David N. Livingstone - Adam's Ancestors_ Race, Religion, And the Politics of Human Origins

8/18/2019 David N. Livingstone - Adam's Ancestors_ Race, Religion, And the Politics of Human Origins

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Medicine, Science, and Religion in Historical Context

Ronald L. Numbers, Consulting Editor


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.

5 Adam’s Ancestors

Race, Religion, and the

Politics of Human Origins

Baltimore


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© 2008 Te Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2008

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Livingstone, David N., 953–Adam’s ancestors : race, religion, and the politics of human origins /

David N. Livingstone.

p. cm. — (Medicine, science, and religion in historical context)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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. Ethnology—Religious aspects. 2. Teological anthropology.

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Frances


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Contents

Preface ix

· Questioning the Mosaic Record

2 · Isaac La Peyrère and the Pre-Adamite Scandal

3 · Te Cultural Politics of the Adamic Narrative

4 · Pre-Adamism and the Harmony ofScience and Religion

5 · Adam, Adamites, and the Scienceof Ethnology

6 · Evolution and the Birth of Adam

7 · Pre-Adamism and the Politics of RacialSupremacy

8 · Te Continuing Legacy of Pre-AdamiteDiscourse

9 · Concluding Reections

Notes

Bibliography

Index


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ix

Preface

Te idea or this book was born one afernoon in March 999 at the Univer-sity o Caliornia at Berkeley. I got into a conversation with Ronald Num-bers, who mentioned an exploratory essay I had published a ew years earlieron the idea o humans beore Adam. Ron suggested that I might return tothat theme to try to esh out the story and write a ull history o the scheme.Te journey on which I embarked that afernoon has taken me to many intel-lectual destinations, some strange, some amiliar, all ascinating. And while

I am sure that I have not said everything that could be said about the idea o pre-adamic humanity, I am greatly indebted to Ron or encouraging me toembark on this expedition. Along the way I have beneted enormously romhis continuing interest and support and rom the help I have derived rommany riends and scholars.

I owe an immense debt to Colin Kidd both or making his Forging of Races available to me prior to publication and or numerous bibliographicalleads. Te stimulus o his scholarship on the history o ethnic identities hasbeen inspirational. Another afernoon conversation, this time with AndrewHolmes, proved to be invaluable in helping me sort out a coherent struc-ture or the entire book. Te act that he also persistently drew my atten-tion to numerous ugitive publications has only placed me more deeply inhis debt. Te care that Nicolaas Rupke took in reading the entire manuscriptand saving me rom some embarrassing errors is both typical o his erudi-tion and scholarship and a mark o his valued riendship. I have benetedgreatly, too, rom many enlightening conversations with good riends suchas Diarmid Finnegan, Frank Gourley, Nuala Johnson, Mark Noll, and Ste-

phen Williams, some o whom took the time and trouble to read portions othe manuscript and offer the best o advice. Luke Harlow willingly providedme with useul bibliographical leads on some American dimensions o thesubject; Simon Schaffer directed me to some important seventeenth-century


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x Preface

work; Philip Orr brought his dramatist’s eye to bear on the entire text andoffered excellent counsel; Jeremy Crampton awakened me to dimensions othe story with which I was unamiliar and shared with me some o his un-

published work; and Martin Rudwick read several parts o the manuscript,

offering sage and salient advice on several points. I am also extremely grateulto Gill Alexander and Maura Pringle or their skill in working with illustra-tions and to Elizabeth Gratch or patient and careul copyediting.

o all these colleagues and riends I record my appreciation in the certainknowledge that, whatever its imperections, Adam’s Ancestors is the betteror the help they have willingly given. But my greatest debt is, as always, toFrances, Emma, and Justin, who have had to share too many dinners with the

ghosts o Adam’s ancestors.


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1 5 Beginnings

uestioning the Mosaic Record

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth

was without orm and void; and darkness was upon the ace o the

deep. And the Spirit o God moved upon the ace o the waters. And

God said, Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the

light, that it was good: and God divided the light fom the darkness.

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. Andthe evening and the morning were the rst day . . . So God created

man in his own image, in the image o God created he him; male and

emale created he them . . . And the Lord God took the man, and put

him into the garden o Eden to dress it and to keep it . . . And out o the

ground the Lord God ormed every beast o the eld, and every owl o

the air; and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them:

and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the namethereo. And Adam gave names to all cattle and to the owl o the air,

and to every beast o the eld.

E

6, when the King James Bible rst appeared, these words have introduced Bible readers to Adam, the ather o the hu-man race. With sonorous majesty these words give voice to a doc-trine that has circulated since ancient times, stretching back through

the Geneva Bible and Miles Coverdale’s translation, Saint Jerome’s medievalLatin Vulgate and the Greek Septuagint, to the Aramaic argums o theearly Hebrews. It is the doctrine o Creation, the story o beginnings—othe heavens and the earth, o light and dark, o sun and moon, o plants andanimals. It is a chronicle that positions humankind at the pinnacle o the


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narrative. It tells how we came to be here, what lie was like in the morningo the earth, why human beings come in male and emale orms, where eviloriginated, and how ugliness entered the world. And here, in the cradle ocreation, stands one individual, Adam, the rst man.

o leave nothing to the imagination, pictures in Bibles would soon give visual expression to the world’s rst couple, newly minted, resh, pristine,unspoiled. ake, or instance, the magnicent Bible published by the Edin-burgh-born John Ogilby (600–676), sometime dancing master, theatricalimpresario, translator, bookseller, publisher, and cartographer. Te author oa series o olio travel books on various countries—Britain, Japan, and Aricaamong them—and a road atlas o England and Wales under the title Britan-

nia in 675, when he was in his seventies, Ogilby reissued in 660 the largeolio Bible published by John Field the previous year.1 Tis hugely expen-sive text, illustrated with what were called “chorographical sculps,” includeda plate engraved by Pierre Lombard depicting Adam and Eve in the Gardenat the moment o their all rom grace (g. ). Te lavish abundance o Eden’soriginal perection, not to mention its portrayal o both the harmonious andthe abulous, only served to anticipate the colossal cost o their banishment

rom its glories.Other illustrations reinorced this picture o the world’s rst occupantsenjoying the glorious surroundings o the Garden o Eden, with its lush veg-etation, peaceul river, and tree o lie. In 65, or example, Jan Breughel theelder (568–625) placed Adam and Eve in a tropical paradise surrounded bybountiul plant and animal lie. In his Historie o the Perect-Cursed-Blessed

Man o 628 Joseph Fletcher showed them strolling peaceully among cam-

els, elephants, and lions. In 629 John Parkinson, himsel an apothecary withan extensive physic garden, used an illustration o a superabundant paradisesuperintended by Adam and Eve as the title page o his work on plant cul-tivation in ower gardens, kitchen gardens, and orchards (g. 2). Such por-trayals, o course, were the latest expression o a long-standing convention in

Western religious art: Adam and Eve were to be ound in stained-glass win-dows, in large medieval maps known as the mappaemundi, and in tempera

wall paintings. Later they would eature in works o natural history such as Johann Jakob Scheuchzer’s Sacred Physics (73–33), in which the cycle ocreation was pictorially depicted using the best available scientic evidenceand culminating in “Homo ex Humo”—the creation o man, the “most no-ble o all creatures, the Microcosm or epitome o all this great World,” romthe dust o the earth in a world “clothed with trees and shrubs, and orna-mented with owers and ruits.” o this Zurich medical practitioner and


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Beginnings: Questioning the Mosaic Record

rm believer in the Bible, the glories o the creation existed in anticipation oits uture human inhabitants.

All o this was entirely in keeping with the image o the unspoiled Edenconjured up in the King James Bible. Afer all, numbered among those

charged with the task o translating the opening chapters o Genesis was John Layeld (d. 67), chaplain to the earl o Cumberland, explorer andchronicler o the English coming to the New World, who wrote o the or-ests o Dominica that “the trees doe continually maintaine themselves in agreene-good liking.” Evidently, the verdant growth o Eden was mirroredin the contemporary Caribbean world. Te projection o Eden as a tropical

paradise, whether in the East or the newly encountered West, not only de-livered visual symbols that ed the romantic imagination but also stimulatedenterprises o various sorts to determine its original site and to preserve its

pristine environments.

