and in the process he resurrects and propagates sometimes harmful narratives, like the racist idea that Native Americans could not have constructed the American earthworks. In the case of the Ark of the Covenant, he finds himself part of a rich tradition that suggests the Ark of the Covenant was carried out of Jerusalem and into Africa, and not necessarily by the Templars. Indeed, this path was even suggested in canonical scriptures, as the Book of Kings speaks of an Egyptian king named Shishak assaulting Jerusalem and carrying away “the treasures of the House of the Lord.” Indeed, this verse is referred to in the film Raiders of the Lost Ark and is the reason its story is largely set in Egypt.

Although it made for a ripping yarn in the first Indiana Jones film, there is no evidence that the Ark of the Covenant was ever brought to Egypt, and in fact, the verse in Kings mentions only vague treasures. However, one mysterious document, the Tractate of the Temple Vessels, does appear to lend some credibility to the claims that the Ark and the Temple treasures were brought to Arabia by priests hoping to hide their most sacred object before the Babylonian invasion. It must be acknowledged, though, that the origins of the Tractate are extremely suspicious. It did not appear until the Middle Ages, the 10th century CE, to be more specific, and thus in all likelihood is a medieval fantasy. Graham Hancock favors more the notion that the Ark of the Covenant was carried out of Jerusalem a hundred years before the coming of the Babylonians, to protect it from a sacrilegious king: Manasseh, the fourteenth King of Judah. According to one of the several theories Hancock entertains, these priests would have carried it to the Egyptian island of Elephantine, where a replica of the Temple had been constructed. This too is pure conjecture, though, and even if it were true, 2 Chronicles records that Josiah, the 16th King of Judah, restored the Temple and specifically ordered that “the sacred ark” be put into it, indicating that if it had been taken to Elephantine during Manasseh’s reign, it would only have been as a brief sojourn and was back in Jerusalem before the Babylonian invasion. There is the further possibility that priests may have brought it to the Temple replica on Elephantine, again or for the first time, ahead of the coming of the Babylonians, but as one of my sources, The Lost Ark of the Covenant by Tudor Parfitt points out, the record that provides us with the most information about the ancient goings on at Elephantine, the papyri discovered in the 19th century by American journalist Charles Edwin Wilbour, makes no mention of the arrival of the Ark of the Covenant, and as Parfitt I think wisely points out, if the temple there had ever held such a relic, it would have been something they bragged about rather than hid. Such is the case with temples and churches generally. They tend to make a big deal about possessing miraculous objects in order to draw more visitors to them and thereby collect more money. So despite what Raiders may have led us to believe, all claims about the Ark of the Covenant residing in Egypt suffer for lack of evidence.

Historical image of the original church in Ethiopia believed by many to have housed the Ark of the Covenant. Courtesy The Digital Collections of the National WWII Museum.

Finally, because it is such a fun story despite reliability problems, Graham Hancock falls back on an age-old belief that the Ark had perhaps been stolen from ancient Israel long before the Babylonian sacking of the Temple or even before the reign of Manasseh or the invasion of the Egyptian king Shishak. By this telling, King Solomon the Wise, who built the first Temple to house the Ark, lost it to a thief who carried it to Ethiopia, where it has resided ever since. But it’s far more interesting than only that. So the tale goes, when the Queen of Sheba visited Solomon to partake of his wisdom, she lay with him and returned to her homeland—Ethiopia, according their national legends—pregnant with his son, whom she named Menelik. Menelik returned years later to meet his father, and in a show of alliance, Solomon sent the sons of members of his court back with Menelik in an effort to recreate the wisdom and greatness of Israel in Ethiopia, known as Abyssinia at the time. However, one of these young men, disgruntled at being sent away, stole the Ark and took it with him. Since the Ark did not destroy the thief or the rest of the party, it was believed that God willed for the relic to reside thenceforth in Ethiopia, and the claim is that, ever since, as kings of a Solomonic dynasty reigned and even as foreign invasions and modern revolutions changed the political landscape, the Ark of the Covenant has remained in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion at Aksum, protected by a virgin priest who is the only person alive who is allowed to see it. This narrative is supported by their national epic, the Kebra Nagast, or The Glory of Kings, which purports to be an account of a dialogue at the First Council of Nicaea that then shares what is ostensibly a far older tradition from more ancient sources. To be very clear, Graham Hancock’s work The Sign and the Seal is not a work of historical scholarship, but insofar as he supports the story of the Ark being in Ethiopia, it must be acknowledged that this is not a new tradition, and it is one that many faithful in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church believe in to this day. A detailed exploration of the evidence refuting this myth is far beyond the scope of this episode, but if you are interested in researching it for yourself, I recommend reading Stuart Munro-Hays’s The Quest for the Ark of the Covenant: The True History of the Tablets of Moses, or if you’re looking for something a bit easier to digest, listen to the Our Fake History podcast’s 2-part episode, “Does Ethiopia Have the Ark of the Covenant?” Suffice it to day here that historians and scholars mostly find that, first, there is no evidence that the Queen of Sheba ever existed except as a literary character; second, despite claims that the Kebra Nagast’s contents are a retelling of ancient traditions, there is no evidence that the work or the legends about Menelik and the Ark existed prior to the Middle Ages; and third, the story appears most likely to be a medieval fiction fabricated as propaganda to legitimize the divine right of Ethiopian kings and enhance the glories of the Ethiopian church.

Even if we were to credit the claims of Graham Hancock and the Ethiopian church, even by their own legend, the relic they revere as the Ark sounds less like the Ark itself and more like the stone Tablets of the Law the Ark was said to contain—or rather, their replacement, since Moses broke the originals and had to get God to remake them. Indeed, every church in Ethiopia possesses such tablets, or tabots, claiming they are replicas of the real ones that, of course, no one is allowed to see. And in their long history, they too tell of times when their priests took their Ark out of its Holy of Holies and hid it elsewhere in order to protect it from invaders, making it further questionable whether whatever it is they actually have now is what they claim it was long ago and whether whatever they had then may now also be lost. Further complicating the matter is the fact that they are not the only African people to claim to be descended from Hebrews or Jews. There are the Beta Israel and the Qemant, also in Ethiopia. There are the Lemba of Zimbabwe, and the Nyambo of Tanzania, the Igbo of Nigeria, and the Ibro of Somalia. Some of these groups have genetic evidence to support their claims of having being descended from Middle Eastern semitic peoples, and more than one has their own tradition about carrying the Ark into Africa long ago. Add to this further legends from Arabic texts that claim the Ark ended up in Mecca after Arabs defeated the Israelites in battle and that it was thereafter sealed in some cave somewhere in the Arabian desert, and we come to a dizzying conclusion that the Ark, if it ever existed, and if it survived the ravages of time, could be secreted almost anywhere: under the most hotly contested holy site on earth, buried somewhere in modern day Israel or Jordan, in some ancient Egyptian catacomb, or in some church anywhere from Ethiopia to the South of France. Rather than lead us to take any such claims more seriously, this preponderance of competing claims should cause us to view all of them more skeptically. Instead of driving anyone to take on a costly expedition that would in all likelihood end in failure and could very well disturb what fragile peace we may have in the world, it seems rather that it should be enough to convince us that, whether it’s ancient history or ancient myth, it’s certainly nothing to chase after now.

