Before the Flood, Adam warned his children that the world would be destroyed twice, once by water and once by fire. His descendants carved what they knew of the heavens onto two columns, one of brick and one of stone, so that if one catastrophe destroyed the first, the other might survive. The Jewish historian Josephus (c. 37–100), writing near the end of the first century, said the stone pillar still stood in his own day, in a land he called Seiris. Later translators rendered the name Siriad, and what that land represents has been argued over ever since.
Seventeen centuries later the story was still being told, and now the record came out of the ground. In September 1827 Joseph Smith (1805–1844) said he had taken a set of gold plates from a hill near Palmyra, New York, at a place an angel had shown him. In September 1845 four followers of James Strang (1813–1856) dug three small brass plates from beneath an oak tree at Voree, Wisconsin, at a spot Strang said an angel had shown him. Smith published a book he said was translated from his plates. Strang published a short record from his, then a book of law he said came from a second set of plates, and went on to be crowned king of a settlement on an island in Lake Michigan.
Between Josephus’s pillar and the plates of the American frontier lies this series.
The idea behind both stories is a simple one. Wisdom existed at the beginning, before the Flood or soon after it, and human beings could preserve it in durable materials for later recovery. From Josephus to the present, scholars, missionaries, antiquarians, reformers and prophets have argued that humanity once possessed a purer teaching, that the religions of the world preserved only damaged or partial forms of it, and that what was missing might still be found, in a scroll, a priestly archive, an Egyptian inscription, a Sanskrit manuscript, a monument, a mound. That search is the subject of this archive.
The search lasted as long as it did because it could change its evidence without changing its shape. When Hebrew scripture stopped supplying the oldest record, the searchers moved to another archive, Egypt’s monuments, China’s classics, India’s manuscripts, the mounds of the Ohio valley, and when one of them was read at last and gave ordinary answers, the search was already somewhere else. Each time it moved its library, and each time it kept its rules. The search survived by shifting its archive. That is the argument of this series, and the sixty-six portraits that follow are the test of it.
A name for the searching
The Swiss historian Urs App gave the search a name in The Birth of Orientalism (2010). He called it the Ur-tradition. The German prefix Ur- means original or primal, and App used the term for movements that trace themselves to an original, pure or genuine teaching, claim its authority, attack later additions as corruptions, and justify reform as a return to the source. Some of the people in this archive went further and held that all the world’s religions preserved fragments of one first teaching. Others claimed only that their own faith ran back to an uncorrupted beginning.
One rule of usage governs these pages. The Ur-tradition always names the searching, never the thing searched for. The searchers gave the object many names, an original revelation, an ancient theology, a first religion, a lost church, and those names are used here when their claims are described.
The belief has an older and narrower name. The historian of Islamic philosophy John Walbridge called it Platonic Orientalism, and Wouter Hanegraaff made it the starting point of his history of Western esotericism. It rested on two assumptions inherited from late antiquity. The first was that Plato’s philosophy was a religious teaching. The second was that Plato had not invented it but received it, as one link in a chain of sages reaching back through Pythagoras to the wise men of the East. The Pythagorean Numenius of Apamea (fl. c. 150) set out the program in a sentence. Begin from Plato, he wrote, go back to Pythagoras, and then call on the peoples of high renown, in Hanegraaff’s rendering “all on which the Brahmans, the Jews, the Magi and the Egyptians were in agreement.” The search this archive follows is what Platonic Orientalism became when it stopped being Platonist. Plato dropped out of the chain of sages, and Genesis, the Druids, the Brahmans and the mound-builders of Ohio took his place.
Six things to watch for
App lists five features of the Ur-tradition and presents them as key features rather than a complete inventory. Texts and objects run through his whole discussion, and I add them as a sixth. Together they make a pattern a reader can recognize in any of the portraits that follow.
There is an original teaching, purer or more complete than anything available later. There is a history in three stages, a golden age, a loss, and the possibility of recovery. There is a line of transmission, the named people, communities or institutions that carried fragments of the teaching across the centuries, and within that line there are pivotal figures, the patriarchs, sages, prophets, priests or scholars who served as its essential links. There are texts and objects, the manuscripts, inscriptions, symbols, monuments and sacred artifacts that supplied visible proof that something had survived. And there is a regenerator, App’s word for the restorer, the person who tells the story and presents himself, his church or his learned circle as the agent that can bring back what was lost.