What made this association o Eden with contemporary landscapes, andthe quest or its geographical location, all the more plausible was the wide-spread belie that the earth was only created our thousand years, or there-abouts, beore the birth o Christ. Johannes Kepler, or example, calculated

F. . Plate rom John Ogilby’s 660 Bible illustrating the Garden o Eden at the pointo the all rom grace.


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that the date was 3992 .., while Martin Luther thought it exactly 4000.. Many other proposals were made, with estimates ranging between threeand six thousand years .. Most amously, o course, was the 4004 ..date o the Irish archbishop James Ussher, whose calculations were based

on extensive research on Hebrew genealogy, ancient Middle Eastern manu-scripts, Greek marble inscriptions, and records o astronomical occurrencessuch as eclipses. Te results o his painstaking and extensive research wereannounced in Latin in one paragraph o his two thousand–page Annalso World History, published in 650. Te world’s birthday was October 23,4004 .., beginning at sunset on the previous evening, to be precise. Tatdate has continued to decorate the margins o some printings o the Bible

right up to the present day.Regardless o how differently the Garden o Eden may have been con-

ceived rom ancient times through the medieval period to more recent days,and no matter the differences in computations o the creation date o theearth, the idea that every member o the human race is descended rom thebiblical Adam has been a standard doctrine in Islamic, Jewish, and Christianthought. In this respect, i in no other, the catechisms o the seventeenth-

century Westminster divines can be taken to speak or them all when theydeclare that “all mankind” descended rom Adam “by ordinary generation.”People’s sense o themselves, their understanding o their place in the di-

vinely ordered scheme o things, their very identity as human beings createdin the image o God, thus rested on a conception o human origins that as-sumed the literal truth o the biblical narrative and traced the varieties o thehuman race proximately to the three sons o Noah and ultimately to Adam

and Eve. What lent urther conrmation to these convictions were those pictorialrepresentations o the world in map orm known as the mappaemundi, whose

purpose was to educate the aithul in signicant events in Christian history,not to provide precise locations or routes to specic places.1 In particularthose tripartite maps known as “ T-O” maps delivered to their viewers a com-ortable cosmology whose cardinal principles dovetailed with traditionalbiblical understanding. ake as a very early example the celebrated map oIsidore, an encyclopedist and historian o the early Middle Ages who becamebishop o Seville around 600 (g. 3). Here the three known continents—Asia, Arica, and Europe—are clearly displayed on a symbolic surace orien-tated to the East and thereore to paradise. But tellingly, superimposed onthis iconic geographical plane are the names o Sem, Cham, and Jaeth—thethree sons o Noah—who stand as the athers o the human races. It was an


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altogether tidy arrangement integrat-ing a threeold continental schema

with a tripartite racial taxonomy; thegeographical shape o the world mir-

rored the Cross, and its anthropolog-ical history ollowed the contours othe Noachian amily. Semites, Ham-ites, and Japhethites inhabited boththe physical and intellectual worldso Christendom’s geographical andhistorical imagination.

For all its seeming clarity and aes-thetic tidiness, however, the assumed

connection between these interpretations o the Genesis account and hu-man origins has been disrupted routinely in the Christian West by a beguil-ingly simple notion that has perennially resuraced in new guises, namely,the suggestion that Adam was not the rst man and that human beings ex-isted beore him. Tis book is about that alternative story and its periodic

reincarnations.

Early Glimpses

Just where the idea rst emerged that human beings inhabited the world be-ore Adam is impossible to ascertain. While its presence is plainly discerniblein the wake o the voyages o reconnaissance and the revival o classical learn-

ing in Europe during the Renaissance, eeting glimpses o the pre-adamitesare detectable among earlier writers. Tese speculations in large measure sur-ace in esoteric philosophical and metaphysical contexts, and their inuenceon later ways o conceiving o Adam’s ancestors is at best marginal. Yet theirlingering, subliminal presence did help to keep the idea o alternative worldchronologies ickering on the margins o Western thought, albeit in intel-lectual and social spaces markedly different rom those in which the idealater ourished.

Te ourth-century Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, or example, onreverting rom Christianity to his earlier pagan ways, suggested that the possi-bility that the human race was descended rom a plurality o original couples

was more in keeping both with observed variation in human customs andcultures and with non-Christian traditions o learning.11 At the same time,Gregory o Nyssa, also in the ourth century, is reputed to have thought that

F. 3. Isidorian T-O mappaemundi.


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Adam’s physical body was derived rom animal orebears, an understandable view perhaps in the light o the outlook o his mentor Origen (ca. 85–ca.254). Condemned as a heretic by the Western Church, Origen had spokeno the inusion o preexistent souls into human bodies and reckoned that

Adam only took physical orm as a consequence o the all rom grace.1 Asor Gregory’s own thinking on anthropology, it emphasized the continuity

and discontinuity o human beings with the rest o the natural order. In his view, that distinctively human trait, the rational soul, was added to what hecalled the vegetative and sensitive (or animated ) souls—metaphysical ea-tures o plant and animal orders, respectively—to produce the rational hu-man species, which was a blend o all three soul types. Because he believed

everything existed in spermatic potential rom the initial divine impulse ocreation, Gregory could and did advance a developmentalist account o theorigin o lie orms by urging that the human body had been created throughthe inherent operations o the elements o the earth and thus emerged romanimal antecedents.1 Tis early evolutionary scheme presumed a natural his-tory o humanity, with Adam emerging rom pre-adamic orebears.

Whether any o these accounts actually went so ar as to imagine the ex-

istence o ully human beings prior to Adam is not certain. But they con-tributed to a lingering sense that the simple clarity o the Genesis creationnarrative might well need complicating in one way or the other. In someother cases—such as the medieval Jewish Midrash literature and in Cabalis-tic writings—hints o the same class o idea are discernible in commentariesthat speculated about the possible existence o other worlds, separate romthis one but existing prior to and independently o it. More specically con-

nected with human prehistory was the suggestion that appeared at the endo the rst millennium, in a work entitled Nabatean Agriculture—a collec-tion o texts purporting to portray the activities and belies o some groupso Arabic stock that developed a hydraulic society during the late Hellenistic

period. Whatever their source, these documents sought to deend Babylo-nian culture against Islam and proposed that Adam had come rom India,claiming him as the ather not o the human race but o an agricultural civi-lization.1 Tis schema was later recorded in Te Guide o the Perplexed, themajor philosophical work o the celebrated Jewish thinker and medical prac-titioner o the Middle Ages Moses Maimonides (35–204). In this treatise,

which gave a philosophical rendering o Jewish doctrine and belie, he ar-gued that the cultural practices o the Sabians (his term or the sect o Hel-lenistic astrolaters) were deviations rom monotheism and that their genesisaccounts were steeped in legend and mythology even while drawing inspira-


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tion rom Jewish sources. Maimonides’s apologetics are not my quarry here,o course; what signies is his reporting o Sabian speculations about Adamthat at once served to reute the conjecture yet simultaneously to circulateit: “Tey deem Adam to have been an individual born o male and emale

like the other human individuals, but they gloriy him and say that he wasa prophet, the envoy o the moon, who called people to worship the moon,and there are compilations o his on how to cultivate the soil.”1

No doubt other traces o pre-adamite inclinations could be excavatedrom additional ransacking o the classical and medieval records. But in the

present context any urther rehearsal o such hints would run the risk oconstructing a past—and thereby assembling a manuactured history—or

a suite o later ormulations whose development owed little or nothing tothose episodic allusions. What is more important is identiying challengesrom several other sources that were harder to dismiss and that progressivelyraised troubling doubts about the intellectual viability o the traditional an-nals o world history.

Challenges to Convention

Both rom within the boundaries o the Old World and, increasingly, romthe New World, misgivings about the conventional adamic narrative weretaking deeper root. Te sources o these disrupting interventions were di-

verse, but three in particular conspired to destabilize the comortable cos-mos o tradition. First, the increasing availability o what were called paganchronicles posed a considerable threat to received wisdom about human

origins and history. Second, the genealogy o what were known as the mon-strous races raised disturbing queries about how such creatures t into theadamic story o human descent. Tird, the encounter with the New Worldthrew into yet sharper relie the growing tensions between world geographyand the Mosaic record. For convenience we can examine these challengesunder the labels chronology, monstrosity, and geography.

