Real Feelings About Ersatz History

Sometimes I like to get lost on Wikipedia. I got lost the other day in the "pseudohistory" category, and it was fascinating.

It started with the Ourang Medan. Well, it started on YouTube. I wasn't signed into my Google Account, so I was browsing the home page. A channel with a series of "top 5" lists came up - in fact, the channel is called Top5s.

This is the video I saw.

[If you want to read more about the strange death of Canadian student Elisa Lam in Los Angeles, you may do so at The Vigilant Citizen.]

The evening after I watched the video, I went to bed thinking about the Ourang Medan, the "ghost ship" whose crew was supposedly found dead, with expressions of abject terror on their faces, shortly before the ship exploded and sank. I wondered if the story was true.

I looked it up the next day. According to Wikipedia, there's no evidence that a ship called the Ourang Medan even existed. If it did, it should be listed in Lloyd's Shipping Register, but it isn't.

The categories at the bottom of the entry caught my eye; this is where I noticed the word "pseudohistory." What a fascinating word, I thought: not history that actually happened, but "history" that circulates in human consciousness without apparent basis in fact. I had to know what else belonged to this category.

For the record, I should mention that Wikipedia, as a peer-edited source, doesn't have the same standards for reliability and accuracy that a source with a "gatekeeper"/editor has. Although it has guidelines, it has so many users that it would be virtually impossible to ensure that all the articles adhere to its guidelines at all times. We have to take Wikipedia entries with a grain of salt, but that doesn't mean the categorization itself isn't of interest.

Pseudohistory, it turns out, contains a great many fascinating topics. Some of it has to do with "ancient astronaut theory," as exemplified by Erich von Däniken's 1968 nonfiction book Chariots of the Gods?. (The question mark is part of the title.)

Another large subcategory of pseudohistory is labelled as Priory of Sion Hoax. This has to do with much of the background story that went into Dan Brown's writing of The Da Vinci Code. Another subcategory is the "Shakespeare authorship question." (There's also a Molière authorship question, but hey, I care much less about French literature than English. Cultural bias - sorry.)

Much of the pseudohistory category has to do with religion, much of it to do specifically with Christianity. Take, for example, the brief Babylon Mystery Religion article. Babylon Mystery Religion is a book, now out of print, by Ralph Woodrow published in 1966. Referring to an earlier (1853) book called The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop, Woodrow's book linked the Roman Catholic Church to ancient Babylonian rituals. Woodrow later recanted his anti-Catholic views in a second book.

Apparently there are quite a few factual errors in Hislop's book, stemming from misunderstandings about the historical Babylonian culture. Although scholars have subsequently pointed out these errors, the Catholicism=Whore of Babylon theme is still alive and well among some Evangelical Christians and Jehovah's Witnesses.

One of the modern-day adherents to some version of Hislop's ideas is Michael Hoggard, an American (Missouri) pastor with a relatively large following for his radio/YouTube show. The show has more than 20,000 fans on Facebook. He also curates the website http://666alert.net/, which collects uses of images linked to the number 666 as they appear in popular culture.

Hoggard is a Southern Baptist. A related pseudohistorical concept is Baptist successionism, which argues that the Baptist denomination is most direct line between the Christianity of Jesus and the Apostles and modern churches. The work most often associated with this view is The Trail of Blood (1931) by J.M. Carroll. It is not historically accurate, but it remained influential among Southern Baptists well into the late 20th century.

But for me, maybe the most interesting article in all of pseudohistory is the Witch-Cult Hypothesis. Remember when I got my ass handed to me for over-relying on Barbara J. Walker as a source? (If not, you can always read about it here.) Well, Walker is probably an adherent of this theory. It states, essentially, that through the Middle Ages and into the Modern Era, ancient Pagan religions survived in such a way that worshipers of The Horned God of Paganism were mistaken by Christians for worshipers of the Christian devil and subsequently persecuted as witches. This theory came about in the 19th century and was perpetuated into the 20th century, even including the entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica for many years.

(Encyclopedias are them things we used to read before we had Google.)

According to the Wikipedia entry, the Witch-Cult Hypothesis found a champion in British historian/Egyptologist Margaret Murray*, who wrote The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. It is not historically accurate.

Despite its unreliability as history, Murray's book is said, in the Wikipedia entry, to have been influential in the development of the Wiccan religion. Murray's subsequent book, The God of the Witches, introduced the term The Horned God for the male deity worshiped by the alleged witch cult on Western Europe. (She acknowledged that the witch cult also worshiped a goddess, but in her opinion the witches regarded their male deity as the more important of the two.) Gerald Gardner, who was also English and is now considered the founder of modern Wicca (referred to as Gardnerian Wicca), claimed to have found a surviving coven of the kind of witches Murray described, and he started his own coven based on them, in the interest of keeping the religion alive.

But mind you, Wicca, modern witchcraft, and NeoPaganism are 20th century religions. While they revive certain aspects of ancient belief and worship, the rituals and beliefs of modern witches were created in the 20th century. And there's nothing wrong with that. People take what they need from their religions, and a religion doesn't have to be old to meet the needs of its practitioners.

