Bartholomew's Notes

WorldNetDaily reports breathlessly on a new book published by Xulon Press (a Christian self-publishing outfit used by Doug Giles, among others). Over to WND:

“The Nephilim and the Pyramid of the Apocalypse” presents an explanation for an unusual verse in the first book of the Bible, Genesis 6:4, which reads: “There were giants (Nephilim) in the Earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men and they bare children to them.”

The book’s author, Patrick Heron, says on his website that his is the only first in-depth book to throw light on the mysterious Nephilim and “to provide evidence of who built the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico and other great monuments of ancient history.”

Well, not quite the first book. SZ at World O’Crap notes:

Heron’s book does seem to be the only one about Nephilim and pyramids.  However, some of the other 20 or Nephilim books floating around also sound pretty interesting.  For instance, Nephilim: The First Human Clones–Why Their Existence Led to Noah’s Flood (“From cover to cover, Matthew Omaye Ajiake takes you on an “edge-of-your-seat” journey into the creation of humanity, human cloning, the Immaculate Conception, and the human quest for eternal life”).  And then there’s Chronicle of the Awakenings: A Guide to Past Lives for Nephilim by Shannon Appel.  While there’s no description given, the title alone is enough to sell it.  And how about Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s  Fallen Angels and the Origins of Evil (“Did rebel angels take on human bodies to fulfill their lust for the ‘daughters of men’? Did these fallen angels teach men to build weapons of war?”)

I’ll add to that list a novel, The Nephilim Seed, by James Scott Bell (“Harvard biology professor Bently Davis is the acclaimed voice of reason against the Intelligent Design movement and a controlling partner in UniGen, a small biotech startup. ‘Nephilim Seed’ is Davis’s shorthand name for a project that will use injectable synthetic genes to create superintelligence in humans and free participants of emotions including religious ones”).

Heron’s book is now in the top ten in the Amazon.com charts. Heron’s website makes available the introduction and the first three (quite short) chapters. Chapter one introduces us to a scholar of bygone days:

The esteemed architect and escatologiest, Clarence Larkin, made the following observations.

What’s an “escatologiest”? I take it Heron means “eschatologist” rather than “escapologist”. Larkin was a turn-of-the-century American pastor mostly famous for his Byzantine and headache-inducing “end of the world” prophetic charts. Heron uses Larkin to describe the Great Pyramid, since copying out of some old second-hand book is easier than consulting academic works by modern Egyptologists. So on to his quote of Larkin:

…Taking the Hebrew cubit to be 25.025 inches, the length of each side of the base is 365.2422 cubits, the exact number of days in the solar year (including the extra day for every 4 years).

Amazing! But…why should we “take” the Hebrew cubit to be this figure? According to my New Jerusalem Bible “Measures and Money” supplement (on page 2074):

In the Old Testament the standard unit is the cubit (a forearm, so about 45cm/18 inches)

Ahh, but there is also the “sacred cubit” and the “pyramid inch”, units which can inferred by “Pyramidolgists” without the bother of having to learn ancient languages, etc. The problem is that Heron doesn’t (apparently) really know anything about the background to the pseudo-science of “Pyramidology”. Larkin took his details from Charles Piazzi Smyth, a nineteenth century Scottish astronomer (and uncle of Robert Baden-Powell). According to the New England Skeptical Society:

Using a ‘casing stone’ – one of the stones that originally covered the outside of the Pyramid – Smyth discovered a ‘pyramid inch’ and used it to measure all kinds of fascinating things, including the…history of the world. The basic premise was that God directed the building of the Great Pyramid and put all the symbolism in it for us to eventually find. Many people don’t know that the founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Charles Taze Russel, was an ardent pyramidologist, although the Jehovah’s Witnesses have dropped that aspect of their beliefs.

However:

the casing stone used by Smyth to calculate the ‘Pyramid Inch’ turned out to be a different size from just about every casing stone subsequently found.

But back to Heron’s Larkin quote:

…The angle of slope of the sides is 10 to 9. That is, for every 10 feet you ascend, you rise in altitude 9 feet. And if you multiply the altitude of the pyramid by 10 raised to the power of 9, you have 91,840,000, which in miles, is the exact distance of the sun from the earth!

