Category: Rome

Romans on Oak Island? No, Just Another Steaming Pilum of Baloney "Evidence" (by Peter Geuzen)

12/10/2018

This is a guest blog post contributed by Peter Geuzen. Peter is familiar to fans of #Swordgate as the producer of numerous illustrations documenting the proliferation of Fake Hercules Swords since December of 2015. He has recently assigned me the task of creating a prize for Swordgate's upcoming Third Anniversary Super Terrific Happy Hour Celebration. So I assigned him this blog post in return. Enjoy!

The Curse of Oak Island has started another season with a few episodes of the obligatory 1/3 recap of the previous episode, 1/3 recap of the recap, 1/6 new material, and 1/6 recap of the new material, per episode. The show airs Tuesday nights in the United States and Sunday night in Canada. To avoid any spoiler issues, this blog is being done on a Monday after the Canadian crowd has had a chance to catch up on the most recent episode.

Welcome to Pilumgate. Don't worry, it won't last long. You might be able to hold your breath until it's over.

You have to wonder if Kevin Burns (Executive Producer & Writer, Prometheus Entertainment) is watching the reactions to his Oak Island cash cow as they happen after each show and season. You have to then wonder if he literally does everything for a reaction. Throw out the red herrings and the scraps of . . . well, scrap, basically . . . as it gets pulled from yet another borehole, or caisson grab, or backhoe pit, or this beach, or that piece of forest, or a full swamp, or a drained swamp . . . you get the idea. As the show keeps trying to be about something, it keeps delivering essentially nothing. Scraps of minor finds are inevitable with the amount of digging and metal detecting going on. Give any historic location in Nova Scotia the same level of effort and you wouldn’t find much of anything different. It’s all stuff from the last couple centuries, but on Oak Island there is also stuff from all the past dead end searches.

Ignoring all these scraps from the last few years, and since this blog is about fake Roman stuff, we leapfrog forward from Fake Roman Swords to the most recent fake Roman find. Kevin Burns has thrown a pilum at us.

First let’s build up the context. The supposed non-actors who don’t star in a scripted show have become actors portraying non-actors who do star in a scripted show. They know what they are expected to say, when to say it, and thus they know what exactly has the best chance of making the final edit back in the Los Angeles studio. As a result, when swinging a metal detector turns up a pointed piece of iron, it’s best to start with a conclusion and worry about details later. Fist pumping yelps of TEMPLAR are now mandatory. The obligatory cell phone speaker call to bring over the always conveniently close by fellowship members has to happen next. The bros then high five all around and Prometheus immediately cuts to a leap of faith confirmation fantasy historical re-enactment scene, with universally condemned narration from the “Could it be?” guy. In other words they found this iron spike thing and immediately gave it a bromance declaration as a Templar crossbow bolt.

Steve Quayle Says Evil Giants Turned Humans Gay

5/4/2015

Here's another right-wing Christian explanation for homosexuality that you can add to your list: the giants did it.

I have no formal training in psychology (the last psychology class I took was as a freshman at Indiana University over twenty years ago), but I'm sure there's some work exploring whatever it is in the human mind that compels us to try to integrate what we see in the world into some kind of internally-consistent framework. Doing that isn't by itself "crazy" - I'm guessing we all do it to one extent or another.

There are a few people out there who have homed in on the idea that giants and/or the Nephilim are the key to explaining the world. Steve Quayle is one of those people, identifying giants as crucial to understanding just about every aspect of world prehistory, history, and current events. His website declares him to be "The leading authority on giants," and he apparently makes a living selling books on giants, speaking about giants, "researching" giants, and doing whatever else it is that someone with the responsibility of being the world's self-proclaimed leading authority on giants would do. He recently appeared on The Rundown Live, a Milwaukee radio show hosted by Kristan Harris, filibustering for an hour about all kinds of topics related to giants (to his credit, Harris does manage to insert occasional comments about mermaids and the "Fiberaci Sequence," but the program was 95% "let's listen to what pours out of Steve Quayle's head"). If you have an hour to kill and want to experience the ramblings of one of the principal stirrers of the Nephilim whirlpool, you can find the program here. If you want to save some time, I recommend Jason Colavito's blog post about the program.

