Pseudoarchaeology and Fiction

Over the last year or so, I’ve started to think as much about how pseudoarchaeological ideas transmitted as pseudoarchaeological ideas themselves. Over the holiday weekend, I read Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). The book tells the story of the Exodus, but does it in an idiosyncratic ways that supposes Moses was an Egyptian rather than a Israelite.

The book is epic in scale, but also somehow disarming intimate as it traces Moses’s life first as a Egyptian Prince, then as a desert ascetic, and finally as savior of the Israelites who led them through the desert to the border of the promised land. Hurston introduces Moses inner life and his conflicted attitudes toward God’s commands. The book is also subtly laced with allusions to esoteric knowledge and leans deeply into “Moses the Magician” trope.

In this way, the book capitalizes on a number of key pseudoarchaeological themes. For example, it privileges Egyptian culture as crucial to the development of other ancient Mediterranean societies. It does this by interrogating an ancient story and revising its claim. In Hurston’s novel, Miriam claims that Moses was found by the daughter of the Pharaoh, but she actually lies having fallen asleep while watching the baby Moses after his mother hid him among the reeds. It is hardly surprising that efforts to revise the narrative of the Exodus have interested pseudohistorical and pseudoarchaeological thinkers for years. Rand Flem-Ath’s worked on Moses as well as a theory of Atlantis grounded in Charles Hapgood’s theories of polar inversion. Of course, Hurston’s novel also appeared the same year as Freud’s Moses and Monotheism.

Deirdre Dempsey’s and Julia Zeppenfeld’s recent work offer both summaries of scholarship on this novel and its contemporary implications. Dempsey, for example, notes that most critics believe that Hurston did not know Freud’s work on Moses, as her book was completed by the mid-1930s, but Hurston’s biographers have noted that she appears to have been familiar with Flinders Petrie’s Egyptian Tales (1899). Hurston’s work with Franz Boas at Barnard is also well known as is his support for her ethnographic research in the American south. It seems likely that she also was familiar with the basic outlines of the Kenite Hypothesis and the work of Josephus. Zeppenfeld notes the importance of the Exodus narrative for African Americans as it evoked both their emancipation from slavery and their subsequent efforts to secure political, social, and economic freedom.   

Jon Woodson’s more unconventional work has argued that Hurston’s novel also alludes to George Gurdjieff’s philosophy (perhaps filtered through the influence of A.R. Orage and P. D. Ouspensky). Gurdjieff’s and his follower’s work represents an expansion of Madame Blavatsky’s work which, as John Hoopes has observed, is a well-spring of many strains of pseudoarchaeology. Woodson contends that Hurston’s work includes references to Oragean esotericism that fellow followers would have recognized but the average reader would have simply overlooked. While the specific cypher that Woodson offers is beyond my ability to critique, it is clear that Hurston’s novel includes several unresolved digressions including several passages about a book of Thoth hidden on an island near Koptos which was known to Moses Hebrew servant. Moses eventually visits the site and defeats the immortal serpent that guards the book. Curiously, we’re never told what the book said or even, clearly, why Moses’s pilgrimage to the site was important for the story. A passing description amulets that Hurston modeled on “slave bundles” in the novel connect Black spirituality to Egyptian magic. Moses’s spiritual quests and his efforts to lead the Israelites out of Egypt were both called “the work” in Hurston’s novel. The Work stands as both a reference to Grudjieffean quests for self-knowledge and Black traditions of magic and spiritual power grounded in Caribbean practices such as Voodoo.  

Hurston’s novel, on the one hand, served as an alternate history of the Exodus that would have resonated with Black readers who had begun to leverage both Egyptian and, in some cases, Hebrew or Israelite, identities to negotiate the challenges Jim Crow laws, the displacements of the Great Migration, and the economic trauma of the Great Depression.

On the other hand, Moses, Man of the Mountain, would have worked as a cypher for esoteric knowledge and offers a window into the way in which certain strains of mysticism, the Black religious experience, and pseudoarchaeology go hand-in-hand. Moreover, these currents are not always obvious to uninitiated (or uninformed) readers leaving them with a patch work of pseudohistorical and pseudoarchaeological narratives that invite further understanding, but serve as a shadowy guide. 

In the end, works like Hurston’s Moses serve as a framework for pseudoarchaeological knowledge to enter mainstream awareness. Hurston’s reputation as an important contributor to be Black literature in the US and to archaeology and anthropology through her commitment to ethnographic recording and publishing of Black folk knowledge makes her an especially compelling figure in fictionalized pseudoarchaeology.

I’m increasingly come to realize that authors like Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Ishmael Reed (who was likely influenced by Hurston’s work), Sun Ra, and even contemporary authors such as Minister Faust or even, obliquely, Fred Moten help keep pseudoarchaeological ideas alive and circulating in the Black community. Many of these ideas are entangled with other forms of counter-hegemonic knowledge that can, at the worst, support racist, antisemitic, colonialist, and white supremacist arguments, but, at their best, can be decolonizing, identity forming, and revolutionary.

As readers of this blog know, one of my projects is to decolonize pseudoarchaeology and to consider it potential both to complement more established archaeological ways of knowing and to offer ways of understanding the role that archaeology can and does play in the face of contemporary challenges of race, migration, and climate change.