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Until next time, remember, when it comes to legendary magical artifacts, it is far more likely that, if they ever existed, they weren’t magical, and they have likely been destroyed by people or the elements and in fact are not filed away somewhere among endless crates in a top secret warehouse.

Further Reading

Munro-Hay, Stuart. The Quest for the Ark of the Covenant: The True History of the Tablets of Moses. I.B. Tauris, 2005.

Parfitt, Tudor. The Lost Ark of the Covenant: Solving the 2,500 Year Old Mystery of the Fabled Biblical Ark. HarperCollins, 2008.

Ricca, Brad. True Raiders: The Untold Story of the 1909 Expedition To Find the Legendary Ark of the Covenant. St. Martin’s Press, 2021.

InfeKtion: Operation DENVER and the Engineering of AIDS Conspiracy Legends

(This blog post is not an exact transcription of the podcast episode, which contains a great deal of material from my interview of Dr. Douglas Selvage. I encourage you to listen to the podcast for a full sense of the what was discussed. Additionally, Patreon supporters have been granted access to the entire interview).

In 2020, early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the Trump administration, amid criticism of its response to the crisis, asserted without evidence that China was to blame for the virus. Certainly the original epicenter of the outbreak occurred in Wuhan, but as a way to deflect blame from their handling of the situation, the Trump administration promoted an emerging hypothesis that the virus had been released upon the Chinese population in a “lab leak.” Medical scientists and the scholarly community were quick to decry this assertion, as study of the virus, a variant of the coronavirus that caused the severe acute respiratory syndrome or SARS epidemic in the early 2000s, showed that it had likely crossed the species barrier much like its predecessor. What their research was showing was that what was most likely to blame were the conditions of the wet markets and the practices of the wildlife trade in China. However, the existence of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the fact that it had been studying coronaviruses that cause respiratory infections ever since the 2003 SARS outbreak was viewed by many as a kind of smoking gun. Rumors about researchers at this institute falling ill with flu-like symptoms late in 2019 further encouraged the lab leak hypothesis, though there is no evidence that any researchers at the institute had Covid-19. Since that time, it has become a mire of conspiracy speculation, with the institute being depicted as a U.S.-funded bioweapons development site and with further claims that Anthony Fauci, a public health spokesman during the first year of the pandemic and chief medical advisor to the President during the first two years of the Biden administration, was himself personally responsible for “gain of function” research to develop a more transmissible virus. While the scholarly community and the intelligence community worked slowly but surely to assemble evidence for a natural origin, the conspiracist community latched onto any gaps in their evidence as if it proved the opposite. Most recently, a declassified report by the U.S. Department of Energy that claimed with “low confidence” that the lab leak theory was correct, along with the FBI director’s comments indicating that his agency agreed, has resulted in numerous major press reports that act like it had been proven, even though this conclusion runs counter to the findings of most other federal agencies and intelligence services and scientific consensus. The fact is that it is still too early to make draw such a conclusion, which is exactly why they have been drawn with “low confidence.” Even as I wrote this, President Biden signed the Covid-19 Origin Act to declassify intelligence on the subject, which has been deemed inconclusive. And this announcement came on the heels of a further revelation that samples deposited by Chinese researchers in a virology database show that the novel coronavirus was present in civets and racoon dogs sold at a Wuhan wet market. Yet these developments will not likely not be trumpeted with quite the same gusto by the press, which often amplifies conspiracy claims simply because it gets them clicks and views. When the recent conclusions of the Department of Energy were making headlines, a disgruntled listener who insisted he was “not an idiot,” emailed me to say that, since “COVID-19 is thought to have escaped a lab,” he hoped I would “reconsider the possibility of HIV having been foisted upon us.” But of course we know that the notion of HIV having been created as a bioweapon is a baseless conspiracy claim, widely spread by the KGB. Really, the story of how this myth appeared and was propagated for political purposes serves as the perfect example from history of why we must reserve judgment about the origin of Covid until the evidence is more conclusive.

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Before I continue with this story, since I have heard that the best way to combat misinformation is not to tease the accurate information until later but to state the truth at the outset of your discussion, let’s start by talking about the natural origin of AIDS. Just as medical scientists have been studying the natural origin of Covid since its emergence, ever since the 1981 recognition of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome as a new disease and the subsequent identification of the causative retrovirus now called the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV, scientists studied it and hypothesized about its natural origin. Early on, even though it seemed to have emerged in America, it was believed to have come “out of Africa” because of the discovery of its similarity to a simian virus known to affect primates in sub-Saharan Africa. With far more time spent studying this pathogenesis than has been spent studying Covid, it has been borne out with consistent evidence that HIV passed naturally to humans through a cross-species transmission, that it actually first appeared in west central Africa, then came to Haiti before emerging in America, all long before the years when it would subsequently be claimed that the CIA was developing it as a bioweapon. And the intelligence services that were responsible for legitimizing and spreading these baseless claims have since confessed! In 1992, the head of the post-Soviet intelligence service, successor of the KGB, explicitly admitted to the existence of the KGB’s disinformation campaign to convince the world that HIV was created by the U.S. as a biological weapon, and that same year, former members of the Stasi, the East German intelligence agency, further confessed to their participation in the campaign. As for hard evidence of the workings of the KGB’s program, and the Stasi’s involvement in it, that was lacking for a long time, causing some to doubt, but eventually, it was discovered in the archives of Bulgaria’s secret police. In the podcast episode, you can hear more about this from Dr. Douglas Selvage, historian at the Humboldt University in Berlin, who along with Christopher Nehring published a German language study irrefutably proving not only the existence of the KGB disinformation campaign but also the nature and details of the significant involvement of East German intelligence in spreading the myth. He has published major papers on the topic in the Journal of Cold War Studies, as well as on openDemocracy and the Wilson Center website. Dr. Selvage generously agreed to chat with me on this topic, and you can hear a great deal of additional information from him throughout the podcast episode, so I encourage you to listen and not just read this blog post.  

Dr. Douglas Selvage. Listen to the podcast for material from his interview. Check out the citations under Further Reading below for research and articles on this topic published by Dr. Selvage.