ChronologyDespite the condence with which Ussher and other chronologists o worldhistory declared on the creation’s date o birth, their calculations did not tat all well with the time rames enshrined in the cultural memories o other

peoples.1 Teir histories, routinely dismissed as pagan chronicles, happilytook it or granted that the human story could be traced back many thou-


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sands o years. In particular, the Egyptians and Chinese were evidently com-ortable with a date line that was radically incommensurate with the timeavailable rom biblical estimates o the origin o the human race. From theMesopotamian world, or example, there were stories o Sumerian kings

ruling or periods as long as thirty thousand years.1 Such annals presentedChristendom’s chronologists with one o the greatest moral problems o thetime: how, i at all, to t these archives into the Judeo-Christian calendar.Already by the ourth century, in an effort to cope with these challenges,Augustine was discrediting the authenticity o such records. Indeed, thecontinuing dispute over chronology was sufficiently strong that he devoteda whole chapter o Te City o God to “the alseness o the history which al-

lots many thousand years to the world’s past” and another chapter to the“mendacious vanity” and “empty presumption” o the Egyptians in claim-ing “an antiquity o a hundred thousand years” or their accumulated wis-dom. Dismissing these accounts as mythical ables was the standard responseo both the rabbis and church athers. Augustine himsel rejected them as“ull o abulous and ctitious antiquities.” And yet reuting them served tokeep these alternative narratives lurking in the shadowy recesses o Western

minds. Considering himsel “sustained by divine authority in the history oour religion,” Augustine himsel harbored “no doubt that whatever is op- posed to it is most alse.”1

But it was only a matter o time beore the relegation o these annals tothe status o mere legend would prove unconvincing. Tus, the Huguenotscholar Joseph Justus Scaliger (540–609) came to the point o acknowledg-ing that the Egyptian dynasties predated both the biblical ood and the con-

ventional dating o the creation narrative. His encounter with the chronicleso Eusebius o Caesarea (ca. 260–ca. 339) not only instituted a proound shifin the traditional approach to chronology by bringing nonbiblical sources,

philological methods o interrogating classical texts, and astronomical computations within the arc o this historical craf but also began to shake thecomortable calendrical authority on which Renaissance cosmology rested.o be sure, Scaliger still held to a world chronology well within traditionalapproximations;1 but his belie that the temporal indications o the He-brew Bible should be interpreted in tandem with Egyptian, Persian, andBabylonian evidence was revolutionary. And Scaliger’s On the Emendationo Chronology o 583 was not the only troublesome intervention. Te writ-ings o Martino Martini (64–3), Athanasius Kircher (60–80), and IsaacVossius (68–89) uncovered Chinese and Egyptian evidence that brokethrough Western time rontiers and posed the prooundest o challenges to


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biblical chronology. Tus, Martini, or example, insisted that parts o Asia were well populated beore the Mosaic ood. Tere circulated, too, specu-lations that the pre-Islamic Iranian world could trace its history back to atime beore Adam, to an earlier, androgynous progenitor o humankind—

Kayumars.1 In turn these conjectures, compiled by Azar Kayvan in the latesixteenth century, which challenged the hegemony o both biblical and Ko-ranic orthodoxy about human origins, ound their way into the scholarshipo the distinguished orientalist Sir William Jones (746–94), who mobilizedit in his writings on the Persians to open up new possibilities or understand-ing racial and linguistic origins.

Te potential implications o this temporal breakthrough were vast. Apart

rom anything else, it raised grave questions about the status o Hebrew asthe original and sacred language. Indeed, at the tail end o the seventeenthcentury a certain John Webb advanced the novel thesis that afer the Flood,Noah and his ark landed not on top o Mount Ararat in Armenia but in-stead in China. As Umberto Eco remarks, Webb argued that “the Chineselanguage is the purest version o Adamic Hebrew, and only the Chinese, hav-ing lived or millennia without suffering oreign invasions, preserved it in its

original purity.”

Tese rather specialized, and in some cases obscure, works were supple-mented by writings on universal history more generally that laid beore theirreaders the details o alternative world chronologies rom other cultures,even i their authors affected to reject them. Montaigne (533–92), or ex-ample, probably drew on Ludovico Vives’s commentary on Augustine’s Cityo God to observe that Herodotus had learned rom Egyptian priests o their

multi-thousand-year history; that according to some the world was eternal;and that “Cicero and Diodorus said in their daies, that the Chaldeans kepta register o oure hundred thousand and odde yeares. Aristotle, Plinie, andothers, that Zoroaster lived sixe thousand yeares beore Plato. And Platosaith, that those o the citty o Sais, have memories in writing o eight thou-sand yeares, and that the towne o Athens, was built a thousand yeares beorethe citty o Sais.” o be sure, such rehearsing o ancient cosmologies withtheir estimated ages o the world could well be with the hope o reutingthem, as in the case o Pierre Charron and Tomas Lanquet. As Paolo Rossi

pointed out, two basic tactics were available. Either seek ways o reducingall human histories to sacred history by a range o calculation translationsbetween calendars, almanacs, and date-keeping devices; or deny the validityo nonsacred sources and outlaw them as perverse or mendacious. But what-ever the motivation, the tradition o chronological inquiry and its tinkering


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with antiquarian arithmetic ostered misgivings about the standard six thou-sand–year–old creation at the heart o traditional Judeo-Christian theology.No doubt that in part accounts or the act, as Colin Kidd has remarked, thatthe “study o universal chronology became one o the oremost disciplines

o the early modern period. It tackled questions o undamental importanceto the identity o Christendom, and it attracted some o Europe’s oremostminds.”

Monstrosity

I chronology had the capacity to threaten the oundations on which tradi-

tional adamic heredity rested, monstrosity was every bit as troublesome tothose who took the time to ponder the matter. Indeed, it was not until themid-sixteenth century, most conspicuously in Vesalius’s 543 treatise on theabric o the human body, that anatomical diversities began to be recognizednot as monstrous but as variations within the sphere o the natural. Mean-

while, portrayals o what were known as the “monstrous races”—humanlikecreatures inhabiting the antipodean ringes o some versions o the medieval

mappaemundi and cataloged in a range o encyclopedic chronicles—stimu-lated a whole sequence o questions that rotated around their genesis and ge-nealogy (g. 4). Te reproduction o the anthropological imagination o therst-century Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder, in such medieval textsas Marvels o the East and Mandeville’s ravels, served to keep these legend-ary peoples with all their titillating grotesquerie in the Western conscious-ness. Te list o Pliny’s wondrous races—the Plinian races, as they came to

be known—was considerable. Among them were Amyctyrae (beings with protruding upper or lower lip), Anthropophagi (cannibals who drank romskulls), Artibatirae (those walking on all ours), Blemmyae (creatures withaces on their chests), Cyclopes (one-eyed beings), Cynocephali (dog-headedtribes), Martikhora (human-headed, our-legged peoples), Sciritae (noseless,at-aced races), Ethiopians, and Pygmies.

Decorating wonder books devoted to the presentation o the marvelousand the extraordinary, which, according to Mary Campbell, incorporated“the most extreme and exquisite projections o European cultural antasy,”these abulous beings—traceable back at least to Strabo, Pliny, and Hero-dotus—proved to be “theological nightmares or Christian writers.”1 In themedieval mind monsters resided in both metaphysical and physical space.Metaphysically, monstrosity occupied its own niche in a complicated taxon-omy o the wondrous, which encompassed the entire eld o emotions, rom


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admiration and awe to horror and revulsion. Physically, they resided on thesouthern borders o the mappaemundi, sometimes occupying the extremityo Arica, sometimes dwelling in an obscure antipodean ourth continent be-

yond Arica’s southern tip. Such locations served to reinorce the idea thatboth nature and culture were at their most hideous at the margins and, con-

versely, that they were at their most reasonable in the temperate north. Te

marvelous, the monstrous, and the marginal went together. “Te medieval writers on topographical wonders,” Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park ob-serve, “depicted the margins o the world as a privileged place o novelty,

variety, and exuberant natural transgression.” Peter Mason concurs, add-ing that increasing “geographical remoteness” was “coupled to remoteness interms o dietary practices, sexual customs and cultural aculties.” But wher-ever the monstrous races were placed, they raised troubling questions. AsDavid Woodward put it: “Te monstrous races posed a number o problemsor the athers o the church. I they existed—and there was general agree-ment that they did—were the human? And i they were human, were theydescended rom Adam and Noah, possessing souls that could be saved?”

David Jeffrey agrees, observing that the “question which continually dogsmedieval . . . students o the subject is whether or not such creatures actu-ally participate in the human condition.” Geographical imagination thus

F. 4. “Monstrous races,” in Sebastian Münster, Cosmographiae Universalis o 544.


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generated proound dilemmas particularly o a theological nature. Campbellrhetorically captures some o the most pressing anxieties: “How . . . couldthere be men beneath the burning zone, across which the inhabitants o theorbis terrarum could not pass to proselytize? Teological rigor necessitated

the construction o a geography . . . conorming at whatever cost to the lit-eral and implicit cosmography o Scripture.” By various dogmatic devicesglobal human geography was made to t with doctrinal prescription.