Indeed, Strange But Bullshit. A variant of this claim is repeated in the work of Grant Jeffrey, a contemporary “prophecy teacher” whom Jack Kinsella sometimes steals (crap) ideas from. Jeffrey claims the Great Pyramid is a billionth of the distance of the earth from the sun. However, as amateur Egyptologist Larry Orcutt points out (after discussing Jeffrey):

The height of the Great Pyramid is 485 feet:

Height of the pyramid times one billion = 91,856,061 miles

Distance of the earth from the sun = 92,960,000 miles

Okay, so what’s a million miles or so? Astronomically, the numbers may be close, but is this similarity meaningful, or even interesting?

Larkin goes on to discuss astronomy and also tells us that:

The Great Pyramid stands at the exact centre of the world. It is midway between the west coast of Mexico and the east coast of China. Between the north cape of Norway and the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. It stands at the intersection of the 30th parallel, both latitude and longitude.

Orcutt shows us Smyth’s chart that “proves” this, then points out its shortcomings – shortcomings that seem not to have even entered Heron’s head.

In chapter two, Heron changes topics completely for no apparent reason and writes an uncritical précis of The Bible Code, Michael Drosnin clearly being a soul-mate.

The original “Pyramidologists” argued that the Great Pyramid must have been created by God (using the Hebrew slaves) as evidence for his existence. In the 60s, Erich von Daniken rehashed the theory for popular a “UFO” readership. Heron, in contrast, argues that the Great Pyramid was created by the offspring of fallen angels and humans. As quoted by WND:

The result of the unions, Heron says, were the Nephilim, Hebrew for giants, that are mentioned in verse 4. The fathers, also are referred to as Nephilim, which also means “the fallen ones.” The author says the fathers were malevolent spirits, or demons.

The Nephilim, then, were “a hybrid of demons and men. They were evil and wicked by nature and could not be rehabilitated and made good, for the evil was in their genes.”

Yes, angels and demons have DNA. But Heron does have tradition on his side – as my Bible notes,

Later Judaism and almost all of the earliest ecclesiastical writers identify the ‘sons of God’ with the fallen angels.

Back to Heron:

These giants and others, Heron writes, actually practiced genetic engineering, citing the fact that it took two spies to carry back one cluster of grapes on a staff between them.

Perhaps the most famous biblical Nephilim was Goliath, the man who stood over 13 feet tall and was slain by shepherd boy David.

So where does that leave the Jolly Green Giant? But this is where Heron’s tomfoolery turns sinister. The idea that evil can be found “in the genes” of particular people has a worrying pedigree. The Bible clearly states that Goliath was a Philistine – and I’ve personally heard Christian Zionists describe the Palestinians as the “Philistinim”, and so identified with the Israelites’ ancient enemy.

But why did the Nephilim build the Pyramid?

I have become convinced that the pyramidal shape is a demonic exercise in counterfeit design, for I believe that the pyramid is a paradigm of the City of God which is at present in the heavens and which was seen and described by John in chapter 21 of the Apocalypse

But that’s not all: the Nephilim will soon be back, hence the lurid “Pyramid of the Apocalypse” part of the title. Heron tells us:

It is the first book to show that the dark forces which roamed the Earth in those primeval times will once again be at large during the coming Apocalypse, with the purpose of visiting mass destruction on an unsuspecting world…

WARNING!

THIS BOOK IS NOT FICTION

Heron, who is based in Ireland, lists a theology degree from The College of Biblical Research in Rome City, Indiana. However, it looks like this is really “The Way College of Biblical Research”, which became defunct in 1997. Although Heron says he is now non-affiliated to any church, this connects him to The Way International, a controversial para-Christian New Religious Movement that no longer operates (Xulon’s other Christian authors are going to love this!)

Brad Reed notes that WND ran a daily poll on the subject. He has preserved the results for us:

What do you think the Nephilim mentioned in the Bible refer to?

1.) The offspring of angels who mated with human women 26.88% (733)

2.) I don’t know, this is one of the great mysteries of all time 24.86% (678)

3.) ‘Fallen ones,’ beyond that, I’m just not sure 11.07% (302)

4.) Giant human beings 9.20% (251)

5.) Angels who mated with human women 8.21% (224)

(A conservative Christian takedown of Pyramidology can be read here. Pyramidology was also a big part of the British-Israelite movement.)

UPDATE: Heron’s book is now being made into a TV show, courtesy of pseudo-documentary maker David Balsiger. See here.

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