It would be inaccurate to suggest that Russian disinformation is entirely responsible for the invention of the conspiracy claim that HIV was developed by the U.S. government. Before the first known insertion of the narrative into the media by the KGB, some form of the conspiracy theory had already arisen among the community most affected by AIDS during the first years of the epidemic. More than a week before the first known use of the conspiracy claim by the KGB, Boston’s Gay Community News and New York’s Native, another newspaper focused on gay issues and the gay community, printed and repeated the erroneous claim that HIV was a variant of the African Swine Fever virus, and pieces in these papers argued, without evidence, that it had been brought across the Atlantic by the CIA for biological warfare purposes in Cuba. The fact that the conspiracy theory originated in a marginalized and oppressed community is no surprise. When the spread of AIDS elicited mostly homophobic sentiments by legislators and the Reagan administration seemed to be purposely dragging their feet in responding to the crisis, one can hardly blame them for beginning to suspect some sinister intentions. Likewise, as the Black community came to be greatly affected by AIDS later in the eighties, it seemed pretty reasonable to many that they may be the victims of some sort of “ethnic weapon,” especially since history showed the U.S. government was entirely capable of such atrocity, the most obvious example being the Tuskegee Experiment, the 40-year study in which 400 African American men were purposely infected with syphilis. Also fresh in the minds of the American public were the Church Committee revelations about Operations MKULTRA, the CIA search for mind control drugs, and MKNAOMI, which developed biological and chemical warfare technology. These revelations led to Richard Nixon’s 1969 executive order banning the military use of biological weapons. Certainly the Soviets had agents in America observing the media for any social and political conflicts they could leverage in their disinformation, and having recently been accused of developing biological weapons themselves, the opportunity to deflect such allegations and simultaneously discredit the Reagan administration by suggesting it had been ignoring this ban and engaging in biological warfare against America’s own citizens was too great to pass up.

If one looks up the Soviet AIDS disinformation campaign today, on the Internet, one finds that it is widely called Operation INFEKTION, when in fact, as Dr. Selvage has shown in his work, the campaign was actually called Operation Denver. There are a few reasons for that. The first is that one of the former Stasi members who first revealed that agency’s involvement in the operation, an individual whose other revelations have been shown to be mixed with falsehoods, thus discrediting him to some degree, actually claimed it was called Infektion. The other reason is that it’s just a better name. It is more evocative of the actual nature of the program, and it has led to a useful metaphor, describing the spread of conspiracy theories and disinformation as a kind of viral infection. Indeed, the New York Times even produced a great nearly hour-long documentary on the topic, complete with engaging animation, that calls the operation by this incorrect name and makes much use of that extended metaphor. It’s for that reason and for search engine optimization, that I’ve used it in the title of this episode, in order to catch those keyword searches. While he has argued against the incorrect designation of the program, Dr. Selvage has himself made clever use of the metaphor, acknowledging that conspiracy claims spread like a viral infection, especially on the Internet, where they spread as memes. He makes the fantastic point, however, that the KGB did not invent this “virus” but rather, since they modified conspiracy claims that had already appeared in order to make them spread more virally, it can be said that they engineered this claim to make it more infectious, a process Selvage cleverly calls “memetic engineering.” In order to draw a more modern parallel to the spread of Covid misinformation, it might be said that Soviet and East German intelligence performed “gain of function” research on existing conspiracy claims, and as a result, turned a small outbreak of conspiracy theory into a disinformation pandemic.

On July 17th, 1983, the very same month that this conspiracy claim appeared in newspapers serving the gay community in America, a newspaper in India called the Patriot, published an anonymous letter purporting to be from an eminent U.S. scientist. The letter claimed that the Pentagon had not abandoned its biological weapons program after Nixon’s executive order to do so, and that the CIA and the CDC had discovered and developed HIV at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Maryland, a facility known for its research into biological warfare and defensive countermeasures against it. This would prove to be the principal Soviet contribution to the conspiracy claim. The fact that the anonymous author claimed to be an anthropologist, not an infectious disease expert, and cited sources like the magazine Army Research, Development & Acquisition, not your typical reading for an anthropologist but just the sort of publication the KGB monitored, went a long way toward demonstrating that the letter was KGB propaganda, as did the poor English of the supposed American academic who wrote the letter. But beyond these tells, the intelligence community was aware that the KGB actually helped establish the Patriot in 1967 and regularly used it as their mouthpiece to circulate propaganda. This was a tried and true method for the KGB: plant the seed of a story in an Indian newspaper and watch it get picked up and spread in other papers. For example, in 1968, during the Vietnam War, the KGB likewise forged a letter claiming that the U.S. was using biological weapons in Southeast Asia, and they spread it by placing it in a Bombay newspaper. The Patriot story did not spread far, but a couple years later, as AIDS became a global crisis, and as accusations were made of the USSR engaging in biological weapons development themselves, the KGB resumed their campaign with a vengeance. In 1985, they published a story in the Literary Gazette, their principal mouthpiece, which cited the fake Patriot letter as if it were evidence. This article argued that HIV’s spread in America was the result of experiments on unsuspecting citizens, suggested AIDS victims should sue the CIA, and warned the nations of the world not to host the U.S. Armed Forces because American soldiers were surely carriers of the scourge.

Even though these news articles, which mixed fact with baseless conspiracy fiction, were illegitimate, they could then be cited to seemingly legitimize further articles, some likewise placed by the KGB and others written by people who were unwittingly helping them spread their narrative. But what the KGB campaign really needed was an academic to lend their claim scholarly clout, and their partner agency, the Stasi, or Ministry of State Security of East Germany, provided it to them. His name was Jakob Segal, a committed Communist who had been born in Russia and studied biology in Germany. As a Jew, he had been forced to flee Nazi Germany for France, where he completed his doctorate. When the Nazis invaded France, he joined the resistance, where he likely first came in contact with Soviet intelligence. He returned to Germany after the war, becoming the head of the Institute for Applied Bacteriology in East Berlin and, according to former Stasi agents, acted as an operative or informer for the Stasi. Likely at the behest of the Stasi and KGB, or perhaps just with their sly encouragement, Segal began to produce scholarly-style literature that argued against the African origin of HIV, suggesting that the virus was an artificial synthesis of the human T-cell lymphotropic virus and a retrovirus that affects sheep—even though the technology required to recombine parts of viruses did not exist at the time and those two viruses are too distinct to even be synthesized—and asserting with no evidence whatsoever the truth of a very specific scenario: that at Fort Detrick, HIV was tested on convicts, and because of its long incubation period, it was believed to have no effect, causing the subjects to be released into the population, whereupon they made their way to New York and spread the virus through sexual contact with others. His claims relied not only on complete speculation, but also on two dubious assumptions. First, he asserted that these ex-convict test subjects must have made their way from Fort Detrick in Maryland to New York City, where the first outbreak occurred, because they were criminals, and there simply was no criminal community to accommodate them in nearby Washington, D.C., when the truth is Washington’s crime rate was extremely high at the time. And second, he claimed that, because the test subjects must have been convicts who had spent a long time in prison, they must also have become homosexual, thus explaining why they introduced the virus specifically into the gay community. Considering the stereotypes relied on and the lack of evidence provided by Segal, it is unsurprising that the scientific community largely ignored him or scorned his claims, as was the case with one AIDS expert who called it “nothing but a hypothesis, and not a very original one at that” in popular German magazine Der Spiegel. However, while the academic world never took him seriously, the press in the third world and the tabloid press in the UK, became unwitting stooges for Soviet intelligence by spreading Segal’s thesis far and wide.