Coping strategies, o course, were not in short supply, not least since a rafo harmonizing tactics had long been deployed to make sense o what wereknown as monstrous births. Afer all, the term monstrum was equally ap-

plicable to anomalous newborn individuals and to unusual races. Te jur-

isprudential and spiritual status o portentous births had long been the subject o canonical concern because the question o their baptism—a burning practical issue or parish priests—routinely raised its head. Sometimes theirhumanity was taken or granted and the rites o the church administered on

what might be called the “better-sae-than-sorry” principle. Sometimes, as was the practice under Roman law, they were put to death. Sometimes mon- stra were interpreted as ominous omens presaging civil disruption or cos-

mic catastrophe. In many such cases standard human physical eatures wereconsidered to be a precondition o legal status and thus o essential humannature. Whatever the official judgment, analogies with individuals providedstrategies or thinking about human racial difference. And in the case o themonstrous races a whole suite o tactics was available, not least to account ortheir origin and survival.

Explanations or their presence in the world abounded. Animated in

turn by horror, revulsion, antipathy, and anxiety, causes were sought in theidea o degeneration. During the medieval period the Plinian races were reg-ularly thought o as having declined—no doubt on account o sin—rom astate o prelapsarian perection. In particular their deterioration was ofen at-tributed to a divine curse pronounced on the guilty crimes o their orebears,Cain (who murdered his brother, Abel) or Noah’s son Ham (who mockedhis ather’s undignied nakedness). In such schemas there was little roomor ideas o improvement. Monstrosity could emphatically not be consid-ered an early stage in social evolution; racial differences were a consequenceo decline, not progress. Degenerationist speculations were in plentiul sup-

ply. Some supposed that the monstrous races had been exiled by God be-cause o their danger to humanity; some thought that they were childreno Adam who corrupted their own offspring by eating orbidden plants orherbs; others conjectured that they had emerged as an accursed consequence


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o the demonic act o murder carried out by Cain, whose violent nature wasmatched by physical deormity and anatomical degradation; still others, par-ticularly in the rabbinic tradition, declared they were satanic descendants oEve, who was inected by the serpent’s impurity. O course, it was not neces-

sary to seek explanations as ar back in history as the early days o creation.Te narrative o Noah and the curse on his son Ham was another avorite

port o call or those looking or ways o making sense o monstrosity. Hav-ing been condemned to servitude his name was, as in some T-O maps, as-signed to Arica and projected as the oreather o black races. In turn hisown son Nimrod was portrayed as red-eyed, black-skinned, and misshapen.Either way, whether drawing on the baneul condition o Cain or o Ham,

these narratives became tropes or coming to terms with any group viewed with suspicion or distaste or hostility. Sometimes such peoples were consid-ered degraded human beings. Sometimes their humanity was simply denied.Te Blemmyae, Cynocephali, and Pygmies were ofen believed to lack ratio-nal souls and thereore occupied a shadowy existence in which they coulddisplay human attributes without actually being human.

And yet these disgured races were not always relegated to outer dark-

ness. Some more positive assessments did surace rom time to time. In thethirteenth-century Ebstor Map, in which the gure o the world is encompassed by the head, hands, and eet o Christ, the monstrous races are gath-ered within the embrace o his lef hand (g. 5). Tis was in keeping with atradition that considered human difference neither accidental nor a ailurenor a consequence o transgression but, rather, an expression o a positivedivine plan, a plan in which seeming monstrosities acquired aesthetic value

inasmuch as they maniested a kind o anthropological plenitude that cel-ebrated the creator’s power.For all that, the existence o such more or less exoticized species routinely

raised disturbing questions about the nature and status o Adam’s descen-dants. Augustine was clear on the matter when he elaborated on the theolog-ical centrality o Adamic ancestry. “Whoever is born anywhere as a humanbeing,” he insisted, “that is, as a rational moral creature, however strange hemay appear to our senses in bodily orm or colour or motion or utterance,or in any other aculty, part or quality o his nature whatsoever, let no truebeliever have any doubt that such an individual is descended rom the oneman who was rst created.” For Augustine, plainly, descent rom Adam con-stituted a denition o humanness, and this meant acknowledging the pos-sibility that certain Plinian races were beyond the bounds o the human race

precisely on account o a non-adamic lineage: “Either the written accounts


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F. 5. Detailrom the EbstorMap showingChrist’s handencompassing the“monstrous races.”


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o certain races are completely unounded or, i such races do exist, they arenot human; or, i they are human, they are descended rom Adam.” Becausesuch creatures were not encountered in scripture, anyone who had seen thesehuman races prominently depicted on mappaemundi or who had read Pliny

on the subject was bound to wonder, as Friedman writes, “i they had de-scended rom Adam, and i so, how they survived the Flood and what shouldbe the attitude o the Christian towards them.”1

Besides these immediately disconcerting queries, the monstrous races hadanother role to play. Tey provided a suite o anthropological templates into

which peoples hitherto unknown to Europeans could readily be tted. Andnowhere was this inclination more marked than in Europe’s geographical en-

counter with an entire new continent—America. Ideas o racial monstros-ity delivered an imagined geography o the Americas in which ideas o anearthly paradise, or which travelers had long been searching, were conated

with the prodigious exotics laid out in works o wondrous travel. In a pro-oundly important sense the eatures o the New World were a projection othe hopes and ears o the Old World. America, in this sense, was imaginedbeore it was discovered. And the result, as Mary Campbell tellingly puts it,

was the production o “a Caribbean that belongs as much to the Other Worldo medieval geographic antasy as it does to the map Columbus helped real-ize.” It is to the signicance o that moment o geographical rendezvous,

with all its destabilizing connotations, that we now turn.

Geography

Europe’s early understanding o America was as much a projection o thegeographical imaginations o the Old World as a topographic descriptiono the New. America, in many ways, was the invention o Europe. Alreadyarmed with cultural and physiological taxonomies into which racial “others”and their traditions had long been inserted, it is hardly surprising that Euro-

pean templates o paganism and monstrosity were transerred across the At-lantic. Indeed, it has even been suggested that depicting native Americans asmonstrous predated Columbus’s arrival in 492, perhaps deriving rom ear-lier Viking excursions or rom South American Indian artwork itsel.

Yet whatever the source, and however much the shock o discovery over-spilled any conventional categories that were brought to bear on it, the con-cept o the marvelous (which sometimes, but not always, incorporated themonstrous) provided a lens through which New World peoples could beinspected, one way or another. Columbus, or example, reportedly had in


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his possession an annotated copy o Pliny’s Natural History and explicitlyinormed Luis de Santangel that he had encountered “no human monstrosi-ties, as many had expected,” in the islands, though he did consider that there

were in existence cannibals—Anthropophagi—as well as men with tails.

In his account o Te Discovery o the Large, Rich and Beautiul Empire oGuiana (596) Sir Walter Raleigh recorded that he had received reports o “anation o people, whose heades appeare not aboue their shoulders” and with“mouths in the middle o their breasts.” Te Blemmyae, as such creatures

were known, were illustrated or Raleigh’s account by Hondius and simplytook their place alongside other representations o New World peoples.Te sel-same engraving decorated the work o the early-eighteenth-century

French Jesuit missionary Joseph-François Latau, which compared the cus-toms o “American savages” with the peoples o antiquity (g. 6).

On various maps and atlases, too, similar depictions suraced. Amongthe marginalia o Johann Huttich and Simon Grynaeus’s world map o 537(which originally appeared in a volume introduced by Sebastian Münsterentitled Novus Orbis) were portrayals o native Americans engaged in thebutchering o human prey, with a second victim arriving slung over a horse.

In his amous double-cordiorm (heart-shaped) world projection o 538Gerard Mercator had “Canibales antropophagi” inscribed across Brazil.And the rontispiece o Abraham Ortelius’s Teatrum Orbis errarum o570 used the image o a savage armed with club in one hand and a severedhead in the other to symbolize America. In the pictorial representations osixteenth-century cosmographers such as André Tevet, legendary peoples(like the Amazons) simply occupied the same spaces as newly encountered

races, sometimes on the presumption that the American present could revealmuch about the European past. As Frank Lestringant puts it: “the Americanethnographic treatise could appear . . . to be a manual o European archaeol-ogy.” Tus, in 590 Teodore de Bry presented an illustration o a emale

warrior o the ancient Picts in the rst o his multi-volume work, America,in order to “demonstrate that the inhabitants o Britain had been no less or-est dwellers than these Virginians.” Similarly, Jean Bodin thought o primi-tive Europeans as just that, primitive, and considered that the Bible was onlyconcerned with “the origins o that people whom God alone chose . . . noto the others.” In all these cases mapping was an inherently moral project, arhetorical device to mark out the terrain between savagery and civilization,between otherness and amiliarity.