One thing that jumped out at me during the program that I don't recall hearing before was the connection that Quayle makes between giants and the origins of homosexuality (about 47:30 into the interview):

"Let me share this with you: there's so much sanitation of the truth, or there's just downright corruption . . . and to corrupt means to literally destroy, you know, and to ultimately take apart or cause to go to pieces, so to speak . . . the thing is, it's just like moral corruption. It's fascinating to me as scientific corruption takes even higher precedent in the headlines that moral corruption comes along like it. And I'll explain something to everybody: Diodorus - look him up - is one of the most interesting ancient historians talking about the Celtic giants declared that, even though they had comely women giants, meaning they were good-looking giant women, that they preferred the sexual accompaniment of each other. So, that's interesting that most people don't understand but that was introduced to humanity. They weren't born with that: that's what the giants taught them."

So there you have it, straight from the world's leading authority: evil giants gave humans the gay.

I did what Quayle advised me to do and looked up Diodorus. Diodorus Siculus was Greek historian writing in the first century BC. He is most famous for his Bibliotheca historica, a lengthy book of world history and geography. As best I can tell, Quayle's claim that Celtic giants introduced homosexuality to humanity is in reference to Book V, where Diodorus describes the inhabitants of Gaul (I found it reproduced here):

    “For stature they are tall, but of a sweaty and pale complexion, red-haired, not only naturally, but they endeavour all they can to make it redder by art. They often wash their hair in a water boiled with lime, and turn it backward from the forehead to the crown of the head, and thence to their very necks, that their faces may be more fully seen, so that they look like satyrs and hobgoblins. . . .
    . . .
    According to their natural cruelty, they are as impious in the worship of their gods; for malefactors, after that they have been kept close prisoners five years together, they impale upon stakes, in honour to the gods, and then, with many other victims, upon a vast pile of wood, they offer them up as a burnt sacrifice to their deities. In like manner they use their captives also, as sacrifices to the gods. Some of them cut the throats, burn, or otherwise destroy both men and beasts that they have taken in time of war: though they have very beautiful women among them, yet they little value their private society, but are transported with raging lust to the filthy act of sodomy; and, lying upon the ground on beast's skins spread under them, they there tumble together, with their catamites lying on both sides of them: and that which is the most abominable is, that without any sense of shame, or regard to their reputation, they will readily prostitute their bodies to others upon every occasion. And they are so far from looking upon it to be any fault, that they judge it a mean and dishonourable thing for any thus caressed to refuse the favour offered them.”

I’ve omitted a dozen paragraphs between where Diodorus describes the Celts as “tall” and the part about about sexual relations. Those paragraphs describe, among other things, how the Celts eat, dress, fight, treat strangers and enemies, and worship. The Romans were already familiar with Celts by this time, having been in conflict with them in the fourth century BC. The Gallic Wars of 58-51 BC would bring the Romans and the Celts into very close, hostile contact. Diodorus’ description of the Celts was probably not meant to be flattering, which makes sense considering the unfriendly nature of the interactions between Rome and the Celts. I'm sure it was not the first (or last) time in history when descriptions of homosexual and pederastic behavior were used to attempt to demean and distinguish "them" from "us."

The alert reader will note that the actual passages from Bibliotheca historica about the Celts aren’t anything like Quayle portrays them. There is nothing about giants (unless you believe that the simple remark that the Celts were “tall” meant that they were actually giant supernatural human-demon hybrids), and there is nothing about humans becoming gay by watching giant men getting it on with each other. I’m not sure where that particular Nephilim fantasy is coming from, but there’s no basis for it in Bibliotheca historica.