The Wikipedia article on The Horned God states that Gardner, consciously influenced by Murray, borrowed his conception of Wiccan practice from Freemasonry, from the Theosophy movement, from other unnamed occult sources, and from Aleister Crowley's Gnostic Mass. (In 1913, Crowley wrote a mass for the Gnostic church, borrowing from the rituals of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian churches, but replacing Christian concepts with his own Thelema, his "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.")

By the way, Margaret Murray is also in part responsible for the association of Glastonbury, England, with King Arthur and the Holy Grail. I used this legend in Midsummer Night.

https://www.createspace.com/4657847

So dig in to pseudohistory if you like. If you're interested in history - and in the history of ideas - you may find it as fascinating as I did.

*That Madeleine L'Engle's fictional protagonist in The Time Quintet is named Margaret "Meg" Murry is coincidence, I think.

'The Unauthorized Dan Brown Companion' on 'Deception Point'

Having just finished audio-reading Deception Point by Dan Brown, I decided to pick up The Unauthorized Dan Brown Companion, edited by John Helfers, off my bookshelf. You may recall from my review of Breaking the Da Vinci Code that I enjoy reading nonfiction books about Dan Brown's fiction. I love books about books in general.

Skimming through the first chapter, "Dan Brown: The Man and His Fiction," I realized I didn't know anything about Dan Brown as a person. I discovered that:

- He was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, which is also the birthplace of the American novelist John Irving (The Cider House Rules, The World According to Garp).

- He attended his hometown's prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy boarding school, where his father was a mathematics teacher.

- His mother was a performer and teacher of sacred music.

- He then went to Amherst College in Massachusetts. Amherst is the home of the Emily Dickinson Museum, and it possesses about half of Dickinson's manuscripts. Dickinson attended Amherst Academy, the secondary school that was the predecessor of Amherst College. Amherst College was all-male until 1960.

- He also studied art history in Sevilla, Spain. The book doesn't say whether or not he earned a degree.

- His first career choice was musician, but he was shy and awkward when performing in front of people.

- After abandoning his musical career, Brown taught English and creative writing at Phillips Exeter.

- The first book he wrote was a book of limericks.

- Brown and his wife Blythe Newlon - a painter and art historian - co-wrote a humorous dating guide called 187 Men to Avoid under the pen name "Danielle Brown."

- His first novel, Digital Fortress, was inspired in part when one of his students was visited by the Secret Service after joking about killing President Clinton in an e-mail. He set part of that novel in Sevilla.

The next interesting chapter is the fifth, "From Indiana Jones to Robert Langdon: Great Academic Heroes in Fact and in Fiction." The list is as follows:

Indiana Jones
The Scarlet Pimpernel
Ian Malcolm (Jurassic Park)
Dr. Benton Quest (Jonny Quest)
Fox Mulder
Sherlock Holmes
Buckaroo Banzai

On Indiana Jones, I have most definitely had a crush. I mean, Harrison Ford, right? I think I watched Temple of Doom about a thousand times when I was kid. Indy was smooth, suave. He knew what to do in every situation. Best of all, he was an archaeologist! That's what I wanted to be when I was a kid. I was constantly checking Egyptology, archaeology, and anthropology books out of the library. My childhood fascination with Indiana Jones was, no doubt, a key moment in the development of my sapiosexuality.

The Scarlet Pimpernel is one classic I never read. Perhaps I should; according to Helfers' book, "Sir Percy ends up married to the most beautiful, most intelligent woman in the known world..." If he can appreciate the world's most intelligent woman, he sounds like a keeper. Also, it is said that with this novel, the Baroness invented the superhero genre.

I'm pretty sure I read Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park only after seeing the movie, and I'm also pretty sure I had a crush on Dr. Malcolm as played by Jeff Goldblum.

I vaguely remember watching Jonny Quest as a small child - I watched many Hanna-Barbera cartoons - but I cannot specifically remember Benton Quest. "Buckaroo Banzai" is a name that only sounds vaguely familiar - maybe from an '80s movie I was too young to watch.

Now, Fox Mulder - I had quite the crush on him for a while. It's a bit weird to me, though, that the list is exclusively male. If anyone should be on this list, it's Dana Scully. She was the scientist. If I remember correctly, she was a physician. Mulder was more of conspiracy theorist than an academic. In fact, I'm pretty sure Indiana Jones is the only college professor on this list.

Of course I love Sherlock Holmes - in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, on Elementary, and in the Guy Ritchie films. (I watched the initial episode of the BBC Sherlock, "A Study in Pink," but it failed to arouse my interest.) Holmes isn't, strictly speaking, an academic, but he was inspired by a real-life one, a professor of medicine.

Indeed, the fictional men of this list are attractive to me. It seems that some female fictional characters who are known for both their intelligence and their adventurous side could have been added. What about Lara Croft, tomb raider? Like Indiana Jones, she's an archaeologist. (Okay, so she's from a video game and a movie, not from a book.)

Michael Tolland can certainly be added to the list of sexy action-scientists.