O course, there were signicant differences between the monstrous racesrom the Old World’s margins and those that suraced in the imagined spaces


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o the New World, and they have been scrutinized by scholars ofen with aneye to psychoanalytic interpretations. Such analyses, however, are not myconcern here. My rehearsal o these modes o depiction is to suggest, rather,

why, given the molds into which native American peoples were squeezed, itis not surprising that at least or a time tactics comparable to those used orexplaining alternative chronology and medieval monstrosity were deployedto t America into the European psyche. Resorting to the language o “pa-ganism” had made it possible to dismiss the claims emanating rom ancientchronologies and to devise strategies or coping with human monstrosity.And this lexicon provided some with grounds or hope that the apologeticmaneuvers that had served the Church athers in the late Hellenistic world

would work just as well or the contemporary heathen that the voyages ogeographical reconnaissance were currently exposing. Te label “pagan,”in other words, could tie together amiliar eatures o Old World histori-

F. 6. Blemmyae in America, depicted in Joseph-François Latau, Moeurs des sauvages amériquains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps.


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cal and anthropological conjecture with the exotic speculative geographieso the New.1 As Anthony Grafon writes o attempts to make sense o thecustoms and practices o the peoples encountered by traveling Europeans:“I Indians cherished myths o a great ood or worshipped a single God, or

example, they did so or a reason as evident as it was orthodox: the devil, thatbrilliant dissimulator, had brought them within his spell by teaching them a

parodic Black Sacred History, one modelled on the real thing but inverted,like the magicians’ Black Mass.” But such tactics seemed increasingly shal-low, and questions multiplied, as there was a dawning realization that thenew America was not joined to Asia. Were the inhabitants o America thedescendants o Adam and Noah at all? I so, how did they nd their way to

the other side o the world? Did they experience a separate all rom grace? Were they encompassed within the scheme o redemption? How did theyt into the racial ormula o descent rom Shem, Ham, and Japheth? WhenPope Julius II decreed in 52 that the Indians were descended rom Adam,it might have seemed to settle the impassioned rhetorical questions posed bythe Dominican missionary in Hispaniola Antonio de Montesinos the previ-ous year: “Are these Indians not men? Do they not have rational souls?”

Nothing could be urther rom the truth.In the hal-century or so afer Columbus’s venture, the debate on the na-ture and status o the American peoples was engaged and nowhere so con-spicuously as in the papal junta at Valladolid, Spain, in 550, when the doyeno Spanish Aristotelian scholarship, the humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda,and the ormer Dominican vicar o Guatemala and now bishop o Chiapa,Bartolomé de Las Casas, vigorously disputed the subject o how the Ameri-

can Indians should be treated by Europeans. Te papal legate had been dis- patched rom Rome to Spain to determine once and or all whether the In-dians shared the imago Dei or were a distinctly other species, whether they

were undamentally bestial and tted only or slavery or sufficiently advancedthat they should not be considered barbarians. Te implications were poten-tially ar-reaching, or on its adjudication hung the answer to the question

whether waging war on the Indians as a means o civilizing and Christian-izing them was justied. So symbolic has this episode become, as a criticalmoment in the whole history o human rights and the moral economy oimperialism, that it was dramatized or French television in 992 and stagedto critical acclaim in New York’s Public Teater in 2005 under the title TeControversy o Valladolid. Sepúlveda’s proposal was that Aristotle’s notion onatural slaves provided the best strategy or dealing with the Indians. Be-cause he considered that they were beref o rationality, practiced human sac-


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rice and other barbarous customs, and engaged in degraded idol worship,Sepúlveda elt entirely justied in resorting to the Aristotelian ormula thatsuch peoples were destined by nature to be the slaves o superior masters—a

proposal that had already been advocated in 50 by the Scottish proessor

in Paris John Major. It was both lawul and expedient to bring them orciblyunder Spanish rule as a prelude to preaching to them. Las Casas ound this

whole line o argument utterly obnoxious, and he set about redeeming themrom Sepúlveda’s bestializing diagnosis (g. 7). His tactic, articulated in sev-eral publications throughout his lie, was to dwell on their accomplishments,to insist on their demonstrated rationality, and to compare them and theirlegal institutions avorably with both ancient and modern “civilizations.”

He thus insisted that the Creator “has not so despised these peoples o theNew World that he willed them to lack reason and made them like brute ani-mals, so that they should be called barbarians, savage, wild men, and brutesas they [i.e., the Sepúlvedistas] think or imagine.” So, while Sepúlveda con-sidered that Indian cities resembled beehives—the products o mere naturalinstinct—and their states exhibited extreme simplicity, Las Casas concludedthat native Americans “in act ullled every one o Aristotle’s requirements

or the good lie.”

At stake in the Valladolid dispute was the moral and judicial status oNew World peoples, whether they were truly human, hal-human and hal-animal, or creatures disguised as humans; whether they were descendedrom Adam or were the offspring o the devil. Although the tribunal ailedto come to any ormal verdict, the hearing nonetheless highlighted severalthings: the lingering inuence o Aristotle, whose benediction was sought by

interlocutors on both sides o the argument; the political, legal, and moralsignicance o questions about human origins; and the stresses and strains to which the conventional adamic narrative was progressively subjected.

In the wake o Columbus’s transatlantic adventure, genetic theories o na-tive American origins—more or less implausible—abounded. o be sure, theoverriding goal was to ensure that the existence o America did not subvertthe authority o the Judeo-Christian scriptures. Yet within that “commonscaffolding o assumptions,” as Grafon terms it, scholars ound it possibleto “erect wildly different structures.” Some speculated that Noah’s mar-itime skills were sufficient to allow or the possibility that America couldhave been reached by sea in ancient times; some were convinced that the na-tive peoples o America were the ten lost tribes o Israel. Others, notably theSpanish Jesuit José de Acosta in the late sixteenth century, desperately intenton preserving the integrity o scripture, urged that it was possible to cross


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F. 7. Bartolomé de Las Casas.


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into the New World rom the northern wastes o Asia. Still others, in partic-ular Hugo Grotius in 643, held to the view that the Vikings had colonizedAmerica and called upon philological evidence to support his theory, a viewthat was vigorously challenged by various writers, including Georg Horn.

Te combined effects o chronology, monstrosity, and global human ge-ography spawned a renzy o conjecture, including the heterodox possibilitythat the earth might be partly inhabited by non-adamic humans, peoples,and cultures who did not trace their ancestry to the Edenic couple o thePentateuchal record. Tus, or all the heroic efforts to encompass the realityo America within the compass o biblical traditionalism, the New World’santhropological and geographical threats to conventional history were suffi-

ciently powerul to encourage some to modiy the standard chronicles o cre-ation and, in particular, to speculate that world history predated the adamicnarrative. Later, in the mid-seventeenth century, Matthew Hale would con-cede that the central issue around which debates about human origins ro-tated was the American Indian. Te very act o their existence, he noted,“hath occasioned some difficulty and dispute touching the raduction o allMankind rom the two common Parents supposed o all Mankind, namely

Adam and Eve.”

Nonetheless those irting with such speculations weresoon accused o keeping schools o atheism, peddling skepticism, and har-boring heretics. Te oriental scholar Jacob Palaeologus, a resident o Prague,

was reportedly executed in 585, or example, or holding to the heresy thatbecause all people were not descended rom Adam and Eve, the inheritanceo original sin was not universal.