A brochure by Jakob Segal and his wife. Courtesy Dr. Douglas Selvage and the Wilson Center.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., some useful idiots did their part to strengthen the resolve of Soviet propagandists and promote aspects of their disinformation by spreading a variant conspiracy theory that blamed the Soviets for engineering HIV. Dr. Selvage cleverly calls this a different “strain” of the same viral conspiracy claim, and it was promulgated by Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche is a fascinating character that everyone in America should know about, though I suspect he is largely forgotten. LaRouche became involved in far-left Marxist politics in the 1950s and ‘60s, while working as a management consultant in New York City, but as his conspiracist worldview evolved, he gradually drifted to the far-right, growing anti-Semitic. History might have forgotten him as just another voice on the lunatic fringe, if not for his surprising political career. Lyndon LaRouche ran for president in every election for about thirty years, from the mid seventies to the mid-aughts. While he never had the numbers to come close to a nomination, he had a devoted following, sometimes described as a cult, who in the mid-eighties infiltrated the Democratic party by winning some primaries for state office. Today, no less influential a figure than Roger Stone has expressed admiration for LaRouche, and I can’t help but find parallels between LaRouche and Trump, who himself drifted from the left to the right during the course of his political career and over the course of his several failed presidential campaigns and single successful campaign espoused numerous conspiracy claims. As for the LaRouchite cult infiltrating the Democratic Party, I find it very similar to Qanon wackos consuming the Republican Party from within, though the latter have proven far more successful, as they currently hold some sway over the Republican Majority Leader in the House of Representatives. LaRouche’s principal mouthpiece was his magazine Executive Intelligence Review, which in 1985 supported the claim that HIV was engineered at Fort Detrick, but with one crucial twist. It claimed that it had been developed by the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization, whom they asserted had been infiltrated by the Soviets, so it was not the CIA but actually the KGB who had developed the virus. Of course, this only launched a disinformation war, with the Soviets citing parts of LaRouche’s claims as further support for their own allegations. But LaRouche’s conspiracy mongering went further. Much like Covid conspiracy claims decades later, his AIDS conspiracy claims involved anti-vaccinationism.  Furthermore, his publications endorsed the notion that AIDS could be spread through even casual contact, like through insect bites, through the exchange of saliva in kissing, and the old myth about toilet seats. On the basis of these groundless fears, he organized support for a 1986 ballot initiative in California that, if it had passed, would have enforced the HIV testing of every Californian and resulted in the removal and forced confinement of those who tested positive. Frighteningly enough, almost a full third of Californians voted for this.

Eventually, the AIDS disinformation campaign seems to have been officially discontinued. When the disease began to spread more widely in the Soviet Union in the late eighties and suddenly the Kremlin was more interested in trading medical research about it, Mikhail Gorbechev found the U.S. Secretary of State less than cooperative because of the known KGB campaign to blame the disease on America. Suddenly official organs of the state, like the newspapers Izvestia and Sovetskaya Rossiya, disavowed the HIV-as-US-bioweapon thesis, and of course, within a few years, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the active measure would be admitted to, as I shared earlier. Nevertheless, Jakob Segal would continue to promote his claims until his death in 1995, and media outlets continued to amplify his misinformation through interviews. It is hard to imagine that he truly believed all the claims he made, such as that aspirin was the cure for HIV and the pharmaceutical industry was covering up this simple remedy. But there is a sense that many of those involved in the KGB campaign believed that, while they may have been spreading unproven claims, the claims were likely true or at least reflected a broader reality about the corruption and immorality of the U.S. government. Thus it is possible that, though he knew his thesis rested on assumptions, he still believed it likely, and looking at his later claims, we get the sense that eventually he came to truly believe his arguments and simply sank further and further into conspiracist delusions. For example, he would eventually finger a specific scientist, someone who had actually done a great deal to fight the AIDS epidemic, as the central villain of his narrative, responsible for the creation of HIV. Dr. Robert Gallo co-discovered HIV as the cause of AIDS in 1984 and during his long career, most of which was devoted to ending the epidemic, he developed the HIV blood test. But in Jakob Segal’s fevered imagination, since Gallo was head of the National Cancer Institute’s Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology in the seventies, and since in 1971, after his ban of biological weapons, Nixon converted Fort Detrick into a cancer research center, Segal saw this as de facto proof that Gallo had synthesized HIV at Fort Detrick. In fact, the NCI was extremely transparent about the cancer research conducted at Fort Detrick, and the Soviet Union’s Minister of Health even toured their lab in 1972. Interestingly, Jakob Segal’s obsession with Robert Gallo, his scapegoating of a respected scientist who was fighting the disease as being the actual person responsible for the creation of it, seems to me to parallel the bizarre and insupportable Covid conspiracy claims that have surrounded Dr. Anthony Fauci for the last few years.

Lyndon LaRouche. Public Domain image.

Despite the fact that the inner workings of the Soviet disinformation campaign have been exposed and its thesis proven false, the conspiracy claim has gone on to do serious harm, especially in Africa, which was and is ravaged by the disease and because of that has proven to be fertile ground for the propagation of the myth. The fact that the consensus of the scientific community remains that AIDS spread to humans from monkeys in Africa has made Africans and even African scientists defensive and more open to alternative narratives that do not seem to lay blame on them, even though of course no blame is actually being placed on African peoples, since it was a matter of natural cross-species transmission. As AIDS has ravaged African nations, we again have seen the tendency of those most marginalized and most effected by an epidemic giving the most credence to conspiracy claims that offer some explanation of their suffering and lay blame on an oppressive villain. For example, one newspaper in Zimbabwe in 1991 added to the myth complex the wild allegation that the CIA had spread the disease by distributing “AIDS-oiled condoms” to other countries. Major African political figures and social activists even publicly promoted the notion that AIDS was an ethnic weapon created by white powers-that-be to destroy Africa, long after this was refuted, such as Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and Kenyan Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai. Of course, the continued spread of these conspiracy claims has variously discouraged safe sex practices and contributed to AIDS denialist claims that effective treatments like antiretrovirals are ineffective and alternative treatments, like Segal’s aspirin doses, are preferable. The fallout of these false conspiracy claims has been deadly.