The largest portion of this book is the concordance, consisting of alphabetical entries of people, places, and things found in Dan Brown's novels up to The Da Vinci Code. The most interesting entries are from the first two Robert Langdon novels, because they have all that great art and architecture in them. I didn't really learn much more about the science of Deception Point, but some of the more interesting entries include:

The Lincoln Bedroom: "Though President Lincoln never used it himself, his son Willie died in the bed of typhoid fever at age 11, in 1962. Ever since, numerous sightings of Lincoln's ghost in the room have been reported by White House guests." In the novel, Michael Tolland tries to amuse Rachel Sexton with a terrible impression of Lincoln's ghost. This is shortly before he tries to seduce her with his knowledge of jellyfish mating rituals.

Olivine: "A material silicate that crystallizes from magma rich in nesium and iron but low in silica. Also called chrysolite, olivine's characteristic yellow-green to olive-green color gives the mineral its name. Transparent olivine can be cut into gemstones known as peridot. It is one of the most common minerals on Earth by volume and has been discovered in meteorites, on Mars, and on the moon."

Red Room: "The Red Room in the White House originally served as the president's antechamber for the Cabinet Room or the President's Library...It remained yellow until 1845, when First Lady Sarah Polk furnished the room in crimson and ruby and it became known as the Red Room," So really, it has nothing to do with Fifty Shades of Gray.

Seahorse mating: "Seahorses are the only known species on the planet in which the male gets pregnant. Seahorses mate for life, and they will even mate across different seahorse species. The female packs the male's breeding bag with nutrients, then snuggles up close to deposit orange-colored eggs inside for the male to fertilize. When mating they link their tails together and do a kind of dance.

"Gestation is only three weeks, resulting in the live birth of between fifteen and one thousand five hundred baby seahorses!...Amazingly, seahorses can get pregnant again almost immediately."

Skyquakes: "Skyquakes are earth-shaking booming sounds, often described as sounding like cannon fire. Louder than thunder or the sonic booms created by aircraft, they often occur on bright, sunny days and are unaffected by weather.

"Skyquakes have been witnessed all over the world and throughout history, including by the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1808. Though scientists postulate that some skyquakes are caused by the testing of secret aircraft or meteors disintegrating in the atmosphere, there is still no definitive answer as to what they are."

Sphyrna mokarran: "Sphyrna mokarran is the scientific name for hammerhead sharks...There are nine different species of hammerhead sharks, ranging from three feet in length to twenty. Found in warm water near the coastlines, they are the only species of sharks to travel in schools."

I like sharks. Top predators are good for their environments, and the ocean needs its sharks. They are beautiful fish. They may occasionally eat a person, but not out of maliciousness. They're simply a hungry animal trying to survive.

I like science and history. That's some of what I enjoy when I read Dan Brown's books.

'Vampyres of Hollywood' Review + 'True Blood' Season 7 Discussion, Pt. 1

Vampyres of Hollywood by Adrienne Barbeau

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I would have been slightly disappointed if the lovely and talented film actress Adrienne Barbeau hadn't written a fabulously entertaining book with her co-author Michael Scott of The Alchemyst fame. Fortunately, this vampyre fantasy/murder mystery set in modern-day Hollywood IS fabulously entertaining. Horror, humor, and suspense are deftly blended into this unusual boy-meets-ghoul story reminiscent of the best of Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire Mysteries series (if by Southern we meant SoCal). True Blood aficionados will appreciate this stand-alone novel.

If Lady Gaga were ever to decide to star in a movie, she would be perfect in the role of vampyre heroine Ovsanna Moore. I also like that Hollywood classics like Rudolph Valentino, Orson Welles, and Mary Pickford make appearances, and the fictional timeline also plays with history. Let's just say that Dan Brown's explanation of the original Friday the 13th in The Da Vinci Code isn't the full story in Ovsanna's telling.

I bought this book for $1 at a library used book sale. I was not obligated to review it in any way. All the opinions stated here are my own.

View all my reviews on Goodreads

Now, I can't let the opportunity to mention True Blood pass without discussing the Season 7. If you want episode-by-episode recaps of the final season of True Blood, I direct your attention to the blog Fangs, Wands, and Fairy Dust. Fair warning, Steph also recaps Outlander and Masters of Sex, so beware of spoilers:

Season 7 Episode 2
Season 7 Episode 5
Season 7 Episode 6
Season 7 Episode 7
Season 7 Episode 8
Season 7 Episode 9
Season 7 Episode 10

I didn't see episodes 1, 3, or 4 on Steph's blog. She may have missed a few.

(Sidenote: I wish my parents had Showtime so we could watch Masters of Sex. Not only do I find Masters and Johnson terribly fascinating, but I also love Michael Sheen because he plays creepy Aro in the Twilight Saga films.)

Tara Thornton

So let's talk about the ultimate fates of some of my favorite characters from the series. My #1 problem with this season is the fate of Tara Thornton, the kickass vamp played by the gorgeous Rutina Wesley.

Tara dies. In the first episode of the season. Offscreen.

Look, it's bad enough that Season 6 gave barely even a flicker of screen time to the Pam-Tara romance. That was on top of all the previous sufferings of Tara's character: an abusive, alcoholic mother; having her mind held hostage by the maenad; losing Eggs; being kidnapped, raped, and tortured by the evil vampire Franklin; getting shot in the head by that psycho Debbie Pelt, and then turned into a vampire against her will; and then being locked up in nutty Sarah Newlin's vampire prison camp. Just when you thought Tara had suffered enough and deserved a happy ending, though - BAM! An undignified off-screen death.