Such was the case with Sir Walter Raleigh (554–68) and Tomas Har-

riot (560–62). Raleigh’s theorizing in act was always conducted withinthe connes o scriptural authority, but his computational strategy or cop-ing with evidence o chronologies o greater antiquity than the biblical re-cord was to seek or the greatest amount o time that the Hebrew text wouldallow. Indeed, in Historie o the World, o 64, Raleigh presented as therontispiece a globe displaying Adam and Eve in paradise and later tabulatedthe Noachian root o every conceivable nation and race. Yet he still admiredEgyptian sources and rom 592 onward was ofen charged with irreligion.As or Harriot, it was his experience o exploration in Virginia that, together

with his work on biblical chronology, raised questions about the origin othe Indians. Perhaps it was or these reasons that both Raleigh and Harriot,and indeed Christopher Marlowe, were branded with holding to the heresythat supposed humans existed beore the biblical Adam and belonging to acircle o atheists that impiously and impudently persisted in affirming that


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American Indian archaeology gave evidence o artiacts that predated Adamby thousands o years.1 Indeed, or chronologists o world history, not leastthose amassing data rom worldwide geographical exploration, the greatestmoral problem according to the Church o England clergyman and ellow o

Christ Church Oxord John Dove (56–68) was that such annals seemedto conrm the speculations o those indels who claimed the existence o“genealogies more ancient than Adam.”

o be sure, direct evidence o Raleigh’s and Harriot’s alleged acceptance othe idea that human beings existed beore Adam is lacking, but any inklingsin that direction would have been reinorced by the writings o Renaissancescholars such as Paracelsus (493–54) and Giordano Bruno (548–600).

Paracelsus, or example, propelled by the sheer presence o newly discoveredraces, had inclinations toward polygenism, even though he struggled to keephis thoughts within the connes o the biblical account o creation. It was,he conessed, difficult to believe that the inhabitants o the “hidden islands”

were descended rom Adam, and while he was convinced that they had nosouls, and thereore were not ully human, he suggested that “these peopleare rom a different Adam.” As he urther explained: “the children o Adam

did not inhabit the whole world. Tat is why some hidden countries havenot been populated by Adam’s children, but through another creature, cre-ated like men outside o Adam’s creation. For God did not intend to leavethem empty, but had populated the miraculously hidden countries withother men.” In sum: “It cannot be believed that such newly ound peoplein the islands are o Adam’s blood.” As or Bruno, he was convinced that theEthiopians, the American Indians, Pygmies, and various species o giants and

troglodytes “cannot be traced to the same descent, nor are they sprung romthe generative orce o a single progenitor.” Rather, their origins could betracked to one o the three sources that constituted his tripartite cosmologi-cal scheme:

Te regions o the heavens are three; three o air; the waterIs divided into three; the earth is divided into three parts.And the three races had three Patriarchs,

When mother Earth produced animals, rstEnoch, Leviathan, and the third o which is Adam;According to the belie o most o the Jews,From whom alone was descended the sacred race.

In Bruno’s case such inclinations were all o a piece with his belie in the plurality o worlds, that is, the existence o other planets with inhabitants ev-


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idently not traceable to Adam. In his 584 treatise De l’Innito, Universo e Mondi (“On the Innite Universe and Worlds”) he argued that the universe was innite and that numerous other worlds existed in which non-adamichumans practiced their own religions. And indeed this heresy was among the

key charges brought against him, which resulted in his being burned at thestake in 600. Others nevertheless shared the same viewpoint. Te Domin-ican philosopher ommaso Campanella, or example, observed in his 622

Deence o Galileo, “I the inhabitants which may be in other stars are men,they did not originate rom Adam and are not inected by his sin.” Te par-allel here advertised between distant space and distant time was one that wasto recur requently in subsequent discussions about Adam’s ancestors.

In one way or another, then, the advance o global geographical knowl-edge rendered troublesome the conventional chronicles on which Christen-dom had long based its identity. Te sheer presence o America, with its own

peoples and cultures, the existence o physical artiacts such as the AztecCalendar Stone, and the uncovering o chronological traditions with timescales hugely incompatible with biblical genealogy, all prompted a numbero thinkers to irt with the suspicion that all races might not be descended

rom the one biblical Adam. Such encounters cast doubt on Old World as-sumptions and began to subvert the authority hitherto resident in those an-cient texts that had long been the blueprint or Europe’s moral architecture.

5And yet, or all these hints at alternative European readings o human ori-gins, they remain largely just that: mere hints, eeting glimpses, prevenienttraces o a monumental heresy still to nd ull voice. Te idea that Adam

might not be the progenitor o the entire human race and that there mightbe non-adamic peoples in existence ound expression in print by only ahandul o writers. Because o the dangers associated with such speculations,open advocacy was exceptional. O course, the snippets that I have identi-ed in this chapter could doubtlessly be supplemented by others. WilliamPoole, culling the archival legacy o the early seventeenth century in Eng-land, or instance, has succeeded in gathering together a number o scatteredcomments indicating doubts about the literal truth o the Mosaic record’s

presentation o the adamic universe. He calls to our attention, or example,the cases o Laurence Clarkson and Gerard Winstanley, members o radi-cal Protestant sects, who gave voice to such views around 650, though theyremained substantially undeveloped. In instances such as these, motivationsprang in large part rom the biblical text itsel, which gave indications thatAdam’s amily dwelled in a world inhabited by other people. When Cain was


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banished rom Eden, it was noted, he built a city in the land o Nod—an en-terprise that presumed the existence o other human beings.

Such speculations were certainly rare given their heterodoxy. And yet thecracks that were appearing in the authority hitherto resident in ancient ca-

nonical texts were now opening. Recently disclosed chronologies, the real-ization o greater and greater human diversity, and new geographical realitiesall conspired to disrupt the traditional adamic genealogy. Te bursting onthe scene o a new account o the human story in the mid-seventeenth cen-tury, unchained rom the restrictions seemingly imposed by descent romAdam, now commands our attention.


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2 5 Heresy

Isaac La Peyrère and the

Pre-Adamite Scandal

I

656 thirty armed men reportedly burst into the Brus-sels lodgings o an emissary o the prince o Condé and hauled him off

to prison. Four months and multiple interrogations later, the prisoneragreed to be escorted to Rome in order to recant o his heresies and bereceived into the Catholic Church. On January 7 the ollowing year IsaacLa Peyrère—a Calvinist o Portuguese Jewish origins rom Bordeaux—ar-rived at the Vatican to meet Pope Alexander VII, who reportedly welcomed“this man who is beore Adam” and roared with laughter while they readtogether La Peyrère’s monumentally heretical treatise, Prae-Adamitae ( Men

beore Adam).1

It was on Christmas Day just over a year earlier, 655, that thebook had been denounced by the bishop o Namur, just a month afer itscondemnation by the president and council o Holland and Zeeland, andsince then its author had received nothing but critical censure. Within a yearo the book’s publication more than a dozen reutations had appeared. Ev-eryone, it seems, hated it.

Born in Bordeaux in 596, or thereabouts, into a wealthy and inuen-tial Protestant amily, La Peyrère had already been embroiled in ecclesias-tical controversy. At the age o thirty, he was accused o atheism by one othe local synods o the French Reormed Church, though the charges weredropped. Ever since then La Peyrère, a qualied lawyer, had been in the ser-

vice o the Condé amily, enjoying its patronage as their ortunes permitted,and had also been part o a French diplomatic mission to various European


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Heresy: Isaac La Peyrère and the Pre-Adamite Scandal

countries. Even though La Peyrère had been tinkering with his pre-adamiteheresy or feen years or more, so long in act that the circulated version othe manuscript had called orth an extended critique rom Hugo Grotiusin 643, he had already established himsel as an expert on Greenland (and

later Iceland) beore Prae-Adamitae made its ormal appearance. Some re-ections on these inquiries into the geography o the northern regions andtheir signicance or La Peyrère’s enduring skepticism is a suitable point odeparture, not least on account o their connection with the whole issue othe peopling o the Americas.

Northern Geography and the Path to Skepticism

On June 8, 646, La Peyrère put the nishing touches to a letter to Fran-çois La Mothe le Vayer, a skeptical French antirationalist and, like La Peyrèrehimsel, a member o a circle o intellectuals enjoying the patronage o the

prince o Condé. Tis was the second such letter La Peyrère had sent to thesame individual. Te rst one, an account o Iceland, had been completed in644, but its contents were not published until 663. Te present treatise, on

Greenland, appeared in Paris in 647.

aken together, these two volumesestablished their author’s reputation as a leading authority on the northernregions until well into the nineteenth century.