Not every figure profiled here pressed all six with equal force, and the people who did belonged to no single movement and never agreed on what the first teaching contained. Christian scholars used pagan traditions to defend biblical history. Deists, who prized natural religion over church doctrine, used the same traditions to challenge Christianity. Missionaries searched Asia and the Americas for traces of an earlier revelation. Scholars recovered genuine texts, accepted invented ones, exposed them, and sometimes supplied the evidence they had hoped to find.
Older meant truer
The searchers did not invent their rules. They inherited them from a small ancient library, and the shape of the search is the shape of those books. Josephus gave them the pillars of Seth, Abraham teaching astronomy to the Egyptians, and the pagan chroniclers called as witnesses to the antiquity of the Jews. Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260–339) gave them an anthology of everything a Christian could quote to prove that the Greeks had learned from older nations. Diodorus of Sicily (first century BC) gave them Egypt as the mother of civilization and the gods as benefactors deified after death.
Cicero (106–43 BC) gave them the rules. Everyone in this archive had read him at school, and his dialogues state, more plainly than any Greek source, the two principles the whole search ran on. The first is the rule of antiquity, that what is oldest is truest. The second is the rule of agreement, which Cicero puts as a maxim in the Tusculan Disputations, that in every matter the consent of all nations is to be reckoned a law of nature. Cicero also gave them their Hermes. In On the Nature of the Gods a sceptic, multiplying gods to embarrass the Stoics, counts five Mercuries, Mercury being the Roman Hermes, and the last of them killed Argus, fled to Egypt, “gave the Egyptians their laws and letters,” and is called Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing. The church father Lactantius (c. 250–325) took the sceptic’s list for a chronology, Augustine (354–430) repeated it, and the Renaissance built on it.
The same library supplied the doubts. In the same dialogue Cicero’s Epicurean mocks the Stoic Chrysippus (c. 279–206 BC) for reading his own doctrine back into Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod and Homer, “so that even the most ancient poets, who never suspected any such thing, are made to appear Stoics.” Cotta, the sceptic who answers him, reports Aristotle’s (384–322 BC) opinion that the poet Orpheus never existed and that the Orphic poems were written by a Pythagorean. The dialogue catalogues the theories that the gods were invented by wise men for the good of the state, that they were useful things given names, and that they were dead kings, and it ends without a verdict. The searchers kept the witnesses and dropped the trial.
Antiquity conferred authority, and the Fathers used it to protect revelation. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215) and Eusebius argued that Moses lived before the Greek philosophers and that much of their wisdom came from Hebrew sources, which placed scripture upstream of Greek learning. The rule could be turned around. Once the Renaissance had an Egyptian Hermes and a Persian Zoroaster at the head of the chain, Hebrew scripture no longer held the oldest line, and the rule that had defended it began to work against it. Much of this archive is the history of that reversal.
The door at Florence
The archive opens in the Renaissance, where the search took the form of a revival. At the Council of Florence in 1439 the Byzantine philosopher George Gemistos Plethon (c. 1360–1452) told the Italian humanists of a wisdom far older than Plato, descended from Zoroaster and the Magi of ancient Persia, and placed the Chaldean Oracles he ascribed to Zoroaster at the head of philosophy itself. A generation later Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) translated the Corpus Hermeticum and set its supposed author, the Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, in the same deep antiquity, close to the age of Moses. From these two strands grew the prisca theologia, the ancient theology, the belief in a single teaching handed down from Zoroaster, Hermes and Orpheus through Pythagoras and Plato and at last into Christianity.