Creative Commons image by Ronald Woan

She appeared a few more times throughout the season, as a V-induced hallucination/ghost - crucified, no less. Dear TV: is it too much to ask that we have some African-American female characters who survive, thrive, succeed, and excel?

So that writing pissed me off, as did the fact that Pam barely brought up Tara's name the entire season. Because (so the writers seem to think) why would Pam grieve for her woman of color lover when she could just as easily obsess over Eric's pasty white Viking ass?

See Also: "Stick a Fork In It" on Dorothy Surrenders

Ginger (No Last Name)

One of the most enjoyable sequences (the beginning of it, anyway) this season was a flashback to the '90s in which Eric and Pam acquired the building that would come to house Fangtasia. The vampire night club of the '00s started life as a humble video store. As Pam stood in it, bewildered by being ordered to manage such a mundane center of human activity, who should pop in but Ginger (played by Tara Buck), searching for vampire movies.

Ah, but this is not the Ginger we've come to know over the past six seasons, the clueless human pathetically and hopelessly lusting after the lanky blond vampire. This Ginger is smart!Ginger. See, she's wearing glasses! She's a student at Tulane! She needs those vampire movies for her thesis on the vampire as metaphor for social outsider!

"#1 Crush" by Garbage plays in the background. Then, suddenly, Eric walks up from the basement. Smart!Ginger takes a half-second glance in his direction, and the immense surge of lust erases half her brain cells, instantly turning her into the Ginger we all know and consider an unflattering stereotype of women. Apparently we can be brainy or express our sexuality, but not both at the same time. It's like that lame-ass "Blow Minds, Not Guys" virtual poster I sometimes see around social media.

In the finale, Eric finally offers to have sex with Ginger. She wants to straddle him while he sits on his throne. She does - for all of about two seconds, before the strength of her insta-orgasm literally knocks her to the floor.

I can't remember if Ginger was a character in the books or not. If she was, was she this lame in the novels, or it just TV Ginger that sucks? I wanted so much more for you, Ginger. I really did.

Alcide Herveaux

Season 6 ended with that terribly confusing flash-forward showing Sam as the mayor of Bon Temps and Sookie happily in a relationship with werewolf Alcide. That looked like fun, didn't it? And if I remember correctly from Dead Ever After, which I read a little over a year ago, book-Alcide had a pretty happy ending. I think he settled down with a female werewolf.

Alas, TV-Alcide and TV-Sookie were not meant to be, as he was killed off in Episode 3. Sad, sad, sad.

Creative Commons image by Sue Lukenbaugh

Sam Merlotte

One positive I'll mention out of Season 7 is that Sam Merlotte and his beloved, Nicole Wright (played by Jurnee Smollett-Bell), got the happy ending they deserved. Nicole, heavily pregnant with the couple's baby daughter, told Sam she wanted to leave the high weirdness of Bon Temps behind and raise her child in a safer environment. She asked him to move to Chicago with her so that they could be closer to her parents. Sam deliberated, but he made the right call. He resigned as mayor and chose to protect his de facto wife and unborn child. Which is as it should be.

Creative Commons image by Gage Skidmore

The next thing I see Sam Trammell in is likely to be The Fault in Our Stars. He plays the father of Hazel Grace Lancaster.

Jessica Hamby

Another one of my favorites who actually got a happy ending was Jessica Hamby, Bill's vampire progeny. However, like Nicole, she had to undergo some awful suffering first. (Nicole was among a group of humans abducted by the hepatitis V-infected vampires, ultimately rescued thanks another abductee, the witch Holly Cleary.) She was abducted by my least favorite character of this season, the awful Violet.

Violet (played by Karolina Wydra) first appeared in Season 6, in the vampire prison camp. I don't entirely remember that storyline - first she tried to eat Jason, then she forced him to become her boyfriend, or something. Either way, Violet always seemed to me like she hated other women. Then Jason upset her by having one last fling with Jessica at Sookie's party, and she retaliated by kidnapping and planning to kill Sheriff Andy Bellefleur's half-fairy daughter Adilyn, Adilyn's boyfriend/stepbrother-to-be Wade Cleary (Holly's son), and Jessica.

Jessica's former lover Hoyt Fortenberry disappeared several seasons ago, when Jessica wiped his memory clean of their relationship and he moved to Alaska. He returned to Bon Temps for his mother's funeral - Violet reached into Mrs. Fortenberry's chest and pulled her heart out. He brought a fiancee, but they were fighting over the issue of children, which she wanted but he didn't. Jason and Hoyt both showed up at Violet's creepy fortress to rescue Jessica and the kids. Violet had just finished explaining her evil plan to hideously torture Jessica when Hoyt's bullet turned Violet to the goo she so richly deserved to become.

In a very short time, Jessica fell back in love with Hoyt and won his love again. In the finale, they got married, with Bill giving her away. Deborah Ann Woll looked spectacularly gorgeous as bride!Jessica.

Creative Commons image by Gage Skidmore

That was my favorite part of the finale. Other parts impressed me much, much less.