Tis account o Greenland, while providing a regional description o thecountry’s eatures, equally approached a number o the larger issues thatabsorbed La Peyrère’s consciousness. By examining them, we can catch aglimpse o the early complicity o geographical inquiry in the radical proj-

ect in which he was embroiled and thus in what Richard Popkin has called“the high road to Pyrrhonism”—the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century revival, courtesy o Pierre Bayle, o the ancient skeptical philosophy o Pyrrhoo Elis. Te map o Greenland that accompanied La Peyrère’s text is a useul

place to begin because it gave geographical voice to some crucial ingredi-ents in the grand proanity that La Peyrère was sculpting over the years (g.8). Having sought the advice o Gabriel Naudé, medical practitioner, librar-ian, and scholar, and the moderately skeptical anti-Aristotelian philosopherPierre Gassendi, in preparing his text, he called upon the expertise o themathematician Gilles Roberval and Nicolas Sanson d’Abbeville, geographerto the king o France, or cartographic assistance. Te map revealed La Pey-rère’s uncertainties about the eastern and western reaches o the subconti-nent and depicted the western coastline merging with modern-day Baffin


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Island; Cap Farvel was shown crucially separated by a stretch o ocean romNewoundland. Tereby he expressed his disagreement with those “whothink that Greenland is part o the American continent” and sided with thenarrative o “a Danish captain named John Munck, who tried this passage

to the East by the north-west o the Gul o Davis, and according to what hesays there is great probability that this land is entirely separated rom Amer-ica.” Jens Munck had led an expedition o about thirty men in 69 in twoships into Hudson Bay. But the mission had to be aborted because, by Juneo the ollowing year, all but three o the crew had died o scurvy, though thesurviving remnant managed to make it back to Denmark.

La Peyrère’s cartographic ventures, which showed how Greenland was

not geographically joined to the North American continent, were integralto his account o the settlement o the region and disclose something o theconnections between geographical investigation and Enlightenment skep-ticism. Afer all, as Paul Hazard, reecting on the meaning o travel at thetime, once quipped: geographical exploration meant “comparing mannersand customs, rules o lie, philosophies, religions; arriving at some notiono the relative; discussing; doubting. Among those who wandered up anddown the earth in order to bring the tidings o the great unknown, there wasmore than one ree thinker.” Armchair geographers o La Peyrère’s stripe

were no less subversive. In act, as he disclosed in correspondence during themid-640s with Ole Worm,1 riend, Danish antiquarian scholar, and gifed

physician and polymath at the University o Copenhagen, whom he had metduring his time in Scandinavia, La Peyrère’s whole project was rooted in his

passion to nd a persuasive account o the origins o native American peo-

F. 8. Map o Greenland rom Isaac La Peyrère’s Relation du Groenland.


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ples. And Worm’s archaeological data provided La Peyrère with added schol-arly authority.11

In developing his argument, La Peyrère gathered together inormationrom both ancient and contemporary sources. wo major works in particu-

lar provided him with historical data, one o old Icelandic origins, the othermodern Danish. From a text described as the “Icelandic Chronicle” (possiblyrom the early-thirteenth-century survey o an unknown writer named Mor-kinskinna), La Peyrère learned o the Skreglinguer people who inhabited the

western ank o Greenland, and he reported that “Doctor Vormius [the Ole Worm just mentioned], the most learned o all the doctors in northern re-searches . . . says they were the original savages o Greenland, to whom this

name was probably given by the Norwegians.” Tis was a critical interven-tion: it meant that the native peoples o Greenland were not descended romnorthern Europeans. What, then, was their origin? wo possibilities sug-gested themselves. Either they were o American derivation, or they were ab-original to Greenland itsel. La Peyrère believed “there was no need o bring-ing Americans here at all,” but, either way, they predated the advent o theNorwegians, and La Peyrère urther suggested that “by the same reasons that

Vestrebug had its original inhabitants when the Norwegians arrived there,Ostrebug had them also, and that as the eastern part was nearer the ArcticSea, was not so ertile, and consequently less inhabited than the west, theNorwegians, who met with less resistance on that side than on the other, took

possession more easily o Ostrebug than o Vestrebug.” Tis scenario oundcorroboration in the Danish Chronicle (probably the 54 work o ChristiernPedersen, who republished Saxo Grammaticus’s twelfh-century history o

the Danish kings), which, La Peyrère reported, conrmed that Greenland “isinhabited by a variety o races, and that these races are governed by differentlords, o whom the Norwegians never knew anything.”1

In passing, it is worth pausing to note something o the anthropologi-cal particulars that La Peyrère conveyed in his regional picture. Indeed, the“richness o detail” that Peter Burke has discerned in this work has suggestedto him that “La Peyrère had become interested in this people or their ownsake” and not just as a cog in the wheels o his pre-adamite device.1 Drawingagain on the Danish Chronicle, he depicted Greenland’s indigenous peoplesas “savages,” “deceitul and erocious,” and incapable o being “tamed, eitherby present or kindness.” Additionally: “Tey are at but active, and theirskins are o an olive colour; it is believed that there are black among themlike Ethiopians . . . Te shirts o the men and the chemises o the women aremade o the intestines o sh, sewn with very ne sinews. Teir clothes are


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large, and they bind them with straps o prepared skin. Tey are very dirtyand lthy.”1

Yet or all that, ethnographic portraiture remained secondary to the over-riding concern that animated La Peyrère’s overall mission: “the question,” as

Popkin puts it, “o whether the Bible is adequate as an account o how the world developed was challenged both geographically and anthropologicallyby what was then known about the Americas and about the ar north . . . IEskimos were ound in Greenland by the Viking explorers, where did theycome rom?”1

Tus, in the concluding pages o his Greenland excursus, La Peyrère tookthe opportunity o tackling the views o the recently deceased Dutch jurist

and Swedish ambassador Hugo Grotius1

—as recorded in a treatise by thehistorian and geographer George Horn, who was himsel deeply critical oGrotius’s Viking thesis and worked within the temporal economy o the bib-lical world picture.1 Grotius, as we have noted, had managed to get his handson a manuscript version o La Peyrère’s as yet unpublished work on the pre-adamites and issued a scathing reutation back in 643. Here he claimed thatthe native peoples o America were o Norwegian descent, and La Peyrère

astened on this assertion to deliver a biting, i belated, retaliation. His rhe-torical riposte warrants quoting at length:

I discover at the same time the errors o the person who has written disserta-tions upon the origin o the people o America, whom he makes out to have

come rom Greenland, and makes the rst inhabitants o Greenland to havecome rom Norway. . . . You will judge, sir, by the continuance and the rea-

soning o my history, that this author errs in every way. First, inasmuch as theNorwegians were not the rst inhabitants o Greenland, as it appears rom

his narrations and the demonstrations I have given you o them; and inas-much as that M. Vormius, who is very learned in the antiquities o the north,so ar rom connecting the origin o the people o America with the people o

Greenland, thinks that the Skreglingres, the original inhabitants o Vestrebugin Greenland, came rom America. Secondly, he is mistaken, inasmuch as

there is little or no probability that Greenland was part o the continento America, and that the passage rom the one to the other was not so well

known nor so possible as is imagined. Tirdly, he is mistaken in that whichI have shown you, that there is no affinity o language or manners between

Greenland and Norway; and i, as he says, the Norwegians communicatedtheir language and manners to the Americans, they must have gone elsewhere

than by Greenland to get to America. I should here have a good opportunity


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o showing up other errors o this dissertation, o making the author eat his

own words, and o sending him to the land o visions and dreams; but as henow sleeps his last sleep, we will let him rest in quietness.1

La Peyrère’s Relation du Groenland, then, was a sustained effort to deploy physical, demographic, linguistic, and cultural evidence, to sustain his ownsuspicions about the adequacy o the traditional story o the developmentand migration o the human races in avor o one allowing or the possibil-ity o plural origins. Te earlier, and very substantially shorter, treatment oIceland, while much less developed, nonetheless advertised similar concerns.Ethnographically, the Icelanders ared rather better than the inhabitants o

Greenland in La Peyrère’s geographical imaginary. Even though they inhab-ited the same rigid reaches, where “it may rationally be supposed, that a Na-tion living so near the North-Pole, may not be so Rened and Polished assome others,” he deemed it “possible the Iselanders are not so barbarous asormerly.”1 Indeed, he considered that they were “very strong and coura-geous” and “had also a sufficient share o Wit, and were so curious in theirAnnals, that they not only careully preserved their own History rom Obliv-

ion; but also, embellished the same with the most memorable ransactions,that happened in their Neighbouring Kingdoms.” Tese records, alongsidethe writings o gures such as Dithmarus Bleenius, who had published in607 a work entitled Islandia,1 and Jonasen Arngrim (sometimes reerredto, as with La Peyrère, as Angrim Jonas), who had studied with ycho Braheand wrote several works o Icelandic history in Latin during the early sev-enteenth century, drawing largely on Bleenius, provided La Peyrère with

inormation or his account. Issues o settlement chronology were never arrom his thoughts, and he paused to attack those using certain classes o phil-ological data to elucidate the genealogy o human societies. “Many Errorso this Nature,” he insisted, “are to be met with in the Writings o most othe best Authors, who have run upon the same Mistake, in looking or thetrue Origin o Nations among the Interpretation or Etymology o certainGerman or Hebrew Words, which to them seem’d to have a near relation tothe Language o those Nations they were treating o.” Itemizing in particularthe efforts o “ Mr. Grotius, [who] in his reatise o the Origin o the Ameri-cans, deduces their Race rom the Germans, because, says he, many o their

Words terminate in Lan, Land being a German Word,” La Peyrère dismis-sively judged that “nothing can be more allacious than Conjectures oundedupon such-like Etymologies.”