One question then became decisive, and the first chapters follow it. Who stood at the head of the chain? The Renaissance gave three answers. Plethon put Zoroaster first, and Ficino, after first giving the place to Hermes, followed him. Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500), Ficino’s contemporary, put Hermes first and corrected Ficino’s chronology to do it. In a preface of 1482 he wrote, on the authority of Diodorus, that Hermes lived not after Moses but long before him, in the age when gods reigned in Egypt. Those gods, he added, in Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn’s translation, had been “perfect and true men and sages,” while the pharaohs of Moses’s day could “scarcely be called human at all.” Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) kept Moses at the head but changed what Moses had taught, setting beside the law given to everyone a secret law for the few, which he called Kabbalah. India stood in every list and headed none. Europe had heard of Indian sages but held no Indian scripture, and the game needed a book older than Moses. India reached the head of the chain only in the 1760s, when texts began to arrive, and the first to reach print, the Shastah of John Zephaniah Holwell (1711–1798), was a book no other European could examine.
The revival carried a question the whole archive inherits. When these scholars traced wisdom back to Persia, Egypt or India, were they recovering a real Eastern source or projecting their own philosophy onto an imagined East? Platonic Orientalism names the belief, not the answer. Plethon knew no Persian, and nearly every doctrine he credited to Zoroaster can be found in Greek Platonism. Yet the answer was not always no. The Egyptologist Jean-Pierre Mahé has argued that the Greek Hermetica had Egyptian models, a Demotic Book of Thoth among them, so that the Egypt Ficino imagined was not wholly a dream. The same doubt shadows almost everyone who follows, and the search ran on its Eastern source whether that source was ever there.
Out of the ground
The search rewarded anyone who could produce the right ancient document, and some produced them. In 1492 the Dominican friar Annius of Viterbo (c. 1432–1502) announced that ancient monuments had been unearthed in his home city, among them a marble whose carvings he read as proof that the Egyptian god Osiris had once civilized Italy. In 1498 he published a collection of recovered texts to bear witness to that deep past. The most influential was a chronicle of world history attributed to the Babylonian priest Berosus (early third century BC). Berosus was real, and his genuine history survived only in scattered quotations by later writers, which made a complete chronicle plausible. Critics spotted contradictions within a few decades, the scholars who followed concluded that the chronicle he printed was his own composition, and that has remained the consensus. It handed Europe a full account of the age after the Flood and a roster of national founders descended from Noah, and in Anthony Grafton’s telling it satisfied most readers for two generations and was still being used by history students a century later.
Exposure did not settle the matter. Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609), Annius’s sharpest critic, sharpened his own source-hunting as he dismantled the chronicle, and in 1614 Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) showed that the Hermetic writings were Greek compositions of the early Christian centuries, not records from pharaonic Egypt. Among critical scholars Hermes lost his claim to remote antiquity. Many of the readers profiled here went on believing in an Egyptian Hermes long afterwards, and the hope of finding an even older source survived the correction entirely. Forgery and the criticism that exposed it grew up together, and in this archive the critics are never far from the searchers. Several of them have portraits of their own.
Criticism of a text did not disprove belief in an original revelation. It pushed the searchers to look elsewhere. Egyptian inscriptions, Chinese classics, Indian shastras and the records of Indigenous America became possible witnesses to a history that Hebrew scripture no longer seemed to contain on its own. A book could also be made ancient by its title alone. The earliest text in this archive is a Prophecy of Ham, ascribed to Noah’s son and known from a single quotation preserved by Clement, and it grew older each time a later scholar passed it on.
The recovered documents share one more feature. Annius said his texts had been dug up, found in tombs and hiding places. In the 1590s a set of inscribed lead books was found buried on a hillside outside Granada and presented a Christianity that had spoken Arabic in Spain since the first century. Grafton follows the pattern across a long history, from the priests who found the Book of the Law in Josiah’s temple down to the present, and notes that the form outlasted its supposed Enlightenment origins. A record pulled from the ground to restore a lost and truer past belongs to no single century or faith. This archive meets the form at its beginning, in Josephus’s pillars, and at its end, in the plates of Palmyra and Voree, and what each record was is a question for its own chapter.
Lost, or kept
Augustine put the belief in its most radical form. “The very thing which is now called the Christian religion,” he wrote near the end of his life, in Edgar Wind’s translation, “was with the ancients, and it was with the human race from its beginning,” and only later “began to be called the Christian.” The sentence can be read two ways, and the two readings divide this archive. Ficino’s ancient theology was a story of loss and recovery. The truth had been whole at the start, had been forgotten, and was being found again, which made it, as Hanegraaff observes, a call for reform. In 1540 the Vatican librarian Agostino Steuco (1497–1548) read Augustine the other way. In his book on the perennial philosophy the ancient wisdom had never been lost, because the Church had kept it. Nearly everyone who follows takes one side or the other. Either the first religion must be recovered, or someone, a church, a priesthood, a people, has kept it all along.