Arlene Fowler Bellefleur

Let us state for the record that TV-Arlene is a million percent better than book-Arlene. Book-Arlene was a racist bitch. TV-Arlene was much more sympathetic, and I would like her even if the character wasn't played by Carrie Preston, who also plays Grace Hendricks on Person of Interest (and whose real-life husband is Michael Emerson).

Creative Commons image by watchwithkristin

TV-Arlene gets a happy ending, too. She almost died in the rescue attempt, but her life was saved by vampire blood from the newly-introduced Keith (No Last Name). As usual in True Blood land, because Keith's blood is in Arlene, Arlene dreams about Keith. Preston did an almost fully nude sex scene on a pool table with her co-star, the beautiful Riley Smith, for the dream sequence. In waking life, Keith and Arlene are attracted to one another, but because she's hep V positive, they take their relationship very slowly. In one lovely scene, they simply dance.

The finale implies they stayed together.

Tomorrow Next week we'll examine some of our other favorites, including Lafayette, Sookie, and Bill.

For 'Person of Interest' Season 3 Premiere Day: the John Reese Family Tree

Tuesday, September 24, 2013: the season premiere of Person of Interest, going into its third season.

When we left off at the end of season 2, The Machine had been set free, Root was recovering from a gunshot wound in what appeared to be a mental health hospital, Sam Shaw appeared to have joined Finch and Reese, and Carter had, for some reason, saved the life of Carl Elias. Kara Stanton's virus has wreaked its havoc, and it's unclear at this point how Finch and Reese will continue to save lives.

This family tree isn't originally my idea. Like so many great things in life, it started with Tumblr. Specifically, with this post posted by the blogger whose blog is Obsesiones Mias. (I feel like I should know her name, but I don't.) The contention of this post is that John Reese seems like he's a little superhuman because, perhaps, his distant ancestor was Kainan - a character in the film Outlander*, also played by Jim Caviezel. The character is an extraterrestrial. Kainan crash-landed on Earth in an Iron Age Viking settlement and, after defeating the space dragon he'd brought with him, he became king of the Viking clan.

At a later time, the Obsesiones Mias blogger said something about adding to the Reese family tree, which got me thinking, until at last I came up with:

It was surprisingly hard to find a way to make fictional family trees online. I gave up the search and instead used a scrapbooking website, CropMom. It's not the most elegant scrapbook page ever - I made it in a bit of a rush.

Let me break down the line of descent:

We can begin the John Reese family tree with Mary.



Her son, Jesus...



...married Mary Magdalene (well, that's one possible scenario, isn't it?)...



...who was pregnant at the time of Jesus' death. Different versions of folklore disagree as to whether the couple had a daughter or a son, but let's say, hypothetically, they had a daughter. This is actually an image said to represent Mary Magdalene, but it could be how the daughter of Jesus and Mary looked. (Some people say her name was Sara. I can't remember if her name is mentioned in The Da Vinci Code or not.)



Now let's say that Sara has many generations of descendants - hundreds of years go by. Some say that the Merovingian kings of France were her descendants. Imagining that she was the ancestress of a royal line, let us speculate that some of her royal descendants migrated northward, to the Viking regions. Let's say that one of her descendants was the warrior-king Hrothgar.



Hrothgar is on the viewer's left, portrayed by John Hurt. You may remember John Hurt best as Mr. Ollivander from the Harry Potter movies; I do too, but I also like to think of him as Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four. You may also remember that Hrothgar is the name of the king whose realm is under attack from Grendel in Beowulf, but I don't think the Outlander movie is meant to imply that this is the same Hrothgar.

Hrothgar's daughter, Freya - a warrior princess - marries Kainan, the outlander.



Presumably, they have children who have both royal DNA and Kainan's extraterrestrial DNA. We'll just assume Kainan's DNA is close enough to that of Homo sapiens that he and Freya can interbreed without difficulty. Their princes and princesses have descendants, some of whom may end up in France (or back in France, if that's where we imagine Mary Magdalene and her offspring ended up).

Hundreds of years later, one of their descendants may have been Edmond Dantes.



Dantes, after many long years of suffering, married Mercedes.



I imagine they had several children together (at the end of the movie, Mercedes rests her hand on her belly, which I always think means she's already pregnant again), but their oldest was Albert. If Albert resembles Superman, it's probably because of the Kainan DNA. Superman is an alien, too.



Albert Dantes, born in the early 1800s, had descendants who, several generations later, included John Reese.



Maybe Reese is the last of this bloodline. But maybe there's a baby Carter-Reese in his future.

*Not to be confused with the 2014 movie based on Diana Gabaldon's time-travel romance novel also called Outlander.

If you need me, I'll be counting down the hours until 10 p.m. Eastern.

Book Review: Dan Brown's 'Inferno'

I am brimming with literary excitement at the news that J.K. Rowling's post-The Cuckoo's Nest project is a screenplay based on Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. It won't just be one film, but a new series. Never has there been a more appropriate time for a Potterhead "Squee!"

What I Thought of Dan Brown's Book

But more news on that as it develops. Right now, let's talk about Dan Brown's 2013 release, Inferno. I got this book at the library and was not compensated for this review in any way; it represents my own honest opinion.

When I read a Dan Brown novel, I have certain expectations:

*Robert Langdon will be man's fantasy hero, a frumpy middle-aged professor who attracts a hot, brilliant, much-younger love interest - check. (It's okay. Middle-aged men are allowed to have their fantasies, too.) In this volume, her name is Dr. Sienna Brown. The plot involves Langdon having amnesia, which is entirely appropriate, because at the beginning of each new book he has completely forgotten about the heroine of the previous novel. Vittoria who? Sophie what? Katherine hmm? In Dan Brown's imagination, female characters have very short shelf lives.

One billion bonus points to whoever writes a spin-off series in which Vittoria Vetra, Sophie Neveu, Katherine Solomon and Sienna Brown team up and solve a mystery on their own. Maybe with one brief consultation with Langdon.

Incidentally, I want to know Vayentha's whole back story, starting with what her name means.

*Historically- and culturally-rich locations? Check. In this volume, we spend most of our time in exotic Florence, the birthplace of Dante Alighieri, then travel to that hotbed of Italian intrigue, Venice, then to Istanbul. This is probably the most fun part of any Dan Brown novel - the vicarious travel.

*Horrifying vandalism of a priceless world heritage artifact? Check. This time, it would be Dante's death mask.

*Tantalizing hints of a conspiracy theory, without suggesting that any living person, government or corporation is guilty of anything we should concern ourselves with? Check.

Because I got exactly what I expected out of this book, I wasn't disappointed. My favorite will probably always be The Da Vinci Code, because as one inclined toward worship of a deity in feminine form, I never related to Robert Langdon quite so much as when he reverently knelt at the grave of Mary Magdalene. Goddess worship in mainstream fiction? More, please!

I quite enjoyed Angels and Demons as well, which I thought was pleasantly suspenseful, and that's probably still my second favorite, but I liked Inferno better than The Lost Symbol, if for no other reason than that Istanbul is more fun to explore than Washington, D.C.

The ending's a little weird. Without spoiling too much, I think I can say that the bad guy kinda wins, and there's really nothing anybody can do about it. The characters in the novel are kinda okay with it, too. What happens is an extreme solution to the world's supposed population crisis, and if this were to happen in real life, it would be absolutely heartbreaking. It's not really a happy ending at all. I wonder where Dan Brown will go next.

Issues Raised By This Book

Let it be said that in real life, while the population crisis that Brown addresses does involve some serious environmental concerns that I believe are fact-based, there's something that's never addressed: much of the human misery that's allegedly caused by "overpopulation" isn't really due to overpopulation, it's due to unequal distribution of resources. For example, we currently have enough food to feed everyone in the world - that's not why people go hungry. People go hungry because governments don't have the political will and/or the infrastructure to get food to the people who need it the most.

Also, we're not doing everything we could be doing to make our limited resources last longer. If more of us were vegetarians or semi-vegetarians (meat once a week, maybe), we could take the land we use for raising animals and the land that grows animal feed, eliminate the middleman (middle being, in this case) and feed that grain directly to ourselves instead of animals raised for slaughter. As the food-animal population gradually dwindled, we could turn grazing lands and feed lots into more land for growing grains and/or more housing for human beings. People in industrialized nations can live much-simplified lives to help people all around the world have access to more resources, if we had the collective will to do it.

It is pretty shameful that about half of pregnancies in the U.S. are unplanned, though. I've read that statistic elsewhere besides in this novel. I'm childless by choice, but you know, it was never that hard for me and my husband to avoid parenthood. Is it lack of sexual education that prevents other couples from enjoying the same freedom? That's sad. Sexual education for everyone before they reach the age of 14, please. Parenthood only by free, conscious choice, and all babies wanted babies - let's make that happen! "Accidentally pregnant" should not be the default setting for a human woman in the 21st century.

So as you can see, this book raises interesting issues far beyond the needs of mere fictional storytelling.

Inferno

I read Inferno in novel class, which was a class I took the first semester of my senior year of high school - that would have been 1994. It's been quite a while. We had an Italian exchange student that year, Gabriel Violi. (My friend Sarah played viola, and every time I said "viola" he thought I was calling his name.) He read us some of the pages in Dante's original Italian, but he made sure we knew it was very strange, old-fashioned Italian. Also, he didn't speak Italian much in his day-to-day life, preferring to use his regional dialect (I forget which one) at home.

Speaking of the storytelling, though, there were a few moments that took me out of the story. One was the mention of the devil's three mouths in Dante's Inferno. Langdon was supposed to have not only read and studied The Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso) but also lectured on its symbols at Harvard. He gives some explanation for why the devil, in the lowest circle of hell, has three mouths in Dante's depiction, and later there's a mention of Judas Iscariot, but the other two traitors depicted as being in the lowest circle of hell, Brutus and Cassius (the murderers of Julius Caesar) are never mentioned. Why didn't he just say that the devil has one mouth for each of the three traitors, to take bites out of them?

That was a very minor issue I had. I bristled a little more when Langdon said, "They're called chthonics because they reside in the underworld and are associated with hell." (That weird word "chthonics," with a silent "ch," just means "subterranean.") No, Robert Langdon, "the underworld" and "hell" are concepts from two different cultures that shouldn't be confused, and you would know that better than anyone. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed in an underworld in which exceptional individuals might be slightly rewarded (in Elysium), but in general, dead human beings were not punished. They simply existed as memoryless shades. "Hell" is an underworld specifically for punishment of evil human beings who have died, and it's a concept from Zoroastrianism first and, later, Christianity. There wasn't a culture that thought the Greco-Roman underworld was hell, or that hell was the Greco-Roman underworld.

And Robert Langdon would definitely know that. He's far too academic to let something like that slide. But again, that's a pretty minor point.

Chthonics

One more thing about chthonic beings: late in the novel, Sienna and Langdon are talking about them, and Sienna says, "Medusa and the entire class of chthonic deities live underground because they're associated directly with Mother Earth. In allegory, chthonics are always symbols of--" And Langdon finishes her thought with, "Fertility." Human fertility was what the antagonist of the novel feared the most; hence his extreme solution. But what Dan Brown isn't really an explanation of why underworld deities and beings are associated with fertility, and there's another thing he isn't quite saying about the red underworld cistern of Langdon's visions (which turns out to be a place in Istanbul).

So I'll tell you, with the help of my trusty The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara G. Walker. Red, underground water? That's the womb of the goddess, filled with her wise blood. Mother Earth is our mother because we came out of her womb - a dark, hidden, earthy space that encloses us fully - her underground caves. Robert Langdon is looking for the Holy Grail yet again - the Goddess's vessel or cauldron, her womb. Life starts there, and when we die, we go back into the earth, buried yet again in the Goddess's womb - from whence we could be reborn. That's the Pagan circle of life: birth, death, burial, rebirth.

Under cauldron, Walker writes, "Among the Celts of Gaul and Britain, the Cauldron of Regeneration was the central religious mystery: reincarnation within the womb of the Goddess" and "Each Celtic temple had its sacred cauldron."

To put it plainly, underworld or subterranean mythological creatures, like Medusa and Hecate, are associated with fertility because they live directly in earthen caves and in the underworld - they live directly inside the Goddess's womb.

Stars

Finally, the last word of this book is "stars." If you know The Divine Comedy, then you'll know why the last word in the book had to be "stars."

'Breaking the Da Vinci Code' by Darrell L. Bock and the Gnostic "Gospel"

On Saturday I went to the discount bookstore, as I may have mentioned. I picked up three books in Nalini Singh's Psy Changeling series, as well as a stack of magazines (they sell them for $1 each) and, for only $1.40, Breaking the Da Vinci Code by Darrell L. Bock, Ph.D.

This last one is a 2004 book about Dan Brown's book that was first published in 2001. I know this is a subject that was popular 100 years ago in pop culture time, but if you've been reading this blog very long, you know I love to read about books I've read. This isn't the first time I've read a book that supplements The Da Vinci Code. I already own Da Vinci Code Decoded by Martin Lunn (which I've read) and The Unauthorized Dan Brown Companion edited by John Helfers (2006 - I have skimmed it, but not read it the whole way through).

Now I've read Breaking the Da Vinci Code. I very much enjoyed it. Bock is a Protestant Biblical scholar, and his book looks at various ancient texts mentioned in Dan Brown's book to show systematically, using the original source material, that 1) the books of the Bible are as authentic a historical source as any other ancient text, and probably much more so, and 2) the ancient texts show very clearly that the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene was understood by witnesses of their time to be teacher/student, not sexual or a marriage relationship.

One of the sources that Bock addresses is Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses in Latin), a second-century work by Irenaeus, considered one of the "church fathers" and a Catholic saint. Irenaeus, a bishop of what is now Lyons, France, but which was then part of the Roman Empire, wrote in part to combat the Gnostic writings of Valentinus, which were popular in Lyons at the time. Valentinus was a Hellenic Egyptian; he or his followers wrote The Gospel of Truth, which was rediscovered in modern times at Nag Hammadi in 1945.

Bock quotes Frederica Mathewes-Green, an Eastern Orthodox Biblical scholar, in her magazine article "What Heresy?" (Books and Culture, November-December 2003). Mathewes-Green wrote:

"The version attributed to Valentinus, the best-known Gnostic, is typical. Valentinus supposedly taught a hierarchy of spiritual beings called 'aeons.' One of the lowest aeons, Sophia, fell and gave birth to the Demiurge, the God of the Hebrew Scriptures. This evil Demiurge created the visible world, which was a bad thing, because now we pure spirits are all tangled up in fleshy bodies. Christ was an aeon who took possession of the body of the human Jesus, and came to free us from the prison of materiality.

"'Us,' by the way, didn't mean everybody. Not all people have a divine spark within, just intellectuals; 'gnosis,' by definition, concerns what you know. Some few who are able to grasp these insights could be initiated into deeper mysteries. Ordinary Christians, who lacked sufficient brainpower, could only obtain the Demiurge's middle realm. Everyone else was doomed. Under Gnosticism, there was no hope of salvation for most of the human race."

Bock explains that "demiurge" is simple a Greek word that means "maker" or "builder," referring to the making of the material world.

If the story of the cosmic spirit-being Sophia giving birth to evil sounds vaguely familiar, it may be that you, like me, are a fan of Lady Gaga. It's the bones of what Lady Gaga wrote in "The Manifesto of Mother Monster" in the full-length "Born This Way" video.

This is the text of the manifesto:

This is the manifesto of Mother Monster: On G.O.A.T, a Government Owned Alien Territory in space, a birth of magnificent and magical proportions took place. But the birth was not finite; it was infinite. As the wombs numbered, and the mitosis of the future began, it was perceived that this infamous moment in life is not temporal; it is eternal. And thus began the beginning of the new race: a race within the race of humanity, a race which bears no prejudice, no judgment, but boundless freedom. But on that same day, as the eternal mother hovered in the multiverse, another more terrifying birth took place: the birth of evil. And as she herself split into two, rotating in agony between two ultimate forces, the pendulum of choice began its dance. It seems easy, you imagine, to gravitate instantly and unwaveringly towards good. But she wondered, “How can I protect something so perfect without evil?”

That the text represents Gnosticism is not my idea, but rather something I read at MKCulture (which you may remember from last year's conspiracy theory post), an inactive blog that is, as of this writing, still able to be accessed. The blogger doesn't elaborate much in the blog post "Descendants of Sophia," but writes, "In my last post I explored the ever-present theme of the Goddess archetype within the context of pop culture. That inquiry ended with 'Born This Way,' the latest [as of April 2011] music video from pop star Lady Gaga. In the video Lady Gaga embodies Gnostic Goddess Sophia." The rest of the post veers off into Kate Bush's album, Elliot* Page's career, and then goddesses associated with the owl and the peacock.

The blogger has a YouTube account as well, on which this video can be found. It explains the Gaga-as-Sophia concept in a little bit of detail. 

If you want the full "Illuminati" explanation of this same video, visit Vigilant Citizen's "Born This Way" post. I'm not much for Illuminati conspiracy theories. I don't doubt that a small group of people has far more power than it should in this world, and that they probably have some screwed-up ideas about how the world should run, but I also believe pop culture is run more by a quest for increased profit than by some sort of ideological (Masonic/Luciferian/Satanic - depends on who you ask) cabal. But it's there to read, if you want it. Madonna may be the Material Girl, but Lady Gaga-as-Sophia gave birth to the creator of the material world. Maybe that's why "Born This Way" subtly samples Madonna's "Express Yourself," according to some listeners. My trusty Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets has more than two pages on Sophia, under the heading "Saint Sophia."

Barbara J. Walker describes Sophia (the name literally means "wisdom" in Greek) as "God's mother" but also the shakti, or female soul/power source, of God. Her symbol was the dove, as some of her incarnations include Aphrodite, Isis/Hathor, and "The Holy Ghost." She writes: "Some said Jesus became Sophia's spouse and his glory depended on this sacred marriage; for he was only one of the Aeons, a minor spirit, the 'common fruit' of the Pleroma [the Gnostic "one true God," a transcendent being]. "Some said Sophia was also Jesus's mother, for she was the Virgin of Light whose spirit entered into the body of Mary to conceive him...Some said Sophia was to God as Metis was to Zeus, his 'mind.'" Walker goes on to report that when the Church of Hagia Sophia was constructed in Constantinople in the 6th century, it was a shrine to Sophia the Goddess, but to cover up the appearance of goddess worship, Christians made up the "virgin martyr" Saint Sophia. Walker cites the 8th and 9th chapters of the Biblical book of Proverbs as having an ambivalent attitude toward Sophia, or wisdom.

In one passage, following Wisdom is to be praised, but in another, "she sitteth at the door of her house, on a seat in the high places of the city [her temple]," calling to passersby to turn toward her, but if anyone turns into her temple "he knoweth not that the dead are there; and that her guests are in the depths of hell." Walker sees this as two factions - one in favor of worshiping the Goddess Sophia and another that worships only the male God - having a debate. If Sophia is thought of as the mother/spouse of Jesus, and she's associated with the "high places of the city" (the temple or watchtower, magdala in Hebrew), it's possibly Sophia is also associated with Mary Magdalene.

Perhaps this is another reason why Lady Gaga appears as a Mary Magdalene figure in her "Judas" video, which came out after "Born This Way." (However, after having watched a little video about Kenneth Anger and Hollywood Babylon the other day, I learned about Anger's experimental film Scorpio Rising. In it, Anger intercut clips of a Biblical drama featuring Jesus with footage of a leather-clad biker, set to 1950s rock 'n roll. The "Judas" video may be an homage to Scorpio Rising. Now, Kenneth Anger - he was openly a Satanist, and would proudly have told you he followed the teachings of Aleister Crowley.)

Neo-Gnosticism is a favorite topic of a blogger I mentioned yesterday, Christopher Loring Knowles. He seems to genuinely believe there is a world of spiritual or energy beings, hidden from us most of the time in the material world, but which seems to break through at times and communicates with us in a language of symbols and coincidences (synchronicities). VISUP will occasionally mention Gnosticism as well. In one post, VISUP mentions that some Gnostics referred to the Demiurge as Samael, which VISUP says means "blind idiot." Where have I read that name before? In Devil's In the Details, where Samael is the name of Satan's fiance. Synchronicity? Maybe. Dog days of summer weirdness? It's a little early for that, but perhaps.

http://www.betterworldbooks.com/

 *Updated from "Ellen" to "Elliot" in 2023.