My main goal in writing this post is not simply to point out a factual error made by someone hocking ancient giants to sell books (if I had a nickel . . .), it's to highlight how fringe notions about the human past are used to frame the world today and how we regard the people in it. Quayle's desire to attribute everything "corrupt" to the influence of evil giants may seem quaint and silly, but it's important to recognize how that theory of the way the world is connects to Quayle's statements about what ought to be done about it. As I wrote in this post, Quayle has declared that the Nephilim bloodline needs to be exterminated, and the hunt is on among Nephilim enthusiasts for markers of Nephilim ancestry among living humans. How do homosexuals fit into Quayle's recommendations for behaviors to mitigate the coming End of the Age?

Quayle is selling the search for truth, but it's really snake oil. It’s ironic that one of his dramatic lines in the interview is that “Men and women can choose: do they want to believe a lie? or do they want to believe the truth? Unfortunately the majority will believe a lie.” In reality, though, the willingness of people to believe a lie is what sells Quayle’s books. If you're reading this post and you think Quayle may be onto something, I urge you to check out his claims about the past for yourself. Do what he says: look it up. As an archaeologist who deals mostly with prehistory, I'm not very familiar at all with Greek and Roman historical sources. It only took me a few minutes, however, to track down Quayle's reference and see that his interpretation of Diodorus' account of the Celts was way off. Is that just a mistake on Quayle's part, or is it an intentional fabrication to build the basis for stirring one more aspect of modern human society into his Nephilim crockpot? If he's willing to aggressively misinterpret and misrepresent the past in order to sell you his picture of the present and the future, do you really want to trust him? I don't. Go and look for yourself.

Update (5/5/2105): Jason Colavito followed up on this post with some background about the history of Christian conspiracy theorists equating the Nephilim with homosexuality.

A Case of Gigantism from Ancient Rome

2/21/2015

A comparison of the humerus (upper arm bone) from a skeleton of an individual with pituitary gigantism (T.30) with a "normal" male from Ancient Rome (taken from Figure 1 of Minozzi et al. 2012).

I came across this short paper* from 2012 interpreting a large skeleton from Imperial Rome as a case of pituitary gigantism. The stature of the individual, a young male, was estimated to be around 202 cm (about 6’8”).

The authors note several things about the remains:

the large size of the bones (long bone lengths over 5 standard deviations from the mean of the population)

hyperostosis (thickening) of the frontal bone of the skull

enlargement of the area inside the skull where the pituitary gland would have been

a wide and long mandible

While the amount of dental wear and the stage of fusion of the cranial sutures were consistent with an individual over the age of 20, it is clear that some of the long bones and vertebrae had not yet stopped growing. In combination with a presumed enlarged pituitary gland, the large size of the bones and their apparent delayed fusion suggests an overgrowth syndrome (a genetic disorder associated with abnormal body growth) that began during childhood.

The authors state that “this case represents an extraordinary discovery, for the first time documenting gigantism in a complete ancient skeleton.” The paper has a nice figure showing the humerus and tibia in comparison to corresponding bones from a “normal” male (giantologists: note the presence of a scale and the plan view perspective of the photograph that makes it clear how big the bones actually are). The short length of the paper means it contains frustratingly few details, however: there is no explanation of how stature was estimated, no metric data are provided, and we are not given much information about which epiphyses are incompletely fused (some do not fuse completely until after age 20 under normal circumstances).

*Minozzi, Simona, Walter Pantano, Franceso di Gennaro, Gino Fornaciari, and Paola Catalano. 2012. Pituitary Disease from the Past: A Rare Case of Gigantism in Skeletal Remains from the Roman Imperial Age. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism 97(12):4302-4303.

Romans on Oak Island? No, Just Another Steaming Pilum of Baloney "Evidence" (by Peter Geuzen)

Steve Quayle Says Evil Giants Turned Humans Gay

A Case of Gigantism from Ancient Rome

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