Although the Soviet AIDS disinformation program was eventually ended and even acknowledged after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russian intelligence has continued to make similar claims about other diseases. Using the same playbook, epidemics such as SARS and Ebola were routinely asserted to have been engineered by U.S. scientists at Fort Detrick as bioweapons, and among the many justifications for his invasion of the Ukraine that Putin threw at the world to see what might stick, one was the accusation that U.S. sponsored biological weapons research was being conducted at Ukrainian facilities. In fact, it has even been claimed that Covid was developed by the U.S. at Fort Detrick, in what appears to be a Chinese disinformation campaign intended to throw the lab leak theory back in American faces. This long history of disinformation campaigns and false accusations lobbed back and forth, with nations accusing and counter-accusing each other of engineering and releasing diseases that actually spread naturally should teach us, if we aren’t affected by a bad case of historical blindness, that we should be cautious and disbelieve any such claims until there is irrefutable evidence about the actual origins of diseases. As Dr. Selvage expressed to me in our interview, any notion that the U.S. developed Covid, or that it was created as a bioweapon by China, or even that it leaked accidentally from their lab, really in a way exonerates the Chinese government for their secrecy about the initial spread of the disease and their lack of international cooperation since.

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Until next time, remember, just because a newspaper prints a claim doesn’t make it true. But that doesn’t mean that claims about the free American press being controlled in a massive conspiracy of silence and official cover-up are the least bit tenable.

Further Reading

Boghart, Thomas. “Operation INFEKTION: Soviet Bloc Intelligence and Its AIDS Disinformation Campaign.” Studies in Intelligence, vol. 53, no. 4, Dec. 2009, pp. 1-24. Defense Technical Information Center, apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA514366.

Geissler, Erhard, and Robert Hunt Sprinkle. “Disinformation Squared: Was the HIV-from-Fort-Detrick Myth a Stasi Success?” Politics and the Life Sciences, vol. 32, no. 2, 2013, pp. 2–99. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43287281. Accessed 17 Apr. 2023.

---. “Were Our Critics Right about the Stasi?: AIDS Disinformation and ‘Disinformation Squared’ after Five Years.” Politics and the Life Sciences, vol. 38, no. 1, 2019, pp. 32–61. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26677588.

Selvage, Douglas. “Memetic Engineering: Conspiracies, Viruses and Historical Agency.” openDemocracy, 22 Oct. 2015, www.opendemocracy.net/en/memetic-engineering-conspiracies-viruses-and-historical-agency/.

---. “Operation ‘Denver’: The East German Ministry of State Security and the KGB’s AIDS Disinformation Campaign, 1985–1986 (Part 1).” Journal of Cold War Studies, vol. 21, no. 4, Fall 2019, pp. 71–123. EBSCOhost, doi-org.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/10.1162/jcws_a_00907.

---. “Operation ‘Denver.’” Journal of Cold War Studies, vol. 23, no. 3, Summer 2021, pp. 4–80. EBSCOhost, doi-org.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/10.1162/jcws_a_01024.

Selvage, Douglas, and Christopher Nehring. “Operation ‘Denver’: KGB and Stasi Disinformation regarding AIDS.” Wilson Center, 22 July 2019, www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/operation-denver-kgb-and-stasi-disinformation-regarding-aids.

Breaking News: The Hitler Diaries Fiasco

On April 20, 1945, while the stooped and shuffling Adolf Hitler, reticent to celebrate his birthday, received his usual regimen of injections and presided over a war conference in which he came to grips with his dire situation, Operation Seraglio was elsewhere underway. This operation was what many had been looking forward to, an evacuation of numerous members of Hitler’s entourage from the bunker, bound for Berchtesgaden. Aside from some evacuees, the operation was also packing up and flying out a fortune in valuables and a library’s worth of government documents. Around ten heavy trunks were carried out of the bunker and loaded onto a truck that day, and the convoy made their way to an airfield north of Berlin, dodging Allied air strikes along the way. These trunks with their mysterious contents were loaded onto a waiting plane, along with sixteen passengers. But their flight was doomed. No one knows exactly what struck them. Whether it was friendly fire from German anti-aircraft guns or an American fighter pilot who took them down, down indeed they went, crashing near the border of Czechoslovakia, outside a village called Boernersdorf. Villagers ran to the scene to find the transport burning and to hear the screams of one occupant inside. According to Hans Baur, Hitler’s pilot and one witness to his eventual suicide, when he informed Hitler of the disappearance of this flight, Hitler grew pale and appeared greatly disturbed, saying, “In that plane were all my private archives, that I had intended as a testament to posterity. It is a catastrophe!” After the fall of Berlin, the US Counter-Intelligence Corps, or CIC, searched for such private archives and documents, all of which would have great historical value. Some of these already resided in Berchtesgaden, at Hitler’s vacation residence, the Berghof, including Hitler’s love letters to Eva Braun, which had been hidden in a cave by Nazis. Eva had ordered them to be posthumously burnt, but instead a certain SS captain kept them. Additional correspondence stolen by this individual included letters between Hitler and Himmler. Despite the CIC catching wind of this document hoard and raiding the SS captain’s family home, they never recovered either set of letters. Afterward, rumors of the existence of Hitler’s personal diaries cropped up, and when the CIC investigated, they always considered it a possibility that the documents they were chasing were actually his letters to Eva Braun or Heinrich Himmler and not diaries. Historians came to the consensus that Adolf Hitler, who hated writing and much preferred to give dictation, never actually kept a diary, and as the decades passed, researchers learned of certain troves of dictated material that might also have sparked the rumors of Hitler having left private diaries behind. The first were the Bormann Notes, transcripts of conversations had at Hitler’s dinner table, published in 1953 as Hitler’s Table Talk. Some of these notes, covering 1943 to 1944, were missing, and considering their nature, with Hitler’s long and boring monologues on whatever topic arose, these could easily have been mistaken for diaries. Finally, in the 1970s, as journalist James O’Donnell researched the mysterious ten trunks lost in the plane crash for his book, The Bunker, he came to the conclusion that the historical documents that Hitler was mourning the loss of were likely the transcripts of his war conferences, which Hitler demanded be transcribed by stenographers in order to establish for posterity what he believed to be his military genius. But one particular passage from O’Donnell’s book would be latched onto and used to resurrect the rumor of Hitler’s diaries: “[D]ocuments have a way of surviving crashes,” O’Donnell wrote. “One is left with the nagging thought that some Bavarian hayloft, chicken coop, or pigsty may well have been waterproofed and insulated with the millions of words of the Führer’s unpublished, ineffable utterances, simply hauled away at dawn as loot from a burning German transport plane.”