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Te Peyrèrean Formula

I the skeptical thrust o La Peyrère’s northern geographies remained to adegree implicit, there was no mistaking its eatures in the superlative sacri-

lege he published in 655, Prae-Adamitae, or Men beore Adam. As we havealready noted, a version o this work had been circulating in one orm or an-other at least since 64, when its banning by Cardinal Richelieu, to whomit had been dedicated, merely stimulated demand or it. Somehow it gotinto the hands o Marin Mersenne’s circle and was picked up by Hugo Gro-tius, to whose critique we will presently turn. Mersenne himsel was initiallyenthusiastic, judging that the work cast new light on some passages o scrip-

ture. Over the ollowing couple o years La Peyrère tinkered with the text inseveral ways and brought out one section o the work in 643, Du rappel des

Juis, which dwelt on his ideas about a coming Jewish Messiah. Later, duringthe second hal o the 640s, while he was working on his Greenland and Ice-land projects, he corresponded a good deal with Ole Worm, who expressedmuch interest in the pre-adamite theory. So once again he returned to his

pet speculation, revising and reworking it in the light o conversations with

a range o interlocutors. And then in 654, afer various travels as part o the prince o Condé’s entourage, he came intocontact with the recently abdicated QueenChristina o Sweden, who showed muchinterest in his ideas. A patron o the artsand literary culture and recent convert toCatholicism, she encouraged him to make

the theory public by having it publishedin Amsterdam. He took her advice, andthe work came out anonymously in sev-eral editions, three by its Dutch publisherElzevier and at least one in Basel. But ano-nymity counted or nothing; there was nodoubting who the author was. Te workconsisted o two parts, both in Latin (52and 260 pages, respectively), which some-times appeared together, sometimes sepa-rately. Te second part came out almost

F. 9. itle page o the second part o Isaac LaPeyrère’s pre-adamite work, originally publishedanonymously in Latin in 655.


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immediately in an English translation in 655 under the title A TeologicalSystem upon the Presupposition Tat Men Were beore Adam; the ollowing

year the shorter rst part, Men beore Adam, made its appearance. Some-times both sections were bound into a single volume, sometimes not (g. 9).

Although efforts were made to suppress its English appearance, the printerFrancis Leach went ahead with it nonetheless. Just whose work the transla-tion was remains unknown, though it has been suggested that the identityo “Whitord, gent” was David Whitord, author, clergyman, and sometimeRoyalist soldier.

Whatever the intricacies o its textual history, the work’s central coordi-nating principle was beguilingly simple: human beings existed beore the

biblical Adam.

Tis meant that the human species had plural origins; LaPeyrère was advocating polygenism. At one level, the whole enterprise wasan exercise in biblical hermeneutics. As the work’s subtitle made clear—“aDiscourse upon the welfh, Tirteenth, and Fourteenth Verses o the FifhChapter o the Epistle o the Apostle Paul to the Romans. By Which AreProv’d, Tat Men Were Created beore Adam”—issues rotating around in-ternal matters o biblical exegesis were o pressing concern. Here the ocal

point was how to interpret Saint Paul’s words: “Until the law, sin was in the world; but sin was not imputed, when the law was not.” La Peyrère oundstandard interpretations that took this text as reerring to the Mosaic lawunconvincing, and he seized on the hermeneutic ambiguity o the apostle’sdeclaration to argue that the “law” reerred to was not the Mosaic Law but,rather, legislative regulations given to the primeval Adam. La Peyrère thereby

voiced his conviction that ceremonial Judaism could be traced back beyond

Moses to the Garden o Eden and thus to Adam himsel. As he put it: “Longbeore Moses there were other Ordinances prescribed, and commended tothe Jews, other Ceremonies instituted, other Laws o God decreed and con-rmed or that holy and elected People. And in this place, I mean the Jews,not onely [ sic ] the Sons o Abraham who are called the Seed o Abraham,but also the ore-athers o Abraham, the Posterity o Adam.” Te conse-quences o this interpretative move were immediate and ar-reaching: theremust have been human beings on earth beore Adam. As he summarized histhesis: “For that law was either to be understood o the Law given to Mosesor o the law given to Adam . . . i that law were understood o the law givento Adam, it must be held that sin was in the world beore Adam and until

Adam but that sin was not imputed beore Adam; Tereore other men wereto be allowed beore Adam who had indeed sinn’d, but without imputation;because beore the law sins wer [ sic ] not imputed.”


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By this neat piece o exegetical reshuffling—a “resh i rather naïve excur-sion into biblical exegesis,” as Anthony Grafon puts it—a range o irritat-ing inconsistencies in the Genesis record could be conjured out o existence.Here was a ready-made explanation or Cain’s ear, afer his banishment rom

the Garden o Eden, that he would encounter hostile individuals seeking tokill him; it delivered a population to inhabit the city he built; it provideda possible answer to the question about where his wie came rom. On thestandard account there simply were no other people beyond the adamic am-ily to make sense o these details. But now there was a simple answer: pre-adamites. As La Peyrère himsel explained, ever since childhood he had been

perplexed by these niggles but had only ound resolution when he pondered

the fh chapter o Paul’s epistle to the Romans. As he colorully put it:And as he who goes upon Ice, goes warily where he cracks it, being not well

rozen, or tender; but where he nds it rozen, and well hardened, walksboldly: So I dreaded rst, lest this doubtull dispute might either cut my

soles, or throw me headlong into some deep Heresie, i I should insist uponit; But so soon as I knew by these verses o the Apostle, that sin was in the

world beore it was imputed; and when I knew, and that certainly, that sin

began rom Adam to be imputed, I took heart, and ound all this dispute sosolid, that I pass’d through it with lesse ear.

Internal textual issues, then, were the ostensible mainsprings o La Pey-rère’s intervention, but external historical and geographical data were, i any-thing, even more decisive. Tere was, or instance, the pressure exerted bythose pagan histories. Using material akin to that or his Greenland disserta-

tion, he culled non-Western chronicles, genealogies, and Renaissance travelbooks in search o supporting testimony, relying in particular on the recentscholarly work o gures such as Claude Saumaise and Joseph Scaliger. Prae-

Adamitae was thus replete with details o Egyptian, Greek, Babylonian, andChinese histories and how they challenged Christian chronology as conven-tionally understood. La Peyrère’s testy impatience with conventional writers

who dismissed these records called orth biting commentary: “But as Geog-raphers use [ sic ] to place Seas upon that place o the Globe which they knownot: so Chronologers, who are near o kin to them, use to blot out age pasts,

which they know not. Tey drown those Countries which they know not:these with cruel pen kill the times they heard not o, and deny that whichthey know not.”

Fundamental, too, was the evidence he derived rom the voyages o re-connaissance and the revelations they delivered on distant cultures and their


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indigenous traditions. His purpose in amassing such data, o course, was toreveal how elegantly his pre-adamite theory could absorb them and therebyintegrate aith and reason. When read in its light, La Peyrère insisted, “theHistory o Genesis appears much clearer and agrees with itsel. And it is

wonderully reconciled with all prophane Records whether ancient or new,to wit, those o the Caldeans, Egyptians, Scythians, and Chinensians; thatmost ancient Creation which is set down in the rst o Genesis is recon-ciled to those o Mexico, not long ago discovered by Columbus; It is likewisereconciled to those Northern and Southern nations which are not known,All whom, as likewise those o the rst and most ancient creation were, it is

probable, created with

David N. Livingstone - Adam's Ancestors_ Race, Religion, And the Politics of Human Origins

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Transcript of David N. Livingstone - Adam's Ancestors_ Race, Religion, And the Politics of Human Origins