By “wrong history” we mean not history that includes some mistakes of fact, but history that is so egregiously misinformed that there is no correcting it. Anything involving Atlantis, or the supposition that the Irish built the Pyramids of Egypt, or a vast conspiracy of all the authors ever published to conceal the true facts, will find its home here. Usually such things are euphemistically termed “Alternative History,” but we like our term better.
Atlantis.
Lemuria.
Catastrophism in General.
Other Immemorially Ancient
Civilizations.
Otherwise
Unattested Explorations and Migrations.
The Pyramids.
My Nation Was the Mother of All
Civilization.
Shakespeare Was Not Shakespeare.
Supposed Ancient Texts.
De Atlantide ad Timæum atque Critiam Platonis, disseret in Almâ Leucorea, praeside Georgio Caspare Kichmajero, Orator. Prof. Publ. Ord. Philosoph. h. t. Spect. Decano, M. Johann. Christianus Bock, Grimmâ-Misnicus, ad D. VII. Martii, in Auditorio Majori, horis matutinis, Anno M DC LXXXV. Witenbergæ, Typis Christiani Schröderi, Acad. Typ. [1685]. —Perhaps this does not belong in “wrong history,” since it is a short learned dissertation on what Plato said about Atlantis; but it is the earliest book we have found (after Plato himself) that deals extensively with the Atlantis question. It seems to conclude that Plato mixed fable with truth, and considers the question of whether Plato meant to indicate America when he spoke of Atlantis.
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. By Ignatius Donnelly. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1882. —The famous foundation of all Atlantis lore in modern times.
The Mysteries of the Formation of the Earth, the Rising and Sinking of Continents, the Introduction of Man and His Destiny Revealed in God’s Own Way and Time. [By Ira C. Fuller.] Author’s edition. Buffalo: Charles Wells Moulton. 1899. —“The contents of this volume were given by Spirit Josephine through the Mediumship of Mrs. M. T. Longley, the controlling Spirit Josephine—claiming at the time to be enrapport with a Band of Ancient Spirits from whom she received the matter which this volume contains. Josephine is a member of an advanced Spirit Band, who have selected the publisher of this work as the recipient of their intellectual and instructive favors. The various Intelligences of this Spiritual Band of workers have communicated to Mr. Fuller through different Media in such manner as could leave no doubt in his mind as to their veracity and intelligence, and as to the similarity of intellectual vigor and of personal characteristics as manifested through each Media.”
The Submerged Continents of Atlantis and Lemuria. Their history and civilization. Being chapters from the Akashic Records. By Rudolf Steiner. Authorized translation from the German by Max Gysi. American edition. Chicago: The Rajput Press, 1911. —Rudolf Steiner explains that, by reading the Akashic Records (a process that, in his description, sounds oddly similar to making stuff up), one can arrive at a more accurate knowledge of history than one can obtain by mere evidence:
Now external history depends on what has been preserved to us in time; and no one, dependent only on external evidence, can even say whether that which has been preserved is true.
But everything which arises in time has its origin in the Eternal, and although the Eternal is not accessible to sense-perception, the paths that lead to a perception of the Eternal are available to man. He can so develop the forces that slumber within him as to be able to know this Eternal. In the articles on “How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds,” which have appeared under the title “The Way of Initiation” and “Initiation and its Results,” the method of this training is indicated. In these two books it has been shown that at a certain high stage of knowledge, man can even penetrate to the everlasting sources that underlie the passing things of time. (Let the reader here have patience; these matters can only be dealt with. by degrees.) If a man in the way described has developed his power to know, then, as regards knowledge of the past, he is no longer restricted entirely to outer evidence. Then he can behold that which in the happening is imperceptible to the senses, that which no time can destroy. He presses on from evanescent history to that which does not pass away. It is true that this history is written in other than the ordinary characters, and in the Gnosis, in Theosophy, is called “The Akashic Records.” Only a feeble picture of these records can be given in our language, for it is adapted to the uses of the world of sense, and what we name with it receives at once the character of that world. Thus the narrator might give to the uninitiated, to one who cannot yet from his own experience convince himself of the actuality of a distinct spiritual world, the impression of being a mere visionary, if not indeed something worse.