Previously, I introduced the character of Hugh Trevor-Roper, the historian who was tasked by British intelligence with establishing the fate of Hitler, and whose work, The Last Days of Hitler, went a long way toward establishing the historical certainty of Hitler’s demise in his air raid shelter. Go back and read the previous blog post/podcast transcript, The Specter of Hitler’s Survival, for more on that. In the decades since the 1940s, Trevor-Roper had become one of the most respected historians and essayists in the world. His expertise was actually 16th and 17th-century England, but because of his work during the war, he remained an authority on Nazi Germany. He had taken the noble title of Baron Dacre of Glanton, and served as a director of the mostly respected British Times Newspapers. In the 60s and 70s, he began to seem like something of a dinosaur, receiving staunch criticism from postcolonialist historians about  some of his outmoded and frankly racist comments regarding African history. Thus, when the editor of The Times called him in 1983 to say the private diaries of Hitler had been discovered and they wanted him to authenticate them, he came to view it as a way to make himself relevant again. But at first, he thought it was a joke. It was April Fools Day, after all, and Trevor-Roper knew quite well that Hitler had stopped writing by his own hand for the last decade of his life, finding it actually painful. Thus he had always dismissed any claims of the existence of his diaries. When it became clear that the Times editor was serious, and that the paper’s new owner, the Australian newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch, was prepared to pay a large sum for English publication rights of the diaries, Trevor-Roper began to see possibilities. After all, his most popular book since The Last Days of Hitler, The Hermit of Peking, had involved the debunking of a diary as a forgery. In the book, Trevor-Roper exposed oriental scholar Sir Edmund Backhouse as a fraud and specifically discredited one of his principal sources, a supposed Chinese diary describing the Boxer Rebellion firsthand, claimed to have been recovered from a burned building. And back in the fifties, when the Bormann Notes were discovered and authenticated, he was given the opportunity of writing the introduction for them when they were published as Hitler’s Table Talk. Thus, whether or not these supposed Hitler diaries were genuine, Trevor-Roper could benefit from being involved, either by debunking them or by introducing them to the world. So what at first he took for an April Fools prank he began to view as an opportunity.

Hugh Trevor-Roper (detail of an image dedicated to public domain, courtesy Dutch National Archives)

Hugh Trevor-Roper had no love for Rupert Murdoch. As a director of the Times, he had opposed the media mogul’s acquisition of the paper, fearing he would tarnish the reputation of the Times and the Sunday Times by turning them into tabloids like his other papers, which eventually he did. Indeed, when Murdoch was negotiating the purchase of the papers, Trevor-Roper and the rest of the directors forced him to sign a pledge to preserve the integrity of the publications, though this would prove entirely toothless. Despite his dislike for Rupert Murdoch, Trevor-Roper agreed to authenticate the diaries, but only as long as he wouldn’t be rushed. He was not fluent in German, so he would have to be given the complete transcript and be given time to evaluate the diaries’ contents. Of course, he was assured, he would have all the time he needs, but a week later, before boarding a flight for Zurich to see the diaries, he was informed that Murdoch was against the clock and competing with other newspapers for the publication rights and would require Trevor-Roper’s assessment of their authenticity immediately, which was not what they had originally agreed to. Nevertheless, Trevor-Roper remained hopeful that he could take advantage of the occasion. On the plane to Zurich, he examined a transcript of a portion of the diaries that were of especial interest. These entries appeared to settle a historical mystery, indicating that Hitler did indeed know about Rudolf Hess’s secret peace mission to Britain and Hitler’s intention to disavow knowledge of the effort only if it failed. Listeners may recall me talking about Nazi Party leader Rudolf Hess and his unauthorized 1941 solo flight back in my episode on supposed psychic spies, because of Hess’s reliance on astrology and the notion that British intelligence may have gulled him into flying off to arrange peace talks using phony horoscopes. The version of events contained in the diaries caused Trevor-Roper to be even more certain that they were a fraud, since he knew of multiple accounts recording Hitler’s shocked reaction to the news of Hess’s flight, all of them contradicting the notion that he knew about it beforehand. Yet despite all these doubts, when Trevor-Roper appeared to examine the diaries at a bank in Zurich, he was taken aback to find not only a diary, but 58 volumes of a diary, along with an entire trove of Hitler’s personal things, his paintings and sketches, even the helmet he wore in the First World War. The directors and editors of the German magazine Stern, who were selling the rights to publish the diaries to the English-speaking world ahead of their own publication of them in German, assured Trevor-Roper that the diaries were genuine, telling him that three handwriting experts had authenticated the writing, that they had confirmed the provenance of the artifacts, that they had been salvaged from the plane that had crashed in 1945 in Boernersdorf, that they had confirmed the identity of the diaries’ supplier, and that the paper of the diaries had passed chemical testing to demonstrate its age. Considering all of this, as well as the reputation of the magazine Stern, and further believing that no forger would spend so much time forging so many volumes when just a few would do the trick, Trevor-Roper began to believe. He signed a non-disclosure to the effect that he wouldn’t discuss the diaries with anyone, and when the Times editor called him at his hotel room later, he said the fateful words, “I think they’re genuine.”

Later that month, Trevor-Roper observed further red flags that should have piqued his suspicions when he returned to Germany to meet the investigative journalist from Stern who had turned up the diaries. This reporter, Gerd Heidemann, was an odd fellow. He waited for Trevor-Roper at the airport, and at first, Trevor-Roper mistook the man for his driver. After this awkward start, they drove off to view Heidemann’s archive of historical artifacts that he had turned up during his investigations. As it turned out, it was a massive collection of Nazi memorabilia. The historian in Trevor-Roper was delighted by all the seemingly genuine historical objects, and he remained enthralled as Heidemann presented his further collection of Mussolini artifacts. He didn’t start to realize Heidemann had an unhealthy obsession with violent despots until his host showed him a further object: the underwear of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Still, a fanatical collector like Heidemann, called “The Bloodhound” by his colleagues, would be just the sort of person to sniff out new finds like the Hitler diaries in the illicit Nazi memorabilia market. But when Heidemann began showing him photos of a man he claimed was Martin Bormann and saying he had spoken to him, that Borman was still alive, Trevor-Roper realized that Heidemann may have been something of a gullible fellow. It was Heidemann’s own magazine, Stern, that had recently proven to the satisfaction of the world that Bormann, Hitler’s personal secretary, had never escaped Berlin. Still, though, Trevor-Roper thought that surely Stern’s editors and directors knew Heidemann was this unreliable and had properly vetted the diaries. They had assured him of the handwriting’s authentication, the confirmation of the provenance, and the supportive chemical test results. Once he’d returned home, he received a phone call from Phillip Knightley, a respected special correspondent for The Sunday Times, who voiced serious concerns about the authenticity of the diaries. Knightley had written a memo after learning of the burgeoning story, urging caution, questioning how thoroughly the diaries had been examined by experts, questioning the narrative of their provenance, and reminding everyone at the paper, and specifically Rupert Murdoch, of times when journalists had been duped by similar forgeries in the past, hopeful that The Times would not now allow themselves to be made fools of in the same way. Murdoch had ignored the memo. Finally, when The Times was about to publish breaking news of the diaries’ discovery along with Trevor-Roper’s assertion that they were genuine, Knightley called him, mostly to be reassured by the venerable historian that his anxieties were groundless. Trevor-Roper obliged, assuring Knightley that the diaries were certainly real, but when he got off the phone, all his former misgivings reoccurred to him: Hitler’s known aversion to writing, the ludicrous notion that the cunning and obstinate Hitler would have approved of Rudolf Hess’s doomed solo mission for peace, and the indication that Heidemann, the man who had brought the diaries to Stern, was a credulous fool. Suddenly, Trevor-Roper had a sinking feeling that he’d made a terrible mistake, but already papers were coming off the presses linking his reputation to the diaries forever.

Gerd Heidemann. Image credit: AP (fair use)

When news of the diaries’ discovery was trumpeted to the English-speaking world, it was met with much skepticism, but this was to be expected. Indeed, one of the loudest critical voices was that of David Irving, a Holocaust denying historian whom I discussed in my episode on Holocaust denialism, “The Wrong Side of History.” In fact, David Irving was recognized as something of an expert at uncovering and authenticating historical documents, as well as debunking forgeries, so his qualms that he was aware of these diaries and that they were fakes should have been taken more seriously. However, Irving’s reputation as a historical negationist, using specious arguments to exonerate Hitler of his war crimes, meant that his objection didn’t carry the weight it might have otherwise. Behind the scenes, though, as The Sunday Times prepared their blockbuster edition, publishing actual excerpts of the diaries, Trevor-Roper, to his credit, had begun the painful process of backpedaling. He called the editorial staff just as they were celebrating the edition going to press and indicated, to their horror, that he not only had become uncertain about the diaries’ authenticity, but that he was “doing a 180-degree turn,” as those who remember the telephone conversation put it. Editor Frank Giles, stoic in the face of a great scandal, hung up and called Rupert Murdoch to tell him that their principal authenticator, the man on whose reputation their entire story was staked, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, had changed his assessment of the diaries, and asked if they should stop the presses. Murdoch answered in his Australian accent: “Fuck Dacre. Publish.” That Sunday, as 1.4 million copies of the paper were circulated, Trevor-Roper flew to Hamburg to meet with Heidemann again and clarify some details about his discovery of the diaries. Heidemann had always insisted on keeping his source anonymous, and that in itself was understandable. Smugglers of Nazi documents might face consequences if their identities were divulged, and in the past, the sources of other finds, like the papers of Goebbels and Bormann, had remained unidentified to the public. But Trevor-Roper was further troubled when Heidemann actually changed his story about provenance and suddenly stated that the other items in the archive, the artifacts that had been displayed with the diaries and had gone a long way toward convincing Trevor-Roper of their authenticity, had come into his possession separately, from a different source. Trevor-Roper came away from the meeting even more certain that he had blundered in giving his assessment without taking the proper time to be certain. The next day, he attended a press conference at the Stern offices, and when he spoke, much to the discomfort of the magazine representatives present, he admitted that the provenance of the diaries was “shaky” and that he regretted that “the normal method of historical verification [was] sacrificed to the requirements of a journalistic scoop.” As if this admission were not explosive enough, suddenly the Holocaust denier David Irving burst into the press conference waving photocopies of the diaries that he had obtained and declaring them to be forgeries. He challenged Trevor-Roper and the editors of Stern to say whether the ink had been tested for age, a question that they could not answer. The reporters present began to chant the word: “Ink! Ink! Ink!” One can hardly imagine a more humiliating end to the career of Hugh Trevor-Roper than this, being made to look like a fool on television by a Holocaust denier.

Sure enough, the news came out shortly afterward. The diaries were a fraud, and as a further stain upon Trevor-Roper’s reputation, they weren’t even a very sophisticated fraud. The forger had apparently used regular school notebooks, the paper of which contained a whitener that proved it was not as old as it was purported to be. Moreover, it seems the forger had given the notebooks an artificial look of aging simply by dipping them in tea. But this was not the end of the obvious tells. The notebooks’ binding contained polyester and viscose, which did not exist at the time the diaries were supposedly composed, and the ink in which the entries were written, which David Irving had rightly insisted be tested, also proved to be of post-war manufacture. And numerous typed labels for volumes comprising thirteen tumultuous years had all been typed on the same typewriter. Hugh Trevor-Roper was immediately suspicious of the content of the single passage given to him in transcription, that of the Hess flight, but if he had been able to read the entire diary, the truth would have been utterly apparent. The forger clearly had no historical training, as the entries contained chronological inconsistencies throughout. As it turned out, nearly the entirety of the diaries was a first-person retelling of the events chronicled in one work, Hitler’s Speeches and Proclamations, 1932-1945 by Max Domarus, and reproduced the inaccuracies of that book. As for the handwriting, there is no doubt that the forger had mastered Hitler’s signature, but authentication of the handwriting by three experts was misleading. First of all, it was more like two experts, and unbelievably, these handwriting analysts had been given separate forgeries from the same source to use as comparison! Unsurprisingly, they found all these forgeries to be consistent because of course they were forged by the same hand. As the affair unraveled later, it turned out Trevor-Roper had been egregiously misled when he examined the diaries in the Zurich bank. The Stern editors told him the paper had been chemically tested, but that was not true. In fact, it was still in the process of being chemically tested, and preliminary results had shown that other items in the trove of artifacts, such as Hitler’s artwork, contained paper whitener and were thus forgeries. Indeed, this was why Heidemann had changed his story to suggest the diaries had come from a different source. And it was a further lie that the Stern editors had confirmed their provenance and the identity of their source. In truth, only Heidemann had dealt with this mystery individual, if he even existed.

The forger, Konrad Kujau. Image via Museum of Hoaxes.

When the diaries were revealed to be forgeries, Rupert Murdoch was unapologetic. He had increased the readership of his papers with an entertaining though false story, and now he could also refuse to pay Stern for the rights to the fraud. He buried an mea culpa blurb in the next edition and opted to shift all blame on Stern with a new headline, emphasizing the “Hunt for the Forger.” During the course of the Times investigation, a few conspiracist claims emerged about who was behind the diaries, many of them based on the fact that the contents of the diary tended to paint Hitler in a somewhat positive light. It was thought that the diaries were a plot by surviving Nazis to rehabilitate Hitler’s image, or that they were a plot to raise money by aging former SS soldiers who no longer had a pension, or they were a plot by East Germany to destabilize West Germany by stoking Neo-Nazism. Not to be outdone by such conspiracy speculation and always on the lookout to throw some disinformation that may color perception of their rivals, the Soviet media apparatus jumped in, insisting it was all a plot by the CIA to exonerate the Nazis. While this mudslinging went on, the disgraced editors at Stern went about the real business of tracking down the forger. Suspect number one was Gerd Heidemann himself. As Trevor-Roper suspected, his colleagues did indeed know he was a kook. He had begun his career as a photographer for the magazine, taking on the occasional dangerous assignment, but had transitioned into investigative journalism. He had a tendency to go off the rails and grow obsessive when digging into a story. For example, he previously worked on a piece about the anonymous German novelist who used the pseudonym B. Traven, and eventually came to the dubious conclusion, based on a resemblance in a photograph, that Traven was the son of Kaiser Wilhelm II. He likewise fell down the rabbit hole when he began taking an interest in Nazi memorabilia. It started when he bought Hermann Goering’s yacht, the upkeep of which proved to be very expensive, but the ownership of which put him in a peculiar position to draw out old, nostalgic Nazis and get them talking. He began hosting soirees on the yacht and recording his Nazi guests chatting over champagne, and he eventually convinced his editor that he was on to something, that he could maybe parlay this into a scoop about escaped Nazis. So he took money from the magazine, as well as from book publishers, buying memorabilia and coming to identify more and more with the Nazis he spent so much time with. Indeed, Stern’s managing editor had forbade him to continue his investigations, especially when Heidemann became so utterly convinced (again based on a dubious photograph) that Martin Bormann was alive even though Stern had proven his death. It seemed as though Heidemann had lost his mind, or that he had gone full Nazi. He’d even invited his elderly Nazi friends to his wedding, which was officiated by a couple of SS generals! Nevertheless, when Heidemann told them that he had come across the Hitler diaries during the course of his investigations into the Nazi collectibles market, one news editor in charge of historical stories secretly encouraged him and funneled more money his way. Gradually, as the affair grew larger and more money was required, other editors were taken into their confidence, until finally the magazine was entirely invested in the project despite some editors’ misgivings. And when the whole thing came apart, it was Heidemann they turned to, making it clear that he must reveal his source or it would appear that he had forged the diaries himself.

Heidemann, for his part, continued to insist on the authenticity of the diaries even despite all the evidence that they had been forged, and over the course of one grueling night, his bosses grilled him and wore him down. He claimed that he was in touch with someone who was communicating with Martin Bormann, and the elusive Nazi was going to fly to Germany from South America on a Lear jet to authenticate the diaries. But Lear jets at the time could not cross the Atlantic, and besides that, Bormann was dead, they angrily shouted at him. Obviously Heidemann was a fool who was being duped by con men. Eventually, Heidemann’s resistance began to fade and he gave them a name and address. He had received the diaries from an antiques dealer named Fischer who told him that they had come into his possession from an old villager in Boernersdorf, where the transport had crashed in 1945. In reality, this antiques dealer was an incorrigible criminal named Konrad Kujau, a deserter from the East German army and convicted counterfeiter and forger who had served time in prison for evading a jail sentence. It does seem that Kujau, who had been dutifully producing the diaries for years, undertook the forgery solely for the money, but just this year, the diaries were finally published in full, and it certainly does also appear that Kujau purposely depicted Hitler as not having planned the Holocaust. Whether he truly wanted to spread this denialist view of history or whether he simply thought it would make the forgeries more valuable, perhaps to someone like David Irving who wanted to believe such a thing, remains unknown. Kujau never spoke on this. As soon as he read in the papers that his work had been exposed as forgeries, he fled his home. But with the pressure on, and his forgery workshop having been raided, he eventually surrendered himself. Despite all the other forgeries they took out of his home, Kujau lied his face off, insisting that he was just the middleman and had no idea he was dealing forgeries. However, at one point, when his interrogators discussed the amount of money Heidemann had paid him, Kujau realized that Heidemann had been skimming off the top, embezzling from the funds that Stern had allocated to pay for the diaries. Knowing that he was on the hook for the crime while Heidemann, who also had profited, was out there free, he finally confessed. He had forged them, but, he said, intent on taking some revenge, Heidemann was in on it and knew they were forged all along.

Rupert Murdoch. Image credit: David Shankbone (CC BY 3.0)

The forgery of the Hitler diaries was perhaps the greatest hoax of modern times. Certainly it was one of the most successful forgeries in that it fooled many and was only exposed as a fraud when it achieved global attention. Stern paid nearly the equivalent of $4 million for them, which accounting for inflation would today be around $11 million, and that’s not even considering the money Stern almost earned from selling the rights to the fraud. The affair destroyed the reputation of many involved. For example, Frank Giles, editor of The Sunday Times, who boasted a long and illustrious journalistic career, died in 2019, and even though he can hardly be blamed for the scandal considering the farce of its authentication and Rupert Murdoch’s decision to publish despite rising suspicions that the diaries weren’t authentic, Giles’s obituaries were devoted almost entirely to the Hitler diaries fiasco. When he learned that the forger Kujau had implicated him, Gerd Heidemann’s first concern was for his own reputation. “I don’t want to be remembered as the man responsible for the greatest flop in newspaper history,” he confided to a friend. He and Kujau were tried together, and they both were sentenced to around four and a half years in prison, Kujau for defrauding Stern and Heidemann for his embezzlement. As for Hugh-Trevor Roper, even though it can be argued that he was lied to and forced to rush his judgment, he also suffered a grievous blow to his reputation as a shrewd and diligent historian. Indeed, his error in judgment in the Hitler diaries affair is frequently used by purveyors of the myth of Hitler’s survival as a way to somehow discredit all of his previous work investigating Hitler’s suicide. Thus the hoax had repercussions on history and misinformation far wider than one might expect. For example, while Heidemann was ruined, Kujau, the real culprit, parlayed his lies into a career. He opened a successful shop, selling his forgeries to the public as “genuine fakes,” and his forged artwork can still be found in books published after the scandal, attributing them falsely to Adolf Hitler. And worst of all, we find that Rupert Murdoch came out of the scandal entirely unscathed. He ended up losing no money on the forgeries and actually profiting from the affair, as his Times newspapers recorded a boost in circulation. One can tentatively draw a line between this affair, which seems to have taught Murdoch that entertainment trumps journalistic integrity and truth, to the propagandistic practices of Murdoch’s NewsCorp and specifically his FOX Corporation and Fox News Channel in America. The Hitler diaries showed him that he can knowingly publish falsehoods, ignore experts and science, and simply change the narrative when lies he has amplified are ultimately exposed. In his zeal for breaking news, he has broken the news. This same greed and cynicism was on full display when Fox News promoted election fraud lies even though Murdoch has said under oath that he thought such claims lacked merit. It remains to be seen whether the current defamation lawsuit in which he is embroiled will change the way he distorts reality with his media empire, but I, for one, am not holding out much hope.

Until next time, remember, if you or someone you love still clings to election fraud claims because Fox News promoted them, the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit has proven beyond doubt that neither Murdoch nor the worst of the Fox hosts, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, ever actually believed these conspiracy lies. Not that definitive proof ever swayed folks from believing nonsense.
*Deep sigh.  

Further Reading

Harris, Robert. Selling Hitler: The Extraordinary Story of the Con Job of the Century—the faking of the Hitler “Diaries.” Pantheon Books, 1986.

McGrane, Sally. “Diary of the Hitler Diary Hoax.” The New Yorker, 25 April 2013, www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/diary-of-the-hitler-diary-hoax.

Steers, Edward. Hoax: Hitler’s Diaries, Lincoln’s Assassins, and Other Famous Frauds. University Press of Kentucky, 2021.