Some searchers wanted more than a teaching. They believed the earliest humans had belonged to a complete religious community with worship, priesthood, rites and covenant, and that its original order might be reconstructed. Eusebius had already argued that Christianity was not a new religion, that Abraham and the righteous before Moses had practised the same faith without the Jewish law or the Christian name. One seventeenth-century Capuchin mapped the first church in detail, in a book of 1626, with a supreme priesthood running from Adam through Seth and Noah to Shem. Every Reformation party claimed the centuries before the Council of Nicaea as the church’s uncorrupted youth, and the American restoration movements at the end of this archive claimed that the New Testament church had disappeared from the earth and needed to be restored.
The same premise supported the opposite conclusion. If existing churches were corruptions of an original religion, some deists argued, then organized religion had caused the corruption, and the first faith was to be sought in reason and nature, with no restored church required. Their weapon was the charge of priestcraft, the claim that priests invent or corrupt revelations in order to rule. Its classical form, that religion was invented by wise men for the good of the state, stood in the same book of Cicero that churchmen quoted for Hermes. Thomas Paine (1737–1809), near the end of his life, retold the finding of the Book of the Law in Josiah’s temple as a priestly invention and traced the religion it displaced, the religion of the sun, through the Druids to the Freemasons. The essay was published after his death in New York, where the last chapters of this archive meet the buried book of the law again. Restorationists and radicals began from the same premise and arrived at opposite ends.
The promise
One promise runs the whole length of the archive. In the northern Mesopotamian city of Harran a community of pagan star worshippers survived into the Islamic centuries, took the name Sabian to secure toleration, and named Hermes their prophet. Theirs, they said, was mankind’s first and authentic faith, the worship from which Abraham, Zoroaster, Christ and Muhammad had each in turn departed. The geographer al-Mas’udi (c. 896–956) was told that two sentences in Syriac, attributed to Plato, stood over the door of their meeting place, that whoever knows himself becomes a god, and that man is a heavenly plant whose roots are in the sky. A community that wrote Plato above its threshold as scripture is much of this archive compressed into one image.
The Asclepius, a Hermetic dialogue that survived in Latin, went further and praised man as a maker of gods, a passage Augustine condemned as idolatry. Around 1494 Lazzarelli made it the summit of Christian rebirth, in a hymn written for the king of Naples, in which the Begetter “has given man a mind like his own, and speech, that he, like the gods, may bring forth gods.” Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) quoted the verse under Lazzarelli’s name, and in 1651 it was printed in English. In April 1844, preaching at a funeral in Nauvoo, Illinois, Joseph Smith told the congregation, in one hearer’s record, “You have got to learn how to be a god yourself.” No line of reading is known to run from Naples to Nauvoo, and this archive does not claim one.
The promise came back without it.
How to read this archive
The portraits run in order of time, from Plethon at Florence in 1439 to Strang on his island in the 1850s, and there are sixty-six of them. Each stands on its own, and a reader can begin anywhere. Several threads run the length of the series, borrowing from one another and often pulling in opposite directions. Christian scholars treated the traditions of Egypt, China, India and America as broken memories of biblical truth and used them to shore up sacred history. Deists and freethinkers kept the recovery claim and turned it against the churches. Missionaries and antiquarians moved the evidence from Hebrew scripture to Egyptian inscriptions, Chinese classics, Sanskrit manuscripts, ancient monuments and buried records. Some writers sought not a lost teaching but a lost institution. And a line of critics, from Scaliger and Casaubon to Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832), used the searchers’ own tools to take the searchers’ evidence apart, without ever quite ending the search. The essays published alongside the portraits will take these threads in turn, beginning with the library the searchers inherited and the city of Harran.
Three entry points, for a reader who wants a way in. Lazzarelli’s chapter shows what the promise of ancient wisdom felt like to a man who believed he had been reborn through it. Annius’s chapter shows how a learned Europe came to possess the ancient histories it wanted. Holwell’s chapter shows the moment India entered the chain, through a scripture no one else could examine.
The end of the archive is American, and it should be read as an end, not as a destination. At the end of the archive the search turned to scriptures of its own. Constantine Rafinesque (1783–1840) offered painted Lenape sticks, Godfrey Higgins (1772–1833), in England, a thousand-page recovery of one oriental religion, Joseph Smith gold plates and James Strang brass ones, each an ancient record said to restore a lost and truer past. Other endings were possible and other histories run on from the same material, into the Theosophy of the 1870s and the perennial philosophy of the twentieth century. The strength and kind of each connection has to be judged on its own, and the chapters judge them one at a time.
The search also left a permanent mark on scholarship. It sent Europeans to learn Asian languages, translate sacred books and study living religious communities, and it became one of the roots of modern Orientalism. The traditions it drew on had histories of their own, and this archive follows what European and American readers made of them. Whether a single ancient wisdom ever existed is not the question. Why so many intelligent people believed they could recover it, and what they built along the way, is.
Sources
Full references for each chapter appear with that chapter; the works below are the ones behind this overview.
Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. J.F. (London, 1651), Book III, ch. 36.
Annius of Viterbo, Antiquitatum variarum volumina XVII (Rome, 1498; Paris, 1515).
Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
Augustine, Retractationes I.12.3, trans. Edgar Wind, in Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (Faber, 1958); The City of God VIII.23–24, on the Asclepius.
Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (Knopf, 2005); Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates: A Cultural History (Oxford University Press, 2023).
Cicero, De natura deorum; Academica, trans. H. Rackham (Loeb Classical Library 268, 1933); M. Tullii Ciceronis Opera, ed. J. N. Lallemand, vol. IX (Paris, 1768). Quotations from On the Nature of the Gods follow Rackham; the maxim from the Tusculan Disputations (I.13.30) is my own rendering from the Latin.
Clement of Alexandria, Stromata VI.6, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2, trans. William Wilson (1885), for the Prophecy of Ham.
Brian P. Copenhaver, ed. and trans., Hermetica (Cambridge University Press, 1992), for the Asclepius and its Egyptian background; Richard Jasnow and Karl-Theodor Zauzich, The Ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth (Harrassowitz, 2005).
Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Book I, trans. C. H. Oldfather (Loeb Classical Library, 1933).
Eusebius of Caesarea, Preparation for the Gospel, trans. E. H. Gifford (Oxford, 1903); Ecclesiastical History I.4.
Stephen J. Fleming, “The Fulness of the Gospel: Christian Platonism and the Origins of Mormonism” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2014), quoting the King Follett sermon, 7 April 1844, from Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook, eds., The Words of Joseph Smith (1980), 357–58.
Mercedes García-Arenal and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, The Orient in Spain: Converted Muslims, the Forged Lead Books of Granada, and the Rise of Orientalism (Brill, 2013).
Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics (Princeton University Press, 1990).
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Ruud M. Bouthoorn, Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500): The Hermetic Writings and Related Documents (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005).
John Zephaniah Holwell, Interesting Historical Events, Relative to the Provinces of Bengal, and the Empire of Indostan, 3 parts (London, 1765–71).
Jean-Pierre Mahé, “Preliminary Remarks on the Demotic Book of Thoth and the Greek Hermetica,” Vigiliae Christianae 50 (1996), 353–363.
Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 1.68–71, in William Whiston, trans., The Genuine Works of Flavius Josephus.
Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, trans. Mary Francis McDonald (Catholic University of America Press, 1964), Book I, chapter 6.
Thomas Paine, “An Essay on the Origin of Free-Masonry” (written c. 1805; published New York, 1810), in The Theological Works.
David Pingree, “The Sābians of Harrān and the classical tradition,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 9, no. 1 (2002), 8–35, including al-Mas’udi’s report of the inscription at Harran.
Vickie Cleverley Speek, “God Has Made Us a Kingdom”: James Strang and the Midwest Mormons (Signature Books, 2006).
Agostino Steuco, De perenni philosophia libri X (Lyon, 1540).
John Walbridge, The Wisdom of the Mystic East: Suhrawardī and Platonic Orientalism (State University of New York Press, 2001).