He who has won for himself the power to observe in the spiritual world, there recognizes bygone events in their eternal character. They stand before him, not as dead witnesses of history, but in the fulness of life. In a certain sense, the past events are played out before him. Those who have learnt to read such a living script can look back into a far more distant past than that which external history depicts—and they can also, by direct spiritual perception, describe those matters which history relates, in a far more trustworthy manner than is possible by the latter.
“Let the reader have patience” will be found useful
advice. One would hate to mistake Dr. Steiner for a
visionary or something worse.
A Dweller on Two Planets; or, The Dividing of the Way. By Phylos the Thibetan. Los Angeles: Poseid Publishing Company, 1920. —A channeled biography of a citizen of Atlantis, revealing “man’s inhumanity to man,” which we could not have known about if it had not been revealed to us by an Atlantean.
The Lost Lemuria. With two maps showing distribution of land areas at different periods. By W. Scott-Elliot. London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1904.
The Submerged Continents of Atlantis and Lemuria. Their history and civilization. Being chapters from the Akashic Records. By Rudolf Steiner. Authorized translation from the German by Max Gysi. American edition. Chicago: The Rajput Press, 1911. —See the fuller description under Atlantis above.
That is, the idea that ancient history or prehistory is explained by great catastrophes otherwise unknown to science and records, but perhaps preserved in ancient myths.
Ragnarok:
The Age of Fire and Gravel. By Ignatius
Donnelly. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1883. —A
near approach of a comet explains everything.
Another
copy.
Eleventh
edition. Chicago: R. S. Peale and Company, 1887.
Augustus Le Plongeon and the Mayas.
Vestiges of the Mayas, or, Facts tending to prove that communications and intimate relations must have existed, in very remote times, between the inhabitants of Mayab and those of Asia and Africa. By Augustus Le Plongeon. New York: John Polhemus, 1881.
Queen Móo and the Egyptian Sphinx. By Augustus Le Plongeon. New York: Published by the Author, 1900.
Sacred Mysteries Among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 years ago. Their relation to the sacred mysteries of Egypt, Greece, Chaldea and India. Freemasonry in times anterior to the Temple of Solomon. Illustrated. By Augustus Le Plongeon. Third edition. New York City: Theosophical Publishing Company, 1909.
The Phœnician Origin of Britons, Scots & Anglo-Saxons discovered by Phœnician & Sumerian inscriptions in Britain, by pre-Roman Briton coins & a mass of new history. By L. A. Waddell. London: Williams and Norgate, 1924.
☛The Great Pyramid is particularly attractive to cranks with a head for mathematics, but the rest of the pyramids get their share of attention as well.
Pyramidographia: Or, a Description of the Pyramids in Ægypt. By John Greaves, professor of astronomy in the University of Oxford. Illustrated with Cuts, engraved by a curious hand. London: J. Brindley, 1736.— In the author’s Misellaneous Works. This appears to be the ancestor of all the books that find a complete theory of everything by taking a yardstick to the Great Pyramid.
Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid. Fourth and much enlarged edition including all the most important discoveries up to the time of publication. By Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer-Royal for Scotland. London: Wm. Isbister, 1880. —The Great Pyramid’s measurements contain the secrets of all astronomy, prophecy, etc. Smyth acknowledges as his inspiration John Taylor, author of The Great Pyramid: Why Was It Built and Who Built It? We have not been able to find that book in our usual libraries.
Philitis: Being a condensed account of the recently discovered solution of the use and meaning of the Great pyramid, whereby the mystery which has shrouded this wonderful structure for four thousand years has been dissipated, and its claim to be accepted as a revelation of the highest ethical and scientific truths exhaustively demonstrated. By Charles Casey. Dublin: Carson Brothers, 1880. —Our author, who adapts the system of Smyth, imagines the architect telling a gawking ancient Egyptian: “In it is shown, by measure commensurate with time, the dispensations allotted by God to the race of man. Also that supreme secret of His council into which the angels have desired to look—the time in the far future when the Eden promise shall be fulfilled—when Jehovah shall tabernacle in flesh—when the Shiloh shall appear as the incarnate word and mercy of God. And, moreover, it contains a record in measure of the earth’s relations to the sun, the moon, and the stellar host of Heaven, and also standards of measure, both as to capacity and weight, for all time and all nations, as well as manifold other truths concerning earth relation and human destiny which have been revealed to me, and are symbolized in that monument on which you look, to be recognised and proclaimed in the latter days by those whom the foreknowledge of God has appointed to the work in that distant generation wherein the fulness of the times of the dispensations shall be completed.”
The Imaginary Metrological System of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh; by F. A. P. Barnard, President of Columbia College. From the Proceedings of the American Metrological Society. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1884. —“If it were not a law of fanaticism that the faith of its subjects and victims is intense in proportion as its foundations are weak, and that its disciples multiply in proportion as its doctrines are defiant of common sense, it might reasonably have been expected that the wild conjectures in regard to this monument hazarded by John Taylor in 1859 would have fallen unnoticed from the press, and would long since have ceased to be remembered among men.” But they have not; thus this antidote.
The Storehouses of the King, or the Pyramids of Egypt. What they are and who built them. By Jane Van Gelder (née Trill). London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1885. —The pyramids were the storehouses built by Joseph to hold the excess grain from the seven years of plenty. Mrs. Van Gelder is absolutely certain of her conclusions: “It is now the pleasant task of the author to state that the vexed question may be set at rest, as the solution to the mystery has been found.”
Studies in the Scriptures, Series III: Thy Kingdom Come. [By Charles Taze Russell.] Brooklyn, etc.: International Bible Students Association, 1915. —Pastor Russell, the founder of Jehovah’s Witnesses, was a pyramid fanboy, and one whole study in this book is devoted to “The Corroborative Testimony of God’s Stone Witness and Prophet, the Great Pyramid in Egypt.”
Irish Wisdom Preserved in Bible and Pyramids. By Conor MacDari. —This is the text of the original 1923 edition, which we were unable to find in a scanned copy anywhere on line, although many reprint-sellers are hawking facsimiles.
Irish Wisdom Preserved in Bible and Pyramids. By Conor MacDari. —This is the text of the original 1923 edition, which we were unable to find in a scanned copy anywhere on line, although many reprint-sellers are hawking facsimiles.
Macedonian - The European Mother Tongue, with dictionary of ancient words still present in today Macedonian language. The all-inclusive PIE substratum of Pelasgo-Proto-Macedonic, i.e. Nashinski (Lat. Nostratic) and its 15,000 years old continuum with explained etymological phonologies from various sources and online dictionaries link-citations. By Basil Chulev, 2018. —We have devoted an entire article to this delightful book in our Literary Discoveries.
The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon’s Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays. By Ignatius Donnelly. Chicago: R. S. Peale & Company, 1888. —There seems to have been no discipline in which Ignatius Donnelly was not thoroughly misinformed. “Neither must it be forgotten that I have worked out but a tithe of the story growing out of 523–218=305. I have given part of that which flows from 305 minus 31 or 32, at the top of 79:1; but 305 is also modified by deducting the other fragments of 79:1, as 284 and 285 (31 or 32 to 317), 57 or 58, the last section in the column, and 199 or 200 (318 to 518), etc.” This from page 800. Reader, if you have made it so far, do not despair! You have only 198 more pages to go.
“Shakespeare”
Identified in Edward de Vere the Seventeenth Earl
of Oxford. By J. Thomas Looney. New York:
Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1920. —This is the
original source of the “Oxford” hypothesis. Apparently
the author’s name is pronounced “LO-nee,” so there
will be no
tittering in the gallery.
The
same. London: Cecil Palmer, 1920.
The Poems of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (Shakespeare Edition). With biographical notice, introduction to the poems and notes by J. Thomas Looney. London: Cecil Palmer, 1921. —Looney’s edition of the genuine poems of the Earl of Oxford is a useful argument against his hypothesis that Oxford wrote Shakespeare, though obviously Looney would disagree with us here. No candid critic would attribute these poems to Shakespeare. Shakespeare loves wordplay and unusual vocabulary. Oxford loves alliteration. In some of the poems alliteration is overtly part of the scheme of the poem, but the others are also full of incidental alliterations. Alliteration is Oxford’s thing. It is his one trick. Shakespeare seldom uses it.
The Oera Linda Book, from a manuscript of the thirteenth century. With the permission of the proprietor, C. Over de Linden, of the Helder. The original Frisian text as verified by Dr. J. O. Ottema, accompanied by an English version of Dr. Ottema’s Dutch translation, by William R. Sandbach. London: Trübner & Co., 1876. —You will learn that Frisia is the mother of all civilization, which must render it very satisfying to